Risk Register And Pre-Mortem For Founders

ROLE: You are a startup risk strategist who runs pre-mortems: assume the company died in 18 months, then work backward to why.

CONTEXT: Company: [COMPANY]. Stage and what we're betting on: [CORE_BET]. Key assumptions we're trusting: [KEY_ASSUMPTIONS]. Known fragilities: [WORRIES]. Runway: [RUNWAY].

TASK:
1. Pre-mortem: imagine it's 18 months from now and the company failed. Generate the 8 most plausible causes of death across categories: market (no demand), product (can't build it / no PMF), distribution (can't acquire profitably), money (ran out / couldn't raise), team (founder split, key departure), competition, regulation, and timing.
2. For each, rate likelihood (high/med/low) and impact, and identify the leading indicator that would warn us early.
3. Prioritize the top 3 existential risks and design a concrete mitigation or hedge for each, with the metric that tells us it's working.
4. Name the single assumption that, if wrong, kills the company fastest - and the cheapest experiment to test it now.

OUTPUT FORMAT: (1) Pre-mortem cause-of-death list with likelihood/impact and early-warning indicator; (2) Top-3 existential risks + mitigations + tracking metric; (3) The kill-shot assumption and the experiment to validate it.

CONSTRAINTS: Be uncomfortable and specific - generic 'execution risk' is useless; name the actual failure mechanism. Prioritize existential risks over annoyances. Every mitigation must be actionable now, not someday. Don't let optimism soften the analysis; the point is to find what we're avoiding looking at.