With careful change management and access control. It's easy to turn off a system if you know for sure that nobody is using it anymore. Large companies and mili

With careful change management and access control. It's easy to turn off a system if you know for sure that nobody is using it anymore. Large companies and militaries do it all the time just fine so there is no reason a dynamic young startup shouldn't be able to do it. :) (As a non-sarcastic response: back when I was an officer in the navy, how we would get rid of systems was most definitely taken into account from the very start. Even before we started building ships or radars or whatever, budgets and dock space would be reserved ~30 years into the future to do the decommissioning work. I do realize that this works much better for established organizations that can be reasonably sure that they will exists in 30 years, after all most startups are hard pressed to last even two. That said, completely disregarding any planning on how to grow out of your current systems does seem to have been the case at all the startups I have consulted for and was a major part of technical debt. IMO a technical leader should know where the skeletons are hidden in the setup for their organization and know roughly in how many months/years they will no longer suffice. Then they can plan the replacement and/or upgrading of said skeletons accordingly)