Obviously depending on a laptop for runtime code would be bad, but plenty of early stage startups depend heavily on a small number of machines for customer support and continued development.
Probably a bigger issue isn’t that they’re a single laptop failure away from collapse, the bigger problem is that replacing a laptop right now would be unusually difficult.
In the world of git and cheaply available easy to use backup software, there is zero excuse to not have backups of everything to load on another machine. Even if you want to avoid the cloud and keep it local, a 128gb USB3 drive is under $50.
“A small number of machines” is not what we are talking about. We’re talking about one single consumer-grade laptop that would collapse the entire business forever.
Giving the benefit of the doubt; it’s entirely possible they have that setup, with the tacit assumption that if their machine died they could buy another same day.
Now, you really can’t buy another laptop same day.
Probably a bigger issue isn’t that they’re a single laptop failure away from collapse, the bigger problem is that replacing a laptop right now would be unusually difficult.