Community Guidelines

FounderDuels is a place to compete hard and fairly. Rankings mean something only if every result was earned, so these guidelines protect the thing that makes a FounderDuels record worth having. Credibility comes before growth: when someone breaks these rules, we protect the result, not the numbers.

• Your entry must be your own work. Don't submit someone else's pitch, writing or product as yours.
• Claims about traction, revenue, customers, funding or team must be true. If you can't stand behind a number, leave it out.
• Answer the duel's question. Entries that ignore it, or that exist only to advertise, may be removed.
• Don't use duels to offer investments, sell securities or ask for money.

Share your duels and ask people to back you. That's how FounderDuels is meant to work. What isn't allowed is anything that makes votes stop reflecting what real people think:

• paying, rewarding or trading for votes, including “vote for me and I'll vote for you” deals;
• using more than one account, fake accounts, bots or scripts;
• asking people to create accounts just to vote in your duel;
• voting in a duel you or your startup is part of.

Votes that break these rules are removed, even if that changes who won.

Challenge the idea, not the person. On profiles, entries and comments, don't post:

• harassment, threats, bullying or personal attacks;
• hate or discrimination based on race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability or age;
• someone's private information, such as a home address or personal phone number;
• sexual, violent or graphic content.

Losing a duel is part of competing. Don't pressure an opponent or voters over a result.

• Use your real name, and a photo that's you or your startup's logo.
• Don't impersonate another founder, a company, an investor or FounderDuels.
• Only add startups you actually founded or work on, with accurate details.
• Don't imply a verification, partnership or endorsement you don't have.

• Post only content you have the right to share. Don't upload copyrighted material, logos or confidential information that isn't yours.
• No spam, repeated promotional comments, misleading links or malware.
• No content that breaks the law where you are.

If you see something that breaks these guidelines, report it. You can report a founder, a startup, a duel, a comment or anything else, for any of these reasons:

• spam, fake identity, fraud or misleading claims;
• harassment or offensive content;
• vote manipulation;
• copyright infringement;
• anything else that doesn't belong here.

You can also contact us with links to what you saw. Reports are confidential: we don't tell the person who reported them. Please don't file reports just because you lost.

We look at what happened, how serious it was and whether it has happened before. Depending on that, we may:

• remove the content, entry or comment;
• remove votes, place a duel under review, change or void its result, and reverse rating changes;
• remove an entrant from a competition;
• send a warning;
• suspend the account for a period, during which it can't compete, vote or post;
• ban the account permanently.

Serious abuse, fraud or large-scale vote manipulation can lead straight to a ban. Every moderation decision that changes a result, a vote or a rating is recorded in our audit log.

If you believe we made a mistake, email [email protected] with the details, and a member of the team will look at it again.