I disagree with this so much. Data is used for far more than ads. If you can't collect data but your competition can, they'll run a more efficient business, offer better products and be more adaptive to change.
My point is that this can be factored into the growth of the company, rather than seen strictly as a barrier to entry, as suggested by the comment above. Are there really fresh startups that really need to worry about this kind of data gathering out of the gate? I'm imagining they're going to be spending a lot more time engineering features and interfacing with important clients to get data to improve their product directly. I often see business/marketing folks wanting user data for what amounts to very premature optimization.