&gt;OK, but that was never on the table, though. What I described isn&#x27;t even possible to manifest, and even if you back it down to what is at least sort of possible, you don&#x27;t have the resources to manifest it before you simply run out due to lack of customers. You&#x27;re not really taking on &quot;debt&quot; if you fail to manifest that, any more than you are taking on &quot;debt&quot; if you fail to make every possible dollar you could if you perfectly correctly harnessed your skills and made the perfect deals.<p>I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s such a problem, though. The &quot;perfect&quot; codebase <i>should</i> be the baseline to which you compare your current debt.<p>Just like in real life, you take on some debt to have a basic standard of living. You might have a mortgage or maybe a car loan or some minor credit card debt, and you&#x27;re normally always working on paying a little bit of that off. In a perfect world you&#x27;d want no debt at all, just like in a perfect codebase. But, a small amount is natural. It&#x27;s only when it gets unruly and unmanageable that it becomes a problem.<p>---<p>Aside, the first and last lines of your comment reminded of this post: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10859383" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10859383</a>