Terms of Service

These terms are an agreement between you and FounderDuels (“we”, “us”). They cover your use of founderduels.com, the competitions that run on it (including SeedBattle) and every related service. By creating an account, voting or otherwise using FounderDuels, you agree to them.

Some features have extra rules that form part of these terms: the Community Guidelines, the Competition Rules and the Refund Policy. Our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy explain how we handle your data.

• You must be at least 16 years old to create an account, and at least 18 to buy a paid product.
• Give us accurate information, and keep it up to date. Your name, startup and claims on your profile must be true.
• One person, one account. Creating extra accounts, including to vote or to get around a suspension, is not allowed.
• You are responsible for everything that happens on your account. Keep your password private and tell us straight away if you think someone else has access.
• Some actions need a verified email address, including creating or accepting a duel, adding a startup, buying a product and applying to a competition.

Your username is your public profile address. It must be 3 to 30 characters, using lowercase letters, numbers and underscores, and include at least one letter. Usernames that suggest an official role (such as “admin”, “support” or “verified”) or that contain the FounderDuels or SeedBattle names are reserved.

You can change your username until you finish onboarding or enter your first duel. After that it stays fixed so links to your record keep working; contact us if you need a change. We may change or reclaim a username that impersonates someone, infringes a trademark or misleads people.

A duel is a public, head-to-head contest between two founders or two startups on one central question. When you create or accept a duel you agree that:

• the duel, both entries, the vote split once it's visible, the result and the rating change are public and can be shared;
• your entry is your own work, and anything you claim about yourself or your startup is true;
• invitations expire if they aren't answered in time, and duels without both entries by the deadline are cancelled;
• you can cancel a duel you're in only before voting opens. Once voting opens, the duel runs to its result;
• you can challenge someone by email who isn't on FounderDuels yet only if you have a genuine reason to believe they'd welcome it.

Results are only worth something if the votes are real. When you vote, or ask others to vote, you agree to these rules:

• One vote per person per duel. Votes are final and can't be changed.
• You may not vote in a duel you take part in, including one involving a startup you co-founded.
• You may not buy, sell, trade or reward votes, use bots or scripts, use more than one account, or organise others to vote dishonestly. Sharing your duel and asking people to back you is fine.
• You may not interfere with how votes are counted, or try to discover how anti-abuse checks work in order to get around them.

We check votes for duplicate and coordinated patterns. We may flag, review and remove votes we believe are manipulation, place a duel under review, change or void its result, and reverse rating changes. We'll do this even if it changes a winner. We log every such decision.

Founder Ratings, ranks, records and achievements are calculated from duel results as described in the ranking methodology. We may correct them when we find an error or manipulation.

A duel result reflects how voters responded to one question at one point in time. Ratings, ranks and results are not an assessment of anyone's character, an endorsement of a startup, or financial, investment or professional advice. Don't rely on them to make investment decisions.

Competitions, including SeedBattle, follow the Competition Rules plus any specific rules, eligibility requirements and prizes published on the competition's page. Where the two differ, the competition page applies to that competition.

You keep ownership of what you post: your profile, startup details, duel entries, comments and images. To run FounderDuels, you give us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, display, adapt for formatting (for example, into share cards and preview images) and distribute that content on FounderDuels and in sharing and promotion of FounderDuels.

Duel entries, results and comments on completed duels are part of other founders' public records. The licence for that content continues after you delete it or close your account, but we'll no longer show it as linked to your profile.

You confirm you have the rights to everything you post, and that it doesn't break the law or anyone else's rights, including copyright, trademarks and confidentiality obligations.

Follow the Community Guidelines. In particular, don't:

• harass, threaten, impersonate or discriminate against anyone;
• post false or misleading claims about yourself, your startup or someone else;
• use duels or profiles to offer securities, solicit investment unlawfully or run scams;
• post spam, malware or content you don't have the rights to;
• scrape FounderDuels at scale, overload it, probe it for vulnerabilities without permission, or get around rate limits and restrictions.

Anyone can report a founder, startup, duel or comment. When we believe these terms or the Community Guidelines have been broken, we may, depending on how serious it is:

• remove or hide content, a profile or a startup;
• cancel a duel, void its result, remove votes or reverse rating changes;
• remove someone from a competition;
• warn an account, suspend it for a period, or ban it permanently.

A suspended account can still sign in, download its data and close itself, but can't compete, vote, comment or post. A banned account can't sign in. If you think we got a decision wrong, email [email protected] and explain why.

Official Duel, Featured Founder and Founder Pro are optional. Prices are shown on the pricing page before you buy, and payments are processed by Stripe. A purchase is complete only when Stripe confirms the payment to us.

• No paid product changes votes, results, Founder Ratings, ranks or achievements.
• Featured placement lasts for the period stated at purchase and is always labelled as Featured.
• Founder Pro renews every month until you cancel. When you cancel, Pro stays active until the end of the period you've paid for.
• Refunds follow the Refund Policy. A refund never changes a result, a rating or a rank.

Verified badges confirm identity or startup details we've checked. Verification is never sold and never affects ranking. We may remove a badge if the information behind it turns out to be false or out of date.

You can close your account at any time from your settings. When you do:

• your profile is hidden straight away and you're removed from the rankings;
• duels you're in that haven't finished are cancelled, and your opponents are told;
• you can restore your account by logging in within 30 days;
• after 30 days your personal data is anonymised and your email address is released.

Completed duel results, votes and rating history stay as part of other founders' records, without a link to your profile. The Privacy Policy explains what we keep and why. If we ban an account, we may keep a keyed hash of its email address to stop it being used to sign up again.

We keep improving FounderDuels, which means features, duel types, competitions and settings such as the rating K factor can change. We may pause parts of the service for maintenance. We'll give notice of changes that significantly affect how you compete where we reasonably can, and we'll never change a completed result except to correct an error or manipulation.

FounderDuels is provided “as is” and “as available”. We work hard to keep it accurate, secure and online, but we don't promise it will always be uninterrupted or error-free. Content posted by founders is theirs, not ours, and we don't verify every claim made in a profile or entry.

Links to other websites are provided for convenience. We aren't responsible for their content.

To the extent the law allows, FounderDuels isn't liable for indirect or consequential losses, lost profits, lost opportunities or damage to reputation arising from your use of the service, including from a duel result, a rating or a ranking.

To the extent the law allows, our total liability to you for any claim is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim, or 50 US dollars. Nothing in these terms limits liability that can't be limited by law, or your statutory rights as a consumer.

We may update these terms. When a change is significant, we'll tell you by email or in the app before it takes effect. The date at the top of this page shows when they last changed. If you keep using FounderDuels after a change takes effect, the new terms apply.