> Without the code the company is nothing, so it's definitely not 'debt'.

I reconcile the concept that code is a debt with your statement in the following way:

The feature produced by a piece of code can be an asset, but the code itself is a debt.

Thus, for a new feature to be valuable, you want the value added of the feature (or asset) to out-weight the cost of the code (or debt).

As a general rule, the complexity that comes along with a piece of code grows as the code-base and feature set grows, thus, for a young codebase, the value of a feature more easily out-weights the cost of the code.