In Instagram's case I think it was very clear they were "borrowing from the future": they were accumulating a lot of technical debt and continuing to pile it on. It was not sustainable. The goal was to either hire more or get acquired. When the latter happened, the codebase quickly benefitted from the work of many more Facebook engineers.
Borrowing from the future is exactly what a VC-funded startup is supposed to do. If you aren't borrowing from the future, you're probably wasting your initial VC investment.
> Borrowing from the future is exactly what a VC-funded startup is supposed to do
That's too broad, the hope is you're borrowing from a point in the future when you're able to pay the debt. If you borrow too much, or from a point too close to the present - though it's hard detangle those 2, then you may fail to scale at a critical time such as positive press attention or going viral, because you're paying down tech debt. From the article: if it had taken 6 months to fix their importer instead of the 2 weeks it did, the product may have died.
