Privacy Policy

Founders Weekend is a 48-hour program where young people build a real business. Most of the people using this app are children — many under 13. This page explains, in plain language, exactly what we collect from them, what we do with it, and how a parent or guardian can see it or have it deleted. It also covers the Founders School sites where families register for events and apply to our programs.

Who we are. Founders Weekend and Founders School are run by Alpha School 78701, LLC, 2028 E Ben White Blvd, Ste 240-2650, Austin, TX 78741. You can reach a human at events@founders.school.

Children under 13

We know that many of our students are under 13, because we ask each student their age when they join. We collect personal information from them in order to run the program.

A parent or guardian can, at any time: ask us what we hold about their child, ask us to delete it, ask us to stop collecting anything further, and refuse to let us keep using it while still letting their child take part where that is possible. Email the address above and we will respond. We will ask you to confirm you are the child's parent before we show you their information or delete it. Deletion is done by hand by a member of staff — see “How long we keep things” below for exactly what that does and does not reach.

How consent works today, stated honestly. A parent or guardian applies for their child's place on our registration form, and agrees to this page and our Terms there — with their own name and email, before the child has an account. We record that agreement with the date and the version number of each page as it stood that day. When the child later creates their account they give us a parent or guardian's email address, and we record which versions were published on that day too. We do not ask the child to agree to anything: they are a child, and a child's tick would be a weaker record than the one their parent already gave us.

What we have not built yet. Federal law asks us to verify that the adult giving permission really is the parent. Agreement on a form is not that verification, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise. We are building the flow that does it: a separate page, sent to the address above, showing you in full what we collect and asking you to authorise it — with each part refusable on its own. If your child has an account and you did not know about it, email us and we will close it and delete their information.

What we collect from students

• Account details — email address and password (the password is handled by our authentication provider and we never see it), plus first and last name, age, and the city of the weekend they are attending.
• A parent or guardian's email address — every student is asked for one when they create their account, and it is required. We ask because the students are children and the money they earn during the weekend has to be paid to an adult: the payout list our finance team works from carries the student's own email and their parent's side by side, so there is always a grown-up to reach. This address is not shown to the student's teammates and not shown to mentors — only the student themselves and the organizers who run payouts can see it. We do not send marketing to it.
• Their work — business ideas, the offer and price they write, notes, their landing-page link, plans, and answers to the in-app exercises. Some of those questions ask about your household: what your family does for work and what your family spends money on. Your child types those answers freely and we store them.
• Conversations with the AI coach — the full text of what a student types and what the coach replies is stored permanently. These are not private. Everyone on their team, and every mentor and admin across the whole program — not only their own mentor — can read the entire transcript.
• Pictures, video and audio — images and video a student uploads or generates for their advert, and voiceover audio. See “Pictures and video” below, which is the most sensitive thing on this page.
• Sales and payments — if a student sells something during the weekend, we record the amount and what was sold. Card details are handled by Stripe and never reach our systems. After the weekend, organizers export a payout list naming each student, their team, what they are owed, and the two email addresses above, so the money can be sent on. The buyer's name and email are also shown to the student, their teammates, and the organizers who run the program.
• People they talked to — students log the outreach they do. This includes the name of the person they spoke to, what they asked, and what that person said. Those people are usually friends, family and neighbours who are not users of this app. See “Information about people who are not our users”.

Event registration and applications

Families register for Founders School events on headcount.events and founders.school, and apply to our programs on founders.school. Those sites keep their own records, separate from the Founders Weekend app:

• Event registration — the parent's name, email address, phone number and home address; each child's name and age, and any allergy or medical note you choose to add; dietary needs; and optional answers such as your employer, job title and how you heard about us. We record when you agreed to these terms and this page and which version you saw, your media-release choice, and your waiver signature (the name you typed and the date). We also record who checked in at the door.
• Program applications — the applicant's name, email, phone, date of birth and mailing address, a parent or guardian's contact details, school and academic records, entrepreneurial experience, essay answers and aptitude-test results, plus IP address and basic request details for security and rate limiting.

We use this only to run the event or to evaluate the application. Staff who run an event can see that event's roster; application data is seen by the admissions team. We do not sell it. Campaign email has an unsubscribe link; confirmations and reminders are sent so the event can happen.

What is visible publicly, without logging in

This is the part parents most often want to know, so it is stated plainly:

• The leaderboard is public. Anyone with the link, without an account, can see a team's venture name, their idea, their city, how much they earned, and the students' names in shortened form (for example “Ada L.”).
• The room board is public and shows a live ticker of outreach — your child's shortened name and what happened, for example “Maya R. got paid”. The names of the people your child talked to do not appear on it.
• We ask search engines not to index these pages. They stay reachable by anyone with the link — the room screens need that — but they carry a “noindex” instruction so they should not show up in search results. Search engines honour this on their own schedule, so a page that was indexed before may take time to drop out.
• Uploaded and generated media is stored at public web addresses. Images and videos a student creates for their advert are kept in public storage. Anyone who has the link can open it. The links are long and not listed anywhere, but they are not password-protected.

If you would prefer your child's name not to appear on the public leaderboard, email us and we will remove it.

Pictures and video

Students can upload photographs and video for their adverts. Those files may contain images of the student themselves or of other children. As described above, these files are stored at public web addresses, and they are also sent to the AI providers listed below when a student asks for feedback on them or asks the tools to edit or generate media.

If you do not want your child uploading images of themselves, please tell them and tell us, and email us to have any such file deleted.

Artificial intelligence

The app uses AI to coach students, grade their landing pages and adverts, and generate images, video and voiceover. This means the text your child writes, and the pictures they upload, are sent to third-party AI companies to be processed.

Being specific about what goes with it: each message to the AI coach also sends your child's full name, age and cohort city, the names and quoted replies of the real people they contacted, their answers to questions about what their parents and relatives do for work and what the family spends money on, and the text of their landing page. We do not send their email address or password. We have not set any “do not train on this” or zero-retention flag with those providers, so we cannot promise your child's words are excluded from their systems.

AI output can be wrong. Grades, feedback and suggestions produced by these tools are there to prompt a student's thinking, not to be relied on as fact.

Companies that process data for us

We do not sell personal information, and we do not use it to advertise to your child. The app your child signs into contains no advertising trackers, no analytics tools and no session recording. Google's advertising tag runs on two public pages only — a product page a student is advertising, and the payment confirmation a buyer sees — so it measures the adults who buy, never the students who build. It is not present on any page reached by signing in.

Advertising: the program includes a feature that could publish a student's advert to Google Ads or Meta. It is switched off, and no student advert has been published to any advertising network. If we turn it on we will update this page first.

Information about people who are not our users

When a student logs who they talked to, they type in that person's name and what they said. The cold-email exercise goes further and asks the student to type that person's email address and a note about them, and we store that too. Those people have not signed up and have not agreed to anything. We hold it only so the student can track their own outreach; we do not email those people ourselves, we do not use their details for anything else, and their names do not appear on our public pages. If your details were recorded by a student and you want them removed, email us and we will delete them.

How long we keep things, and what deletion actually means

We want to be straight with you here, because it is the part of this policy where the honest answer is not always the reassuring one.

How long we keep each kind of record:

• Your child's account and work — their profile, your email address, their work, coach conversations, outreach logs, and uploaded pictures and video: kept so they can come back to what they built, then deleted or made anonymous 24 months after their last weekend, or sooner if you ask.
• Event registrations (apart from the waiver and media release): 24 months after the event. If you unsubscribe, we keep your email address on a do-not-email list so we never email you again.
• Program applications: the admissions cycle plus 12 months. Applications that did not lead to a place are then deleted; an enrolled student's application becomes part of their student record.
• Money records — sales, Stripe records, payouts, refunds, and each family's payout-or-refund choice: 7 years, because tax and accounting law requires it.
• Signed waivers, media-release choices, and the record of which version of these pages you agreed to: 7 years after the event, or until the child turns 21 if that is later, because they are how we show what was agreed if a claim is ever made.

Nothing is deleted automatically yet. There is no automatic clean-up job; staff carry out the periods above by hand. There is also no “delete my account” button in the app.

How to ask us to delete your child's information. Email events@founders.school with your child's name and the weekend or event they attended. We log every request, confirm you are the child's parent or guardian, and complete it within 30 days. A member of staff does it by hand in our databases, and we will email you when it is done, saying what was deleted and what we had to keep.

What a deletion request cannot remove. Signed waivers, media-release choices, the record of what you agreed to, and money records are kept for the periods above even after we delete everything else. Where we can, we remove your child's details from them so what remains no longer identifies them.

Uploaded pictures and video need deleting separately, and we may miss one. Media lives at a public web address that is not automatically removed when the advert, the venture or the account is deleted, and older versions of a picture stay reachable after a student replaces it. We remove these by hand on request. If you want your child's uploads gone, say so explicitly when you email us so we look for all of them.

Security

Access to student records is restricted by database rules so that a student can normally only reach their own venture's data, and mentors and staff can reach the students they are running. Passwords are handled by our login provider and are not visible to us or to staff. As noted above, uploaded media is deliberately public so it can be shown in the app, and is not protected by these rules.

No system is perfectly secure. We are a small program, not a large company, and we would rather tell you that plainly than imply otherwise.

Your choices

• Ask to see what we hold about your child.
• Ask us to correct it.
• Ask us to delete it — their account, their work, and their uploaded media. Please say if you want the media too, since those files are removed by a separate manual step. Waiver, agreement and money records are kept as described above.
• Ask us to remove their name from the public leaderboard.
• Ask us to stop collecting anything further.

Email events@founders.school. We will acknowledge your email within three business days and complete the request within 30 days. During a live weekend we may be slower to complete it, but we will still acknowledge it.

Changes to this page

If we change what we collect or who we send it to, we will update this page and change the date at the top. If the change is significant and affects children's information, we will contact enrolled families directly.