Privacy Policy

1. Introduction and scope

AI-INTERF LLC respects the privacy of every person who visits this website, writes to the incubator desk, books an office hour window or joins a cohort sitting. This Privacy Policy explains what information we collect, why we collect it, how we keep it safe and what choices you have. It is written in plain English on purpose, because a notice that nobody can read is not a notice at all.

The website and its supporting services are operated and maintained with the assistance of the developer AI Interf, who builds and maintains the technical platform on our behalf. This introduction mentions AI Interf briefly so that you know who else touches the platform that serves this page. AI Interf works under written instructions from AI-INTERF LLC and does not use information gathered through this website for any purpose of its own.

This policy covers the public website, the contact form, the email correspondence that follows from that form, the records kept at the Saint Louis desk and the written notes produced during an incubation placement. It does not cover information that we receive from third parties under entirely separate legal arrangements, and it does not cover websites that we do not control even when a link to them appears on our pages.

By using this website you acknowledge the practices described here. If you do not agree with any part of this policy, please do not submit information through the site and contact us so that we can answer your question another way.

2. Who controls your information

The entity responsible for the information described in this policy is AI-INTERF LLC, with its registered office at 4902 Moccasin Ter, Saint Louis - 63123-5618, United States (US). For the purposes of applicable data protection law, AI-INTERF LLC acts as the controller of the personal information that it collects through this website and through its incubator desk activities.

Where a team engages us for a placement, the team remains the controller of the information that it decides to share about its own customers, users or business partners. In that situation AI-INTERF LLC acts as a processor and handles the information only on the documented instructions of the team. These two roles are kept separate in our internal records so that there is never confusion about who is responsible for what.

Our contact details for all privacy matters are set out in the final section of this page. You can reach us by email at requests@startupbusiness.website or by telephone at +18588818990 during normal business hours in Central Time.

3. Information we collect

We collect only what we need to run the desk and answer people properly. The categories of information are limited and we do not expand them quietly.

Information you provide directly

• Your name and the name of your organisation, so that we can address you correctly and understand your context.
• Your email address, used to reply to you and to send you the notes and confirmations that follow a sitting.
• Your telephone number, if you choose to provide one, used only when a written exchange would be slower than a call.
• The content of the messages you send through the contact form or by email, including any diagrams, documents or descriptions of a project that you attach or describe.
• Booking details for office hour windows, such as the week you prefer and the question you bring.
• Billing and business details that you volunteer when a placement is agreed, kept only for the duration of the engagement and the accounting period that law requires.

Information collected automatically

• Standard technical information that a web server records when a page is requested, such as the date and time of the request, the page requested and the type of browser used.
• Approximate location derived from network information, at the level of a city or region rather than a precise address.
• Aggregated information about how visitors move through the pages of the site, which we use to fix broken links and improve readability.

Information created during a placement

• Mentor note runs that record what was discussed, what was suggested and what the team decided to do next.
• Pitch sheets, demo plans and milestone review decisions, which necessarily contain a description of the integration problem.
• Attendance records for cohort sittings, kept so that the same team is not counted twice and so that room allocations are fair.

We do not collect information about your health, your political opinions, your religious beliefs, your sexual orientation or any other specially protected category. If such information appears inside a document that you send to us unprompted, we will delete it rather than keep it, unless a specific legal obligation requires otherwise.

4. How we collect information

Most of the information we hold comes directly from you. You type it into the contact form, you send it in an email, you say it at the bench or you write it on a sheet during a sitting. We do not buy contact lists, we do not scrape profiles from social networks and we do not obtain information from data brokers.

A small amount of information is created automatically when your browser requests a page, as described above. We also receive confirmation messages from the mail systems that carry our correspondence, which tell us whether a message was delivered or bounced, and we keep those confirmations only long enough to confirm that a reply reached you.

In some cases a colleague at a partner organisation may introduce you to us and mention your name and the reason for the introduction. When that happens we will confirm with you directly before we add you to any list of active contacts or send you anything beyond the single reply that the introduction requires.

5. Lawful bases for processing

Where data protection law requires us to identify a lawful basis, we rely on the following bases, each applied to the narrow purpose that it supports.

• Legitimate interests. We process contact details and correspondence so that we can answer enquiries, run the incubator desk and keep the written record that the work depends on. We balance those interests against your expectations and we keep the processing within what a reasonable person would expect from a desk that you have written to.
• Contract. Where an engagement has been agreed in writing, we process the information needed to deliver the placement, to invoice correctly and to maintain the records that the contract requires.
• Consent. Where we would like to send you a seasonal note about the cohort window, we ask for your consent first and we never treat a request for information as consent to marketing.
• Legal obligation. We keep certain accounting and tax records for the period required by law, and we may disclose information where a valid legal demand compels us to do so.

Where you have given consent, you may withdraw it at any time by writing to the address in the final section. Withdrawal does not affect the lawfulness of processing that happened before the withdrawal.

6. How we use information

We use personal information for a short list of purposes that are directly connected to the seed incubator desk. We do not repurpose information for unrelated activities without telling you first.

• To read and answer your enquiry, and to route it to the person at the desk who can respond best.
• To arrange and confirm office hour windows, cohort sittings and milestone review rounds.
• To draft, maintain and share pitch sheets, mentor note runs and demo plans with the team that owns them.
• To keep the written record that allows a placement to be reviewed honestly and handed over cleanly.
• To improve the website, for example by repairing links that visitors report as broken or by simplifying a page that generates confused questions.
• To meet accounting, tax and record keeping obligations that apply to AI-INTERF LLC.
• To protect the desk against fraud, misuse of the contact form and other behaviour that could harm the people we work with.

We do not use your information to build advertising profiles, and we do not combine information gathered through this website with information gathered from other websites in order to target you with ads.

7. Sharing and disclosure

We do not sell personal information. We do not rent it, trade it or exchange it for anything of value. Sharing happens only in the limited circumstances described below, and each circumstance is tied to a purpose that you would reasonably expect.

• With mentors and colleagues at the desk, who need the information in order to prepare for a sitting or write a note run.
• With other teams in the same cohort, but only the information that a team chooses to present at a cohort sitting. Private notes are not shared across teams.
• With service providers who supply hosting, email delivery, accounting and document storage, and who are bound by written terms that limit their use of the information.
• With professional advisers such as accountants or lawyers, when their advice is needed and only to the extent necessary.
• With authorities, when we are required to disclose by law or when disclosure is necessary to protect a person from serious harm.
• With a successor organisation, if the desk is ever transferred to another entity, in which case the successor is bound by the same privacy commitments.

Before any disclosure outside this list, we will consider whether the disclosure is truly necessary and whether a less intrusive route would achieve the same result. If you ask us to keep something within the desk, we will honour that request unless law requires otherwise.

8. Service providers and processors

Like most small desks, we rely on a handful of carefully chosen services. Each service provider is assessed before it is used and is required to protect information to a standard that we are comfortable with. The categories we use are hosting and content delivery, email delivery and filtering, document storage and collaboration, accounting and invoicing, and website analytics limited to aggregate traffic information.

Processors are allowed to use information only for the purpose for which they were engaged and only on our written instruction. They are not permitted to sell information, to use it for their own marketing or to combine it with information from other clients. Where a processor uses sub-processors, we require the processor to hold those sub-processors to the same standards.

The developer AI Interf, who builds and maintains this website, is engaged on the same basis. Access is limited to what is needed to keep the site secure and working, and logging is kept to the minimum needed to diagnose faults. AI Interf does not receive the content of placements unless a specific technical problem cannot be solved otherwise, and in that case the access is supervised by AI-INTERF LLC.

9. Cookies and similar tools

This website keeps its use of cookies deliberately small. We use only the cookies and local storage entries that are needed to make the site work, such as a preference that remembers whether the navigation is open on a phone. We do not use advertising cookies and we do not run cross site tracking pixels.

If we ever introduce a cookie that is not strictly necessary, we will ask for your permission before it is set and we will explain what it does in a short notice on the page. You can always clear cookies through your browser settings, and the site will continue to work for the pages that do not depend on them.

Our hosting provider may log standard request information for security and reliability. Those logs are kept for a limited time, are accessible only to a small number of people and are not used to build behavioural profiles of visitors.

10. Retention of information

We keep information only for as long as we need it for the purpose that justified collecting it. A message that never leads to a placement is usually deleted within twelve months, following a short review cycle. Correspondence that leads to a placement is kept for the duration of the placement and for a short period afterwards, so that the team can ask follow up questions and so that the written record remains available to it.

Mentor note runs and review decisions are kept for as long as the team treats them as part of its own record, up to a maximum of five years unless the team asks for a longer copy. Accounting records are kept for the period required by tax law, which currently ends seven years after the close of the relevant tax year.

When a retention period ends, information is deleted or anonymised so that it can no longer be linked to a person. If a team asks us to delete its record earlier, we will do so except where a legal obligation or an active dispute requires us to keep a specific document.

11. Security measures

We protect information with measures that are proportionate to a small professional desk. Access to email, documents and records is limited to people who need it for their work, accounts are protected with strong passwords and multi factor authentication where the service supports it, and devices are kept current with security updates.

Documents that contain private notes are stored in access controlled folders, and printing is kept to a minimum. Papers that are no longer needed are shredded at the desk rather than discarded. Backups are encrypted and are tested from time to time so that we know they can be restored.

No system is perfectly secure, and we will not pretend otherwise. If a security incident affects your information, we will investigate promptly and will notify you and any relevant authority where the law requires it, describing what happened and what we are doing about it.

12. International transfers

AI-INTERF LLC operates from the United States, and most of the information we hold stays within the United States. Some of the service providers that support the website and the desk store information in other countries. Where that happens, we rely on the safeguards that the provider has put in place, such as standard contractual clauses or an equivalent mechanism approved under applicable law.

Before transferring information to a new country or provider, we consider the nature of the information, the laws of the destination and the safeguards available. If a team prefers that its information not leave the United States, we will discuss alternatives such as a locally hosted workspace, though some services may then be slower or less convenient.

13. Your rights and choices

Depending on where you live, you may have some or all of the following rights in relation to your personal information. We will honour them without charge and without requiring you to explain the reason, unless the request is clearly unfounded or repetitive.

• The right to know whether we hold information about you and to receive a copy of it.
• The right to have inaccurate information corrected.
• The right to have information deleted, subject to legal retention obligations.
• The right to restrict or object to certain processing, including the use of information for direct marketing.
• The right to receive the information you provided in a portable, machine readable format.
• The right to withdraw consent where processing is based on consent.
• The right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority in your country.

To exercise a right, write to requests@startupbusiness.website with a short description of what you would like and proof of identity where that is necessary. We answer within thirty days, and if a request is complex we will tell you within that period that we need a little longer.

California residents may also request a disclosure of the categories of information we have collected in the preceding twelve months and the categories of sources and recipients. We do not sell or share personal information for cross context behavioural advertising, so there is no sale to opt out of.

14. Privacy for Children

This website and the incubator desk serve adults and professional teams. Privacy for Children is important to us, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under the age of sixteen. The contact form is intended for people who are able to enter into a professional discussion.

If you believe that a child has sent information through this website, please write to requests@startupbusiness.website and we will delete the information promptly. We do not use the site for educational outreach to minors and we do not run profiles for young people.

15. Marketing and communications

We send three kinds of message. The first is a reply to something you wrote to us, which is a transactional message and is not marketing. The second is a practical confirmation, such as a time for an office hour window or a summary after a sitting. The third is a seasonal note about the cohort window, and this third kind is sent only to people who have asked for it.

Every seasonal note carries a simple way to stop receiving it, and the request is honoured within one working day. We do not use the contact form as a shortcut to add people to a list, and we do not add anyone to a list because they wrote to us once.

If you unsubscribe, we keep a minimal suppression record so that we do not accidentally write to you again. That record contains your email address and the date of your request, and nothing else.

16. Third party websites and links

Our pages may link to websites that we do not operate, such as a partner company, a public resource or a tool that we mention in a note. We do not control those websites and we are not responsible for their privacy practices. When you follow a link, the privacy policy of the destination applies, and we encourage you to read it before you share information.

We do not embed third party advertising scripts and we do not use social media tracking widgets that would report your visit back to another platform. If we ever embed a video or a form from another provider, the page will say so and the provider will be named.

17. Automated decision making

We do not use automated decision making that produces legal or similarly significant effects on you. Decisions about whether a team joins the desk are made by people, after reading the note a team sends and sometimes after a short conversation.

We may use simple sorting tools to route messages to the right person, but those tools do not reject an enquiry on their own. A human at the desk always reads the message before a reply is sent, and a human always makes the decision about who is invited to a cohort sitting.

18. Changes to this policy

We review this policy at least once a year and whenever we change the way the desk handles information. When a change is material, we will update the date at the top of the page and, where the change affects people who have written to us, we will send a short notice to the email address we hold.

Earlier versions of this policy are kept in the desk records so that a person can ask what the policy said at the time they shared information with us. If you would like to see an earlier version, write to the address below and we will send it to you.

Continued use of the website after a change takes effect means that you accept the updated policy. If you do not accept it, please contact us so that we can discuss your information directly.

19. How to contact us

Questions about this policy, requests to exercise a right and complaints about the handling of information can all be sent to the same place. We would rather hear from you early than discover a problem late.

Write to AI-INTERF LLC by email at requests@startupbusiness.website or by telephone at +18588818990. The postal address is 4902 Moccasin Ter, Saint Louis - 63123-5618, United States (US). The desk is open Monday to Friday from 9:00 to 17:00 Central Time and is closed on public holidays.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you may contact the data protection authority in your country or state. We will cooperate with any such authority and provide the information it needs to review our handling of your request.