About Whether

Whether turns public macro signals into a weekly operating posture for startup and product leaders. Each week it answers three things: what should change right now, how sure we are, and what would flip the call.

It is not a macro blog and not a prediction engine. Every call is bounded — an action, the threshold that triggers it, and the condition that reverses it — so a team can act on it and revisit it later without re-litigating the reasoning.

Who writes it

Kanav Jain — Editor, Whether

Kanav Jain writes and maintains Whether's weekly operating brief, and owns the regime model that turns public macro data into a posture call.

What it is built from

Whether reads public data from FRED across six signal families — Treasury yields, credit spreads, inflation, labor, financial conditions, and volatility — and scores them into one of four operating regimes. The two numbers the brief leads with are built from the Chicago Fed financial conditions index and the VIX, not from the yield curve alone.

Startup-market inputs — funding velocity, layoff trend, SaaS multiples — come from a curated snapshot rather than a live feed, and every surface that uses them says so. The scoring formulas, source list, refresh cadence, and stated limitations are published in full.

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.