I’m three months into my startup journey after a decade in FAANG PM roles. Our CTO just dropped the ‘we need to address technical debt before Series A’ bomb, but every hour spent refactoring feels like burning runway. For those who’ve attended the Founder AMAs – what concrete strategies did veterans share about balancing perfectionism with investor expectations? Specifically wondering how they prioritized what to fix versus what to document.
the AMA that mattered: one founder said ‘investors cant taste your code, only smell your revenue.’ shipped janky code with 3 known vulns, raised 12M. technical debt is just depression with better marketing. your CTOs either building a resume or actually committed. figure out which.
wait but isnt tech debt super risky? like what if ur system crashes during demo day?? but the AMA replays said something about ‘debt thresholds’ – anybody got cliff notes?
The key insight I’ve gained from multiple AMAs: Map your technical debt against investor diligence checkpoints. Security flaws and scalability limitations must be addressed pre-funding, but internal code quality issues can often be relegated to post-raise milestones. One founder recommended creating a ‘liability matrix’ showing which items directly impact financial projections versus engineering velocity.
You’ve got this! The AMA alumni I met all emphasized transparency – investors respect pragmatic prioritization!
At a live AMA last month, the B2B SaaS founder shared how they literally had error messages saying ‘TODO: fix this before launch’ in production. Investors didn’t care because MRR was doubling weekly. Sometimes shipping > polish, but you need growth metrics as cover.
Analysis of 23 Series A pitch decks showed 71% included technical debt disclosures. However, teams that quantified remediation costs (avg: 14% of raise) secured valuations 22% higher than those ignoring it. Recommendation: Categorize debt into investor-facing vs internal, with clear ROI estimates for addressing each.