Privacy

Your Startup Advisor Ltd., Company No. 769550, Cork, Ireland, is the data controller. Contact: charles@laythegroundwork.io. In practice, Charles is the only person who reads your information.

If you apply: the answers you type into the application form (name, email, country, optional LinkedIn, and your answers about your startup). We use these to assess your application and contact you about it. Legal basis: taking steps at your request before entering an agreement.

How applications are reviewed: An AI model, guided by my scoring criteria, reads each application and suggests scores, a next step and a short note, with its reasons. It sees your answers, not your name or contact details. I review every suggestion and change what I disagree with, and nothing happens to your application until I have. No decision is made by software alone.

If you’re interviewed: brief notes from the 15-minute call. Same purpose and basis.

If you join the program: attendance records, your customer-conversation log in Evidnt, session recordings (shared with your cohort only, never published), whatever you post in your cohort’s private Discord channels, and the emails between us. We use these to run the program. Legal basis: performing our agreement with you.

Payment information: none. Groundwork is free, so there is no payment to take and no card, bank, or billing data of any kind involved at any point.

Website visits: we use Cloudflare Web Analytics, which is cookie-free and doesn’t track you across sites. That’s why there’s no cookie banner: there’s nothing to consent to.

We don’t collect anything else, and we never buy, sell, or trade personal data.

Nobody, in the everyday sense. No data is sold or shared with advertisers.

Like almost every small business, we use service providers who process data on our instructions: Google Workspace (email, documents, interview calendar invites, session recordings), Supabase (the database where applications and program records are stored), Resend (which sends our emails), Anthropic (the AI model that suggests application scores; Anthropic does not use your answers to train its models), Cloudflare (website hosting and analytics), Discord (the cohort channels), and Evidnt (the conversation log, which is our own product, owned by Your Startup Advisor Ltd.). These providers operate under EU-approved data protection frameworks.

Session recordings and your cohort channels are visible to the other founders in your cohort. That’s the point of them, and it’s stated in the program terms.

• Declined or unsuccessful applications: deleted within 6 months of the decision, unless you ask us to keep your details for a future cohort.
• Program records for participants: kept for the duration of the program and up to 2 years after, so we can provide references, handle questions, and invite you to alumni things.
• Session recordings: deleted within 12 months of the cohort ending.

You can ask us at any time to: see the data we hold about you, correct it, delete it, or object to how we use it. Email charles@laythegroundwork.io and it will be handled personally, normally within a month.

If you’re unhappy with how we’ve handled your data, you can complain to the Irish Data Protection Commission at dataprotection.ie, though we’d appreciate the chance to fix it first.

If this policy changes in any meaningful way, the date at the top changes and program participants are told by email. We won’t quietly move the goalposts.

Email charles@laythegroundwork.io. I read everything.