Privacy Policy

Who we are

Founder Feast is operated from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. References to "we", "us", or "our" mean Founder Feast. References to "you" mean any person who interacts with our website at founderfeast.com, our mobile app, or any of our services.

For privacy questions, contact us at hello@founderfeast.com.

Information we collect

You give us

• Account. Name, email, password, and authentication identifiers when you sign in with Apple, Google, or email.
• Profile. Company, role, industry, stage, city, LinkedIn, Instagram, and an optional short bio used to match you with tablemates.
• Dinner preferences. Dietary restrictions and notes you choose to share for seating and the restaurant.
• Feedback. Post-dinner ratings, free-text notes, and mutual opt-in answers about other attendees.
• Communications. Messages you send us by email or in-app.

Collected automatically

• Device & app. Approximate location (city), device type, OS version, app version, language, time zone, and crash diagnostics.
• Usage. Pages viewed, actions taken, referring URLs, and basic analytics events.
• Member activity. When you are signed in to the website or the app, we record what you do there and when, and link it to your account: sign-ins and app opens, the pages and dinners you open, the buttons you use to book, join a waitlist or pay, the steps of your application and membership, and which of our emails you opened or clicked. We never record what you type in a chat, and never record your screen in the member area or the app.
• Push tokens. If you enable notifications, an Expo push token tied to your device.
• Cookies. Session cookies for authentication and a small number of analytics cookies (see below).

From third parties

• Payment processors. Stripe sends us a customer ID, the last four digits of your card, the card brand, and your subscription status. We never see or store full card numbers.
• Sign-in providers. Apple and Google share the minimum profile fields you authorize (name and email).

How we use information

We use the information described above to:

• Run our matching algorithm and curate dinner tables.
• Confirm reservations, send dinner reminders, and reveal restaurant and tablemate details before each event.
• Process membership payments and manage subscriptions through Stripe.
• Improve the product, debug issues, and protect against fraud and abuse.
• Use your member activity to run the club, help you when something goes wrong, see which parts of the service work, and choose which emails we send you, for example a reminder about a dinner you looked at but did not book. We never send your activity to Meta, Google or any other advertising platform.
• Send transactional emails (confirmations, reveals, feedback requests).
• Send occasional product updates. You can unsubscribe at any time.
• Meet legal obligations and enforce our Terms of Service.

How we share information

With other members. Once you are an accepted founder, your name, photo, role, company, industry, stage, whether you are a founder or an investor, bio and any links you add are listed in the member directory across our cities, unless you hide yourself, and every accepted founder can see it, whether or not they hold a paid membership. What you are raising, your revenue and the size of the checks you write are never shown to other members. You can hide yourself from the directory at any time in your privacy settings; the founders you have already dined with, and any member who can see you on the member map if you chose to be on it, can still open your profile.

With your tablemates. Your name, photo, role and company are shown to the people at your table when the table is revealed before each dinner. Contact details follow the audiences you choose in your privacy settings: by default your LinkedIn is visible to members, and your email, phone and Instagram are shared with no one until you turn them on. You can change any of these for everyone, or for one person, at any time.

With restaurants. We share aggregate headcount and dietary requirements with the venue. We do not share names or contact details.

With service providers. We use the vendors listed below to run the service. They process information on our instructions.

For legal reasons. We may disclose information when required by law, to enforce our Terms, or to protect rights, property, or safety.

Business transfers. If we are involved in a merger, acquisition, or asset sale, your information may transfer as part of that deal, subject to this policy.

We do not sell or rent personal information.

Service providers

Cookies & analytics

We use a small number of cookies and similar technologies. Essential cookies keep you signed in. Analytics cookies (Google Analytics 4, the Meta Pixel and Microsoft Clarity) help us measure which pages and ads bring people here, with IP addresses truncated where supported. When someone applies, we also send Meta a hashed version of their email so the application can be matched to the ad that led to it. The Meta Pixel does not load on the signed-in member area or our admin pages.

On our public pages only, Microsoft Clarity records how visitors scroll, click and move through a page (session replay and heatmaps), so we can see where the site confuses people. It never runs on the signed-in member area, the app, our admin pages, sign-in or checkout, and what you type into our forms, the application included, is masked in your browser before anything is sent. Turning analytics cookies off below turns it off too.

Our emails contain a small image that tells us when an email was opened, and some buttons in our emails record the click when you sign in through them. We keep these with your member activity.

Browsers can send a Do Not Track signal. There is no common standard for it, so we do not change what we collect when we receive one. You can turn analytics cookies off below.

You can also block cookies in your browser. Blocking all cookies may break sign-in or other essential features.

Data retention

We keep your account and profile data as long as your account exists. When you delete your account, this is what goes, within 30 days, except where we must keep records for legal, tax or fraud-prevention reasons:

• Your sign-in and your profile, including your photo, bio and links.
• Your seat at any upcoming dinner, and your place on any waitlist.
• Your notification tokens, contact requests and blocks.
• The feedback you gave after dinners and the kind words you left for tablemates.
• Your name and address in our email log, and the copies of emails we sent you.
• Your activity history: sign-ins, pages opened and the actions you took.
• An active web subscription, cancelled immediately with no further charge.

And this is what stays, in the form it stays in:

• Past dinners, seating and audit records stay in our books under an anonymous id only, so a table that happened still adds up. Nothing that identifies you remains attached to them.
• Anything you wrote in the feed or a chat stays in the conversation, shown as from a deleted member.
• Reports about conduct stay, so we can keep the club safe, with your name removed.
• Payment records held by Stripe, Apple or Google are kept by them under their own policies and the law.

Member activity is kept for 13 months and then deleted automatically. All of it goes when your account does.

The same list is on our account deletion page.

Your rights & choices

• Access & update. Edit your profile any time inside the app or web account.
• Delete. Delete your account from Profile in the iPhone or Android app, or at founderfeast.com/app/profile, or by emailing us.
• Export. Request a copy of your data by emailing us.
• Your activity. Email us to ask for a copy of your activity history, or to have it deleted without closing your account.
• Marketing opt-out. Unsubscribe links appear in every non-transactional email.
• Push notifications. Toggle them off in your device settings at any time.
• Region-specific rights. Residents of the EEA, UK, California, and other jurisdictions may have additional rights to access, port, restrict, or object to processing. Contact us to exercise them.

Security

We use encryption in transit (HTTPS), encryption at rest where supported by our providers, role-based access controls, and HMAC-signed session tokens. No method is perfectly secure, but we work to protect your data and respond quickly if we discover a breach.

International transfers

We operate from Canada and store data with providers that may process it in the United States, the European Union, and other regions. Where applicable, we rely on Standard Contractual Clauses or equivalent safeguards.

Children

Founder Feast is for adults. The service is not directed at anyone under 18 and we do not knowingly collect information from children. If you believe a child has provided us information, contact us and we will delete it.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. Material changes will be communicated through the app or by email. Continued use of the service after an update means you accept the revised policy.

Contact

Questions, requests, or complaints? Email hello@founderfeast.com.