[dpenguin]

Great answer along the same lines I myself look at tech debt as well.

Another important thing to keep in mind is that while you can leverage tech debt to move the business forward all you want, be extremely aware of your tech debt and reduce it before you go bust. It’s very easy to develop a belief of “this has worked for 4 years so it’s solid and doesn’t need to be looked at anymore” when in fact, you could be teetering on a total collapse of the system within 3 months because some aspect of the system/business started gaining traction non-linearly.

PS: I have worked at very large, medium and small companies that grew big. Haven’t worked at a failed startup so far - so a bit of selection bias in my opinion.