It sounds like you are developing, the founder is managing, and the founder made a judgment call based on his knowledge of the market versus technical debt. He is choosing to make the trade-off.

As developers, our responsibility is to ensure our leads are aware enough of the cost to make good calls, and their responsibility is to make those good calls based on their perspectives, perspectives that include more factors than just our future development time.

Maybe the judgment call is to reduce features and focus on quality of features that were implemented on this iteration. Maybe the judgment call is to release a feature because the market demand is just right and the feature is "good enough".

This is a typical balance in our industry.