Comment by thfuran

>You can have a super great product that makes a ton of money right now that has such poor build quality that you become too calcified to improve in a reasonable amount of time

While it's true that that can be partially due to tech debt, there are generally other factors as well. The more years you've had to accrue customers in various domains, the more years of decisions you have to maintain backwards compatibility with, the more regulatory regimes you conduct business under and build process around, the slower you're going to move compared to someone trying to move fast and break things.