How the rating and rankings work

Every founder has one Founder Rating. It starts at 1500 and moves only when a rated duel the founder took part in is decided. It measures competitive results against other founders, weighted by how strong each opponent was at the time.

The rating is a standard Elo system, the same family of rating used in chess. Nothing else touches it: not payments, featured placement, verification, referrals, profile completeness, followers or comments.

Before a result is applied, each side's expected score is calculated from the two ratings:

expected = 1 / (1 + 10 ^ ((opponent rating − your rating) / 400))

The rating change is then:

change = round(32 × (result − expected))
result: win = 1, loss = 0

The winner gains the change and the other founder loses the same amount. K = 32 is the largest possible swing in a single duel. With these settings:

Try your own numbers with the rating calculator.

A duel changes ratings only when all of these are true:

• the duel is set to rated, and its duel type is rating-eligible;
• both sides are founders with FounderDuels accounts;
• it produced a result: at least 3 valid votes (or, in judged competition matches, at least one judge's score).

Ties

An exact split of the result is a tie. A tie picks no winner and changes neither rating. It counts as a completed duel and a tie on both records, and it ends any win streak. A winner is never chosen at random.

No contest

A duel that ends without enough valid votes for a result is recorded as no contest: no winner, no rating change, and it doesn't count as a completed duel.

Judged competition matches

Some competitions add judges, who score both sides from 0 to 10. In hybrid matches the result share is (1 − w) × community vote share + w × judge score share, where w is the judge weight published on the competition page. Competition matches are rated like any other duel.

A rating can't fall below 100 and has no ceiling. When a loss would take someone below the floor, they stop at the floor, so in that one duel the winner can gain more than the loser loses.

A founder appears in the rankings once they have completed at least one duel. Until then their profile shows “Unranked”. A no contest doesn't count; a win, loss or tie does.

Closed accounts are removed from the rankings, and banned accounts don't appear on the leaderboard.

The global leaderboard and every founder's global rank use the same order:

1. Founder Rating, highest first;
2. then total wins, most first;
3. then account age: the founder who joined earlier ranks higher.

The last rule means two founders never share a position, and a position can't be won by opening a new account.

Weekly and monthly leaderboards rank rating gained rather than rating held. They cover rolling windows: the last 7 days and the last 30 days, not calendar weeks or months.

• The score is the sum of every duel-related rating change in the window. Corrections made in the window count too.
• Ties are broken by wins in the window, then by account age.
• Only founders whose rating changed in the window appear.

Seasonal leaderboards use the season's published start and end dates, and its categories where it has them.

Filtering narrows the list without changing anyone's rating or the order rules above.

The startup leaderboard is separate and doesn't use the Founder Rating. It orders startups by wins, then win rate, then total duels.

Rankings contain no paid input. Featured Founder, Official Duel and Founder Pro don't appear anywhere in the ranking calculation. Featured profiles show in separate, labelled slots on discovery pages, and never inside a ranked list at a position they didn't earn.

Verification confirms identity and is never sold or used as a ranking boost. See pricing for exactly what each product does.

Credibility comes before growth. If a founder manipulates votes, we remove the manipulation rather than protect the numbers.

• Votes are checked for duplicate and coordinated patterns, including many votes from one network, shared devices and brand-new accounts.
• Flagged votes are reviewed. Votes confirmed as manipulation are marked invalid and excluded from the count.
• If invalid votes change the outcome of a finished duel, the duel is placed under review and its result is corrected: the original rating change is reversed and the correct result is applied.
• A duel can also be voided, which reverses its rating changes entirely.

Rating history is append-only. A correction is recorded as a new entry, never an edit, so every change to every rating can be traced. Every admin action that affects a result, a vote or a rating is written to an audit log with the reason.

Think something is wrong? Report it. Reports of vote manipulation are reviewed first.

Ratings update the moment a duel is decided. Leaderboard positions are calculated live and may take up to a minute to reflect the latest results. Rank-based achievements such as Top 100 and Top 10 are checked every hour. They're awarded only once the field is big enough to mean something: at least five ranked founders for every place, so 50 for Top 10 and 500 for Top 100.

Each founder's rating history, including the duel, the opponent's rating and the change, is shown on their profile unless they've chosen to hide it.