We can theorize all day. Where is the data? The truth is we don't know how to guarantee business success, except via shotgun techniques (funding lots of random attempts). This strongly suggests that technical debt is not that important of a construct.
How is your position distinct from, "I don't understand X, ergo X can't be very important"? Because it looks pretty much the same to me.
If you think each business is a "random attempt", I hope you're never a founder. Modern businesses are highly non-random. It's true that investing in startups is in some sense gambling, but it's gambling on a highly filtered subset of all existing businesses, which is in turn a tiny fraction of all possible businesses.
The "where is the data" line is especially misleading here because no data just means no data. There are no high-n, double-blind studies validating the concept of technical debt. But there are also no studies demonstrating it's not a useful concept. And that's most of life: the decisions we have to make rarely can be solved by looking up journal studies. When that's the case, we have to apply other tools.
Again, I see this as you mistaking "I don't understand" for "there is nothing there". I obviously don't think it's handwaving, and it has been a long time since I took unsupported accusations from Internet randoms very seriously.
Sure, you could be a very special snowflake, so smart that the world really does always break down into "obvious to brobdignagian" and "dumb/meaningless". But if you're that smart then I'd suggest that either a) you should use your smarts to make your Olympian view comprehensible to us mortals, or b) you're wasting your time talking with the likes of us.
Technical debt isn't just a startup thing. It's ever-present in tech organizations. Technical debt is probably a leading factor in the irrelevance and ultimate death (typically sale / merger) of most software companies. The product gets increasingly buggy over time as developers pile on more and more hacks to get features out the door without writing down the debt, and customers move on to competitors that have fewer bugs. This is what happened to Netscape, for example.
For startups, technical debt can show up as unreliability (remember Twitter's fail whale?), or it can sink a product before it ever becomes famous enough for you personally to remember.
