[corry]

One of the things I struggle with in the perennial conversations about technical debt at startups is how to account for the fact that the future in not known with certainty: i.e. circumstances can change that render very good and 'worth-it' (but expensive) technical decisions obsolete in future.

My hot take (sorry) is that business people are actually more in tune with this fact because they deal with the more chaotic side of the business (clients, funding, competition, $$$ etc). So they are less willing to give developers the time to 'do it right' vs 'do it fast', since they believe that EVEN IF it's 'right' today, it probably won't be 'right' tomorrow and we'll have to rewrite/re-do/refactor to accommodate the new paradigm/circumstances.

Of course this catches up with the business since so much duct tape will inevitably slow new development; but then tech debt can be dealt with on those terms vs. "prepaying" the cost of fixing the future problem.