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The best strategy is to talk through the business performance, and the business goals. When businesses miss goals, or they clam up on the underlying fundamentals - it generally means that trouble is brewing. Sometimes this is done on "tenuous" justifications, I once worked at a startup that insisted that employees could not have access to revenue data or other business metrics if they were to go public. Of course, the reality was that the business wanted to hide how deeply underwater everyones options were - as well as how far off the growth projections were from business reality.