Startup foundation Planned

Startup foundation ยท 03

AI Pre-Mortem

A planned adversarial pre-mortem that compares founder-identified risks with failure modes surfaced through four hostile perspectives.

Intended use

What this kit is being designed to do

  • Challenge a venture before scaling
  • Surface overlooked failure modes
  • Turn one risk into a test

Business mini-lecture

Optimism needs an adversary before scale.

Optimism helps founders persist, but it can also narrow what a team is willing to notice. A pre-mortem imagines that an important initiative has failed and works backward to identify credible causes. An adversarial agent can widen the search across customer, operational, financial, and reputational perspectives. It is most valuable before scaling, signing a major commitment, or entering a hard-to-reverse launch.

The proposed capability would generate failure hypotheses and compare them with risks the team already sees. It cannot know which scenario is likely, and a vivid warning is not evidence. Founders must separate genuinely new risks from reworded concerns, reject unsupported speculation, and select the practical test or safeguard that deserves action now.

Operating contract

Inputs, outputs, and gates

Inputs

  • Venture concept
  • Founder risk list
  • Four adversarial perspective prompts

Outputs

  • Failure-mode register
  • Founder-versus-agent gap analysis
  • One pre-scaling test

Gates

  • Founder distinguishes novel risks from reworded concerns
  • Founder reviews unsupported speculation
  • Founder approves the selected test

Known limits

What this record does not promise

  • The kit has not been implemented or evaluated.
  • Model-generated failure modes are hypotheses, not evidence that failure will occur.

Lineage

Where the intended practice comes from

Planned Founder Hub foundation record. Its authoritative source inputs and transformation decisions must be pinned in the implementation evidence packet.

Lineage explains provenance; it does not substitute for a review record, field evidence, or a versioned implementation.