Awesome answer, and very reassuring. Thanks! I'll target <= 6 for now, assuming I'm allowed by the team I hire to keep coding ;). I guess I'm less concerned

Awesome answer, and very reassuring. Thanks! I'll target <= 6 for now, assuming I'm allowed by the team I hire to keep coding ;). I guess I'm less concerned with technical debt and more concerned with the product debt, which is a closely related concept I haven't heard discussed much. By product debt I mean partially-thought-through features rushed out the door that have been forgotten about. Even if the code is perfectly-factored, the product can come across to the end user as buggy because of product debt. I'm concerned that hiring hackers (even the very best hackers) will in fact exacerbate this problem, because we'll be able to push even more partial features out the door. At what point to you loop around in a startup and revisit/remove old features? Of course there are no hard and fast answers, and I appreciate the comment about balance. I'm trying to gather more perspectives and experience on this to better inform my position on this.