Startup Risk Register That Names Every Way The Company Can Die

One link — the startup risk register has the top 10 risks, the likelihood × impact score, and the assigned founder running the cheap experiment to retire each one.

Lean startups treat every assumption as a risk. The discipline is a startup risk register: list the top 10 ways the company can die, score each by likelihood × impact, and assign one founder to design a cheap experiment to retire each risk. Most first-time founders skip this because risk registers feel like 'big company' work — by the time they wish they had a startup risk register, the company is already dead from a risk nobody named. This startup risk register combo wapin makes it lightweight: a checklist with the top 10 risks pre-filled (market, technical, founder, runway, regulatory, channel, hiring, security, competitive, customer concentration), a poll where each co-founder ranks the top 3 risks, and a scoreboard tracking which risks have been retired with cheap experiments. As a startup risk register it works because every co-founder sees the same risks on the same link — nobody is silently betting the company on a risk the team never named. Run the startup risk register once at company-start and review it monthly, and the startup risk register will be the document that survives the next downturn.