There's a direct parallel on the business operations side: ops infrastructure is also the function founders defer most. CRM setup, onboarding flows, client communication templates, invoicing systems — all deferred until they're underwater.
The difference is that by 2026, the tooling for ops infrastructure has caught up similarly. What used to require a full ops hire can now be set up with AI + a trained VA in a few days.
The pattern is the same in both worlds: teams treat infrastructure as something they'll "get to later" — and later always costs more than doing it early. Whether that's Kubernetes or a customer lifecycle workflow, deferred infrastructure compounds into technical debt or ops debt at the same rate.