I Analyzed 70 Startups' Codebases — The Ones With More Technical Debt Raised More Money

This post distills the findings of my master's thesis at the University of Twente and TU Berlin. I built an automated pipeline that analyzed the codebases of 70 open-source, venture-backed companies across 146 funding periods during the ZIRP era (2009–2022). The full thesis, dataset, and source code are open: github.com/maxcodefaster/tdr-velocity-analysis. What follows is not anecdote — it's data.…