How Whether works
Whether publishes free weekly operating guidance for startup leaders, based on interest rates and credit conditions.
How it works
Hiring, Roadmap, Fundraising, Spending and New bets each get an action, a pause line and a restart line. Set the lines when you make a plan. Because the pause and restart lines are apart, a small move back across the pause line doesn’t restart anything.
Each published brief stays on record. The track record compares past guidance with what happened next, including where it fell short. Some changes in conditions came with no warning, and the calibration study shows the margin measures distance from a line, not probability.
How to use the pause and restart lines
In practice
Action: Hire only for roles that pay back inside six months.
Pause line: Pause all hiring if funding pressure crosses 76.
Restart line: Restart hiring when funding pressure falls below 66.
How the three parts work
Action
The commitment you will make this week.
Pause line
The measurable condition for pausing that commitment.
Restart line
The condition that must be met before you restart.
Agree on the lines in advance
Write down the pause and restart lines before committing cash. When a line is crossed, review the decision against the condition you agreed on.
These lines give you a reason to review a decision. They cannot establish that it is right or safe; check your cash position and the costs of stopping or restarting.
Decision template to print or copy
Complete this before committing cash.
The decision
What are you considering doing?
Action
What will you commit to this week?
Pause line
What number, date or event would make you pause?
Restart line
What must happen before you restart?
When you will check
How often will you check the lines?
Free to copy and share. No signup or data collection.
Where it fits and where it does not
Since Jan 2012, conditions have changed 7 times in 177 months, and a monthly reading crossed one of the pause or restart lines in 23 of them. Most Mondays, nothing has moved. Use the brief to set your plan's lines and get an email when one is crossed.
It fits
- Commitments that run for quarters and cost money to unwind: a hiring plan, a lease or multi-year contract, the runway to hold before the next raise.
- Plans a group approves once and should not re-argue each month: a budget whose second half is released when a line is crossed, or an agreed floor on runway.
- Venture-backed companies with one to two years of runway and a next raise that depends on what capital costs. The test is the currency of the raise, not the address: a company in Toronto, London or Berlin raising from U.S. funds prices its round off the same rates this brief reads.
- Investors and accelerators sending one reading to every company they back: the portfolio note says what the week means at each runway.
It does not fit
- A single hire or purchase. The lines are a policy for a kind of decision, not a verdict on one.
- Under six months of runway. At that point cash matters more than the market, so the guidance starts with cash.
- A company whose funding does not follow U.S. rates: one raising locally in a currency whose central bank sets its own price of money, or one in a sector raising on a boom of its own. Where you are registered is not the test; a company outside the U.S. that raises from U.S. funds borrows at U.S. rates, and the scores are its cost of capital.
- Which product work matters most. Rates affect how much slow-payback work a team can afford, not what it should build.
Who writes it
Kanav Jain — Editor, Whether
Kanav Jain writes and maintains Whether's weekly operating brief, and owns the model that turns public U.S. market data into the weekly guidance.
The pause-and-resume structure comes from Kanav Jain's earlier work on healthcare products. That work is listed at kanav.net.
What it is built from
Both scores the brief leads with start from U.S. Treasury rates, read from the St. Louis Fed (FRED). Funding pressure comes from the one-month bill rate, the speed of its rise, and long rates falling below short ones. Risk appetite comes from the gap between the ten-year and two-year rates. Market-stress readings then adjust them: the extra interest riskier companies pay to borrow, the Chicago Fed's summary of borrowing conditions, and the VIX index of expected stock-market turbulence. Where the pair lands sets the conditions: Sunny, Cloudy, Stormy or Freezing.
Two startup-market inputs lower risk appetite when they weaken: the pace of venture funding and tech layoffs. They come from a curated snapshot rather than a live feed, and every surface that uses them says so.
Inflation and unemployment appear on the signals page but enter neither score. Everything that does is published with its formula, source and refresh schedule.
Corrections and questions
Whether publishes dated records that do not change after the fact. If a published brief is wrong, say so and it gets a correction note rather than a silent edit.