I haven't heard of any company going down because of technical debt, but here is a study that has some quantitative analysis of technical debt in the beginning: https://medium.com/building-bowery/e5a006f7b724
Thanks - that's an interesting article, although the key quote from the original paper doesn't really help make the case:
> The only thing that can be said with any certainty, is that not doing any technical debt maintenance does impact them negatively. But there isn’t a lot of difference from that point on. This is slightly controversial, and could be unrelated altogether.
Judging by the lack of activity on this thread, and the above article, I think I could effectively argue that technical debt either doesn't exist (outside the minds of developers), or that it's 'a thing', but just not that important.
