With regards to technical debt, I feel like it's trading one form of dying for another. Eventually bugs and performance issues will bring product quality down to the point where it starts to affect your brand. I heard a quote at Mongo Seattle along the lines of "customers will forgive delay, but they will not forgive a bad product."
Obviously 10gen has been around for a while and has a sustainable product, so their notion of survival has shifted more to quality than velocity.
In the article, I am hoping to at least raise awareness that technical debts exist when there are trade-offs. This would hopefully save developers from the awkward conversation when the co-founders come around asking why the site is so slow.
Addressing your last point, that is what I was hoping to drive toward with "A good developer will know the right questions to ask about a problem, so be sure to provide as much information as you can."
At Startup Weekend, we don't have PM's, so it is my job to ask lots of questions about "who, what, why." Unfortunately, I have worked with folks who find it unfathomable that I should ask questions about use cases and customer goals.
So the point here, is give developers specifics about the customer goals and scenarios when they ask for it so they can accomplish what I think you are saying.
Thanks for your comments though! I'd be interested to hear more about your experiences with dev teams in startups. My experiences are mostly from working at a 2-3 year old company as well as some freelance work I've done.