One problem with that is that your company may be one month from failure for quite a bit of time. If you look at profit for a new company, it usually starts "po

One problem with that is that your company may be one month from failure for quite a bit of time. If you look at profit for a new company, it usually starts "positive", but just a little bit, not much at all. And then you grow the company. This immediately introduces expenses but revenue only grows slowly as new customers come in and get convinced. So it dives below zero, and quite far below zero. Now at that point you have investors, but they'll be watching how the curve evolves quite a bit. And they'll only be releasing money a few months of runway at a time. And then things get delayed for dumb reasons. So a lot of the time you're a few months from failure, and of course one of these investors might walk away and maybe you can find a new one, maybe not. So a startup should expect to spend something like 2 years of time "one/two months from failure". Should you really tell your employees this ? It's not going to go very well. I doubt that in the case of a unorganized failure that it would be very visible for the CEO either, by the way. I mean a week or two earlier than for the employees, sure. But not much more.