[jiaweihli]

> I've never seen a start-up fail on account of technical debt.

That's because noone ever says "XYZ startup failed because their code quality wasn't good enough." It's usually something closer to "Their customers didn't renew contracts, they had to slash headcount, and went into a death spiral from there."

If you press for details, the deeper reason might be "they couldn't turn around features fast enough" or "the app was slow or their servers went down too much" which is a symptom of too much technical debt (either directly, or because the better engineers on the team choose to leave as a consequence of the technical debt).

I agree that early startups don't fail because of technical debt, but I'd bet that many mid-size startups do fail because of it.

[icedchai]

I've been in startups since the late 90's. Not once have I seen a startup fail due to technical issues. Several of these made it to the double digit million raised, 100's of employee phase. Failure was always related to the wrong product being built or a bad business model (poor product/market fit, pricing is screwed up, some sales, but not enough to cover cost, no plan for marketing, etc.)

Poor code quality is rarely perceivable by customers, except in the most extreme cases.