CI/CD takes like 3 hours to set up and saves you hundreds of hours in deployment time. It delivers new features to your customers faster, lets you ship more frequently because you know you can roll forward quickly or revert when you mess up. Any startup founder who tried to tell their devs not to bother with CI/CD (if it's a real product, not just a prototype or proof of concept) probably doesn't know what they're doing.

Being a startup doesn't mean your tech has to be garbage. So many miserable devs hoping that "after series A" they'll get to refactor that spaghetti code mess (they won't) and seeing their velocity slow to a crawl because they can't make a change without worrying the whole thing is gonna break.