I'm going to go out on a limb here and speculate that you may be "seeking technical cofounder."
Btw, there is a giant flaw in your logic. You assumed I couldn't judge a programmer, but you then assumed I would successfully judge a technical cofounder.
Even more so, if you end up being an acquisition target for companies like Google and Yahoo (who want to read your code), then it becomes "this will cost us hundreds of millions of dollars this week if its not fixed now."
Regarding technical debt, I think we're conflating a few things under this umbrella. There can be code that is easy to read and maintain, but won't scale to millions of users. Then there is spaghetti code which is brittle, hard to read and modify, but may or may not scale. I think it's ok to have the first before you know if you need to scale.
When you guys got to the point that you realized it needed to scale was it fixed immediately? If not, would it have been that hard to fix it then.
Btw, thank you for talking about this stuff. It's great to hear insights from someone that's been through such things.
As the saying goes "Always assume that the next guy to maintain your code is a psychopath who knows your address."
That is not something I knew in the early days of digg. I know it now.