Speaking as someone who has worked as a developer for multiple early-stage startups, the opposite is true.
Early-stage startups tend to have rampant technical debt for two reasons:
1) They need to get a product to market immediately and they need to iterate on it rapidly—so using technical debt as a tool to achieve short-term goals quickly is actually awesome.
2) Startups tend to pivot. Making fundamental domain changes to a product quickly tends to give you very weird systems, often with large unused portions.
Early-stage startups tend to have rampant technical debt for two reasons:
1) They need to get a product to market immediately and they need to iterate on it rapidly—so using technical debt as a tool to achieve short-term goals quickly is actually awesome.
2) Startups tend to pivot. Making fundamental domain changes to a product quickly tends to give you very weird systems, often with large unused portions.