Exactly. (An unhedged short call option to be more precise.) And a startup is a long call option. So a startup can bootstrap itself to a certain level of success by mortgaging its higher-upside states.
It happens all the time, not just via technical debt but also via management debt and various other leveraged choices.
For a young startup to be successful, it needs to offer evidence to investors that additional funding will lead to exponential revenue or market share growth. Those are the hard things.
Building code without taking on technical debt is actually easier than building it with just the right amount of technical debt for the business's uncertain future.
In my opinion, the kind to avoid is sloppy, non-strategic technical debt, such as what you often get when developers are burnt out and need to complete aggressive milestones so that management will be satisfied with the rate of development. This debt tends to break modularity and lead to bad system design, whereas stategic debt can simply mean building a quick and dirty black box for desired functionality that has clearly defined interfaces that can likely remain once the debt is removed and will not necessitate a rewrite of other modules.
Similarly, management debt can be strategic if it teaches young or inexperienced managers useful lessons that they grow from and apply as the company grows. But management debt that results in burnout and high turnover also gets rid of the valuable lessons and lets someone with slightly more experience make some of them again.
What would this look like in practice?