Updated: January 2, 2025

FounderWrite is owned and operated by Quest for Excellence International LLC (“FounderWrite”, “we”, “us”, and “our”). This Privacy & Cookie Statement explains how we collect, use, and share your information, including how we use cookies and similar technologies. We leverage technology responsibly to provide the best experience for entrepreneurs and business founders while prioritizing your privacy and security.

Scope of this Policy

This policy applies to all FounderWrite websites, applications, and offerings, including www.founderwrite.com, app.founderwrite.com, and any website or mobile application owned, operated, or controlled by us (collectively, “FounderWrite Sites” or “FounderWrite Site”). FounderWrite is an online writing and business resource platform that provides writing workshops, modules, videos, graphics, educational documents, exercises, forums, products, and personalized content (our “Services”). By using our Platform or Services and submitting information, you agree that we may use and disclose your information according to the terms of this policy.

Our Role as Data Controller

FounderWrite determines the purposes and means of processing personal information and acts as a ‘data controller’ under applicable data privacy laws. We may share your personal information with partner companies and conduct processing activities as controllers or joint controllers for the purposes described in this policy. In certain circumstances, there may be multiple data controllers processing your information. FounderWrite is not responsible for the processing of other data controllers, and you should contact them directly regarding their privacy practices.

Key Terms

“User” means any person or entity registered with us to use the Service.

“Personal Information” means any information that describes, relates to, identifies, or can be used to identify an individual directly or indirectly. Examples include first and last name, date of birth, email address, gender, occupation, demographic information, transaction information, and information received from third parties.

“Platform” consists of all websites and applications through which FounderWrite offers its Services, including registered accounts, writing programs, and marketplace.

“Services” means the offerings, services, and experiences made available by FounderWrite through the Platform.

“Visitor” means any person who visits our Platform or engages with us at events or in connection with our marketing or recruitment activities.

“Cookies” means cookies, web beacons, pixels, local shared objects, and similar technologies used to automatically collect device and usage information.

Information We Collect

The personal information we collect depends on your interactions with FounderWrite, how you configure your account, your privacy settings, and your location.

Information You Provide To Us

Creating an account: We collect Personal Information when you create an account, interact with the FounderWrite Platform, or subscribe to our services. This may include your name, job title, organization, location, phone number, email address, profile photo, billing information, usernames, and credentials.

Identification information: We collect Personal Information to verify your identity, including your name, social security number, driver’s license numbers, and government-issued identification details, for example to verify your identity when distributing program funds or processing service applications.

Customer support, product research, training and feedback: We collect Personal Information such as your name, email address, telephone number, and any other information you choose to share when you reach out for support, provide feedback, participate in surveys, subscribe to marketing, attend events, or participate in product research or training.

Social and community content: We receive content you post on our social media pages.

Business and writing information: We may receive information about your business, writing projects, manuscripts, business plans, financial statements, writing transaction details, payment details, tax return details, customer or client details, income and revenue information, and investment information.

Third-party service content: We receive information when you sign into or connect your account to a third-party service, such as document storage platforms or social media platforms.

Expert advice: When you interact with live experts including mentors, editors, or workshop facilitators on the FounderWrite Platform, we may receive information about the questions you ask, your account details, and the guidance provided.

Required information: Some services and experiences require you to provide information to function. If you do not wish to provide required information, you may not be able to use certain features.

Information We Collect Automatically

Location information: Certain features may collect your precise location information or device motion information if you grant permission in your device settings.

Device information: We collect information about the device and applications you use to access the Service, such as your IP address, operating system, browser ID, viewfinder size, and other system and connection information.

Log data: Our web servers keep log files recording data each time a device accesses our servers, including originating IP addresses and activity in the Service such as date/time stamps, pages and files viewed, searches, device event information, error reports, and hardware settings. We may also access metadata associated with files you upload.

Usage data: We collect usage data whenever you interact with our Service or Platform, including dates and times you access the Platform, browsing activities, session duration, links clicked, non-sensitive text entered, mouse movements, and details about communications you interact with. We also collect performance metrics related to email deliverability and other communications.

Online behavioral data: We automatically collect information about your use and interactions with our Platform, partners’ websites, e-commerce stores, social media websites, and marketing campaigns, including device information, page view information, search results, and whether marketing campaigns have been viewed, delivered, opened, clicked on, bounced, or marked as spam.

Information We Collect From Third Parties

Employment and staffing services: If you submit an employment application through the Platform, you will be redirected to our third-party staffing services provider who shares your information with us.

Your service providers: If you sync a non-FounderWrite account with your account, we receive information according to your settings with that account.

Supplemental information and identity verification providers: Service providers who help us verify your identity, business details, and ensure information accuracy. These may include financial institutions, telecommunications providers, or email providers.

Customer support providers: Service providers who provide information about you or your interaction with the FounderWrite Platform for troubleshooting purposes.

Risk management, cybersecurity & anti-fraud providers: Service providers who help us assess risks, combat fraud, illegal activity, and protect your personal information.

Communication providers & social networks: We or our third-party service providers may collect information from email providers, communication providers, and social networks, including to monitor public discussion about our brands.

Joint offering partners: We may offer co-branded services or engage in joint-marketing activities with others, including through writing programs, conferences, or live events.

Publicly-available and third-party sources: We collect information from publicly available sources and third-party sources, such as open government databases.

What Are Cookies?

Cookies are small data files placed on your computer or mobile device when you visit a website. Cookies are widely used by website owners to make their websites work more efficiently and to provide reporting information.

First party cookies are cookies set by the website owner (in this case, FounderWrite). Third party cookies are cookies set by parties other than the website owner. Third party cookies enable third party features or functionality to be provided on or through the website, such as advertising, interactive content, and analytics. These parties can recognize your computer when it visits our website and when it visits certain other websites.

Why We Use Cookies and Other Tracking Technologies

We use first party cookies for several reasons. Some cookies are required for technical reasons to operate our Websites, and we refer to these as “essential” or “strictly necessary” cookies. Other cookies enable us to track and target the interests of our users to enhance the experience on our Online Properties.

Third parties serve cookies through our Websites for advertising, analytics, and other purposes. We use various commonly used tools such as cookies, web beacons, pixels, local shared objects, and similar technologies to automatically collect and store certain device and usage information when you interact with FounderWrite so we can provide the experiences you request, recognize your visit, track your interactions, and improve your experience.

Web beacons allow us to collect information such as your IP address, browser, email client type, and other similar data. We use this information to measure the performance of our platform, provide analytics information, enhance effectiveness of our Service, and for other purposes described below.

We may allow selected third parties to place cookies through the Platform to provide better insights into use of the Site, user demographics, or to provide relevant advertising. These third parties may collect information about online activities over time and across different websites. We may also permit third party service providers to place cookies through our Platform to perform analytic or marketing functions. We do not control the use of such third party cookies or resulting information and are not responsible for any actions or policies of such third parties.

Cookies Served Through FounderWrite Websites

Essential Website Cookies

These cookies are strictly necessary to provide you with services available through our FounderWrite Sites and to use some features, such as access to secure areas. Because these cookies are strictly necessary to deliver FounderWrite services, you cannot refuse them without impacting how the FounderWrite platform functions. You can block or delete them by changing your browser settings.

Performance & Functionality Cookies

These cookies enhance the performance and functionality of our FounderWrite Site. They help us know which pages are most and least popular and how visitors move around the FounderWrite Site. Although important to us, these cookies are non-essential to the use of the FounderWrite Site. However, without these cookies, certain functionality may become unavailable.

Analytics and Customization Cookies

These cookies collect information used to help us understand how our FounderWrite Sites are being used or how effective our marketing campaigns are, or to help us customize our FounderWrite Sites and application for you in order to enhance your experience. These cookies may be set by us or by third-party providers whose services we have added to our pages.

Advertising (Targeting) Cookies

These cookies make advertising messages more relevant to you and your interests. They prevent the same ad from continuously reappearing, ensure ads are properly displayed, and in some cases select advertisements based on your interests.

Other Tracking Technologies

We and our third-party partners may use other similar technologies from time to time, like web beacons, SDKs, pixels (or “clear gifs”), and other tracking technologies. Pixels are tiny graphics files that contain a unique identifier enabling us to recognize when someone has visited our FounderWrite Sites or opened an email we have sent. This allows us to monitor traffic patterns, deliver or communicate with cookies, understand whether you came from an online advertisement, serve targeted advertisements, improve site performance, and measure marketing campaign success. While you may not have the ability to specifically reject these tracking technologies, in many instances they rely on cookies to function properly; accordingly, declining cookies will impair their functionality.

Targeted Online Advertising

Third parties may serve cookies on your computer or mobile device to serve advertising through our Websites. These companies may use information about your visits to this and other websites to provide relevant advertisements about goods and services you may be interested in. They may employ technology to measure advertising effectiveness using cookies or web beacons to collect information about your visits. This process does not enable us or them to identify your name, contact details, or other details that directly identify you unless you choose to provide these.

How We Use Your Information

We use collected information for general commercial purposes such as to improve our Platform and Services, grow our business, and offer our own or third-party products or services that we think you may find of interest.

We process Personal Information where you have given informed consent to such processing, for example where you have signed up to one of our mailing lists or to respond to your inquiries. Where you have provided consent for our processing of Personal Information, such consent may be withdrawn at any time.

Where your consent is not mandatory, we process Personal Information on the following lawful bases:

Contractual necessity: We have a contract with you and it is necessary to process your personal information to perform our contract, including to provide you with the benefits of the FounderWrite Platform and operate our business.

Legitimate business interests: The processing is in our legitimate business interests, such as operating our businesses, improving and developing the FounderWrite Platform, communicating with you, marketing our offerings and services, personalizing your experience, and detecting illegal activities.

Legal compliance: We need to comply with legal requirements, including applicable laws and regulations.

Specific Uses of Your Information

Financial transactions: To exchange funds, either for distribution of funds (e.g., writing program grants) or to collect money owed to us for services delivered. This includes sending you emails, invoices, receipts, notices of delinquency, and alerting you if we need a different payment method. We use third parties for secure payment transaction processing.

System alerts: To send you system alert messages in administering the Service and providing certain features, such as informing you about temporary or permanent changes, planned outages, account security notifications, new features, version updates, releases, abuse warnings, and changes to this policy.

Account communication: To communicate with you about your account and provide customer support.

Program eligibility: To evaluate your eligibility for writing programs, marketing offers, products, and services.

Program execution: To execute and customize our writing programs and loyalty programs.

Service features: To provide features such as writing analytics and progress tracking.

Expert connections: To connect you with experts and other users.

Notifications: To communicate with you through electronic notifications concerning your account.

Dispute resolution: To provide support and resolve disputes.

Authentication: To authenticate your identity.

Event management: To manage event registrations and attendance, including sending related communications.

Payment processing: To process transactions and payments, including fulfilling orders and conducting settlement, billing, clearing, and reconciliation activities.

Legal compliance: To meet legal requirements, including complying with court orders, valid discovery requests, valid subpoenas, and other appropriate legal mechanisms.

Legal representation: To provide information to representatives and advisors, including attorneys and accountants, to help us comply with legal, accounting, or security requirements.

Legal proceedings: To prosecute and defend a court, arbitration, or similar legal proceeding.

Government requests: To respond to lawful requests by public authorities, including to meet national security or law enforcement requirements.

Service improvement: To provide, support, and improve the Service to perform our contract with you or where we have not entered into a contract, in reliance on our legitimate interests in administering and improving the Service.

Personalization: To provide suggestions and tailored features that optimize and personalize your experience, including adding features that compare Users’ writing projects, using data to suggest other resources your contacts may be interested in, or recommending products or services that may be relevant to you.

Analytics: To perform data analytics projects in reliance on our legitimate business interests in improving and enhancing our products and services. Our data analytics projects use data from FounderWrite accounts to provide and improve the Service.

Aggregated data: To combine and anonymize data about our Users and their use of the Service to create aggregate, anonymized statistics for certain features within the Service and for promoting and improving the Service.

Targeted advertising: To personalize the Service, content, and advertisements served to you in reliance on our legitimate interests in supporting our marketing activities and providing certain features.

Fraud prevention: To prevent or detect fraud and ensure compliance with any applicable laws, regulations, codes, and ordinances.

How We Share Your Information

We may share and disclose your Personal Information with our subsidiaries or affiliates and to the following types of third parties for the purposes described in this policy.

Our service providers or agents: We share your information with third-party service providers or agents working on our behalf for the purposes described in this policy. For example, companies we’ve hired to help provide and support our Service, assist in protecting and securing our systems and services, and other business-related functions such as advertising, marketing, and sales efforts.

When you connect with a FounderWrite Platform partner: If you choose to interact with a Platform Partner, apply for their services, or link or sync your account to a Platform Partner’s product or service, you consent and direct FounderWrite to share your information, including personal information, to the Platform Partner providing the service or offering.

For research: With appropriate controls, we may share information with third-parties, such as academic institutions, government and non-profit organizations, for research purposes or to publish academic or policy-related materials. We only share information in a way that would not allow any individual to be identified.

For joint features, sales, promotions, and events: We may share your information with third-party companies who are jointly providing features, sales initiatives, promotions, or events with us.

With writing and business services providers: In connection with our writing and business services, we may share personal information with editors, publishers, writing platforms, and other service providers.

When you publicly post the information: We may provide opportunities for you to publicly post reviews, questions, comments, suggestions, or other content, which may include personal information. Anything you share in a public forum is public.

Advertising partners: We may partner with third-party advertising networks, exchanges, and social media platforms (like Facebook) to serve our advertising on other sites. We may share Personal Information of Users and Visitors with them for this purpose.

For legal reasons: We may share your information with third-parties for legal reasons without your consent, as permitted by law, including when we reasonably believe disclosure is required to comply with a subpoena, court order, or other applicable law, regulation, or legal process.

For corporate transactions: We may share your information with third parties and their agents or professional advisors in the case of a sale, merger, consolidation, liquidation, reorganization, financing, or acquisition.

We may also share anonymized, aggregated information with selected third parties for statistical or other purposes.

No Sale of Personal Information

We do not and will not sell personal information to third parties. We do share personal information with third parties for the business purposes described in this policy.

Controlling Cookies

You have the right to decide whether to accept or reject cookies. Essential cookies cannot be rejected as they are strictly necessary to provide you with services.

You can choose not to receive emails from us by “unsubscribing” using the instructions in any email you receive from us. All opt-out requests can be made by emailing us using the contact details provided below. Please note that some communications such as service messages, account notifications, and billing information are transactional and necessary for account management. Users cannot opt out of these messages unless you cancel your FounderWrite account.

You can choose to delete or block cookies by setting your browser to either reject all cookies or allow cookies only from selected sites. If you block cookies, performance of the Platform may be impaired and certain features may not function.

If you prefer not to have your data used for data analytics purposes, you can opt out of data analytics projects at any time by emailing us at compliance@founderwrite.com.

Most advertising networks offer a way to opt out of targeted advertising. If you would like more information, please visit https://www.youronlinechoices.com.

Do Not Track Disclosure

Certain state laws require us to indicate whether we honor “Do Not Track” settings in your browser. FounderWrite adheres to the standards set out in this Privacy Policy and does not monitor or respond to any Do Not Track browser requests.

Accessing Your Information & Your Choices

We believe you have the right to access information that pertains to you and your business. If another person has input or processed information in the FounderWrite Platform about you or on behalf of you or your business (and we are processing such information as data controller), you may ask to receive a copy by contacting us at compliance@founderwrite.com.

If you are a User, you may manage your individual account, update, amend, correct, or delete information and manage your profile settings within the dashboard provided through the FounderWrite platform, or you may contact us directly by using our contact form on our “Contact Us” page.

If you provided consent for us to collect or process Personal Information, you can withdraw your consent at any time. Withdrawing your consent will not affect the lawfulness of any processing we conducted prior to your withdrawal, nor will it affect the processing of your Personal Information conducted in reliance on lawful processing grounds other than consent.

Verification

To help protect privacy and the security of your information, you may be asked to provide additional information to verify your identity and/or ownership rights prior to us exercising your data rights. If we are unable to verify your identity or ownership rights to the data, we may not be able to provide you with data rights until you provide us with proper documents.

Information Retention

Unless you specifically ask us to delete your personal information or business information, we retain your personal information as long as it is necessary to comply with our data retention requirements and provide you with services and the benefits of the FounderWrite Platform and successfully run our business. However, even if you request deletion, we may be required to maintain your information as long as necessary to:

Comply with legal or regulatory requirements, such as maintaining records of transactions.

Exercise, establish, or defend legal claims.

Protect against fraudulent or abusive activity on our service.

This means we may keep different information for different periods. If your account is canceled because you have not used it in a long time, we may delete this information immediately.

There may be occasions where we are unable to fully delete, anonymize, or de-identify your information due to technical, legal, regulatory compliance, or other operational reasons. Where this is the case, we will take reasonable measures to securely isolate your personal information from any further processing until such time as we are able to delete, anonymize, or de-identify it.

New Jersey Privacy

New Jersey residents have certain rights regarding their personal information under applicable state privacy laws. We are committed to respecting these rights and will respond to valid requests in accordance with applicable law.

Data Processing and Cross-Border Data Transfers

Our Platform is maintained on servers located in the United States, and Personal Information submitted is stored on our U.S. servers. If you are visiting our Platform from outside the United States, please be advised that your information is transferred to our U.S. servers. Disclosing your personal information to us pursuant to this Privacy Statement is at your own risk. We strive to comply with laws of jurisdictions in which we maintain operations but we make no representations that the practices described in this policy are compliant with laws outside those jurisdictions that apply to the collection, security, use, and disclosure of personal information.

Security

We take appropriate and reasonable technical and organizational measures designed to protect Personal Information from loss, misuse, unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, and destruction, taking into account the risks involved in the processing and the nature of the Personal Information. If you have any questions about the security of your Personal Information, you may contact us using our contact form on our “Contact Us” page.

FounderWrite accounts require a username and password to log in. Users must keep their username and password secure and never disclose it to a third party. Because the information in a User’s FounderWrite account is private, account passwords are hashed, which means we cannot see a User’s password. We cannot resend forgotten passwords either. We will only provide Users with instructions on how to reset them.

While we strive to protect your information, no method of data transmission or storage is 100% secure, and we cannot ensure or warrant the security of your information.

Suspicious Activity

If you suspect a website or mobile app is pretending to be from FounderWrite (also known as “spoofing”), do not enter personal information. Instead, please make an inquiry through customer support. You can also email us at abuse@founderwrite.com.

If you receive an email that claims to be from us but you are not sure or think it is suspicious, do not click on any links in the email. Instead, forward it to us at abuse@founderwrite.com and delete it.

If you have reason to believe that your interaction with us is no longer secure, please immediately notify us at compliance@founderwrite.com.

Children’s Privacy

The FounderWrite Platform is not designed nor intended to be attractive to use by children under the age of 13. We do not knowingly collect information from children under the age of 13. If you are under 13, please do not submit any information to us.

Changes To This Policy

We may change this Privacy & Cookie Policy at any time and from time to time. The most recent version of the policy is reflected by the version date located at the top of this statement. All updates and amendments are effective immediately. We will endeavor to provide notice of material changes by posting a revised version of this policy with an updated effective date or by other notice on the FounderWrite Sites. We encourage you to review this policy often to stay informed of changes that may affect you. Our electronically or otherwise properly stored copies of this policy are each deemed to be the true, complete, valid, authentic, and enforceable copy of the version that was in effect on each respective date you visited the FounderWrite Site.

Questions & Concerns

If you have any questions or comments, or if you have a concern about the way in which we have handled any privacy or cookie matter, please contact us using our contact form on our “contact us” page.