[wccrawford]

A mortgage is debt.

Debt in business is a well-known and appreciated way to get things moving now at some additional cost later.

This applies to both financial debt and technical debt. The difference between those, and hence the name, is how you incur and repay it, not how you make the decision. It's not "business debt" because you can't repay it with "business".

If I were to imagine "business debt", it'd be making decisions now that work well for the moment, but won't work well in the future and will actual retard the business for a while later. You could do it the "right way" now and have fewer customers up front, or you optimize for now and have more customers now, but make it harder to get customers later.

Likewise, financial debt gives you more money right now and costs you more money later. Technical debt gets technical stuff working right now, but takes more time from your tech team later when you need things to be different.