[wolco2]

Technical debt starts to matter when the initial project changes focus or patches start mountig.

These days rewrites are popular. They make sense in some cases (when the project is smaller or introducing new framework). But in others where the original developer and business people have left and no one knows exactly how things work aside from they need to continue to do the same. In those cases fixing technical debt is extremely important.

A startup is more likely to fall into the above category if they ignore their technical debt because rewrites are hard and messy.