PRIVACY POLICY

Effective Date: The moment you loaded this page. Retroactively.

Last Updated: Whenever our legal counsel finished their cold brew.

DISCLAIMER: This is a satirical privacy policy produced by VC FOMO, a parody platform. It is not legal advice. It is not a real privacy policy in the sense that a lawyer would recognize. It is, however, funnier than most real privacy policies, and contains approximately the same amount of actionable information. For actual legal questions, please consult an attorney who charges by the hour and does not describe their practice as "disrupting legal services."

01. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY(For LPs Who Don't Read Past Slide 3)

VC FOMO ("we," "us," "our," or "the Fund") operates the VC FOMO website and game. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, disclose, and safeguard your information when you visit our platform. We take your privacy almost as seriously as we take our deal velocity metrics, which is to say: very seriously in pitch decks, somewhat seriously in practice.

TL;DR: We collect minimal data, use cookies for engagement metrics, and respect your rights under GDPR and CCPA. Your data is not for sale — we are not that kind of fund. We are the kind of fund that talks about data as a "strategic asset" and then stores it in a MySQL database with a sensible schema.

By using this website, you agree to this policy, including the parts we haven't written yet. Your continued use of the platform constitutes a soft circle on our data practices, which we consider binding pending final close.

02. DATA COLLECTION(Our Proprietary Data Moat)

Information We Collect Automatically

Every time you visit VC FOMO, our servers quietly note the following, with the detached efficiency of a junior analyst building a CRM:

• Browser & Device Data: IP address, browser type, operating system, device type, and unique device identifiers. We use this to ensure the site works correctly on your device. We do not use it to judge you for using Internet Explorer.
• Usage Data: Pages visited, time spent on each section, clicks, scrolls, and interactions with CTAs. We are particularly interested in how long you hover over "PLAY NOW" before committing. This is our proprietary FOMO Index™ and it is, frankly, our best dataset.
• Engagement Metrics: Deal counter interactions, theme toggles (old-money vs. new-money), and cookie banner dismissal timing. The aesthetic you choose tells us more about your risk appetite than your LinkedIn profile does.
• Referral Data: How you arrived at our site. If you came from a VC Twitter thread, we already know everything we need to know about you.

Information You Provide Voluntarily

If you submit a pitch via our contact form, you provide us with your name, email address, message, and any attached files. We store this information in our database and S3 infrastructure. We will read your pitch. We may respond to your pitch. We make no representations about the timeline for either.

Attached files (pitch decks, financial models, cap tables, and whatever else you felt compelled to send) are stored in encrypted cloud storage. They are accessible only to the fund manager, who will review them with the same rigor applied to all inbound deal flow: enthusiastically at first, then with increasing skepticism upon closer inspection.

03. COOKIE USAGE & TRACKING(Our Cookie Round)

What Are Cookies?

Cookies are small text files stored on your device that help us remember your preferences and measure how you interact with VC FOMO. Think of them as your personal LP in our data-driven disruption strategy: silent, persistent, and occasionally inconvenient to remove.

Cookies We Deploy

Cookie	Purpose	Duration
vc-fomo-aesthetic	Remembers your theme preference (old-money vs. new-money). Critical infrastructure.	1 year
vc-fomo-cookies-dismissed	Tracks whether you clicked through our cookie banner. You did. You're here.	1 year
session	Keeps you logged in if you authenticate. Signed with JWT. Very secure. Very enterprise.	Session
_analytics	Aggregated page view and engagement tracking. Privacy-preserving. No cross-site tracking.	Session

Third-Party Analytics

We use privacy-focused analytics to track page views, user engagement, and traffic sources. We do not use Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, or any other surveillance-capitalism-adjacent tracking infrastructure. Your data is processed on our servers and is not shared with advertisers, data brokers, or anyone who would describe themselves as being "in the data space."

04. HOW WE USE YOUR DATA(Our Investment Thesis)

We use your data to operate and improve the platform, which is a legally required sentence that we are required to include regardless of whether it conveys any information. More specifically, and with the transparency that LPs deserve:

• Optimize User Experience: Understand how you interact with VC FOMO and improve the site accordingly. This is the legitimate use case. We mean it.
• Measure FOMO Levels: Track engagement metrics to validate our core hypothesis that the VC industry is, in fact, deeply anxious. Data confirms this.
• Respond to Pitches: Use your contact form submissions to respond to your inquiries. Response time is subject to deal flow, current portfolio triage, and whether we are at a conference in San Francisco.
• Legal Compliance: Comply with applicable laws and respond to lawful requests from authorities. We will fight frivolous ones. We have strong opinions about regulatory overreach.
• Platform Improvement: Monitor site performance, identify bugs, and optimize for mobile and desktop. We believe in continuous iteration, which is what we call fixing things after they break.

05. DATA SHARING & THIRD PARTIES(Our Co-Investment Policy)

We do not sell, rent, lease, or otherwise monetize your personal data. We do not share it with advertisers, data brokers, or anyone who would describe their business model as "connecting brands with audiences." Your data is not our Series A. It is not our revenue stream. It is not our exit strategy.

We may share aggregated, anonymized data with service providers who help us operate the platform — hosting infrastructure, analytics tools, and similar vendors. These providers are contractually obligated to use your data only for the purposes we specify and to not do anything we would find embarrassing at a board meeting.

If we are acquired (unlikely, but we keep our options open), your data may be transferred to the acquiring entity as part of the transaction. We will notify you if this occurs, probably in the same email where we announce the acquisition with the phrase "incredibly excited about this next chapter."

06. YOUR RIGHTS & CHOICES(Your Cap Table Position)

GDPR Rights (EU Users)

If you are located in the European Union, you have the following rights under the GDPR, which we respect both legally and philosophically, having read at least the Wikipedia summary:

• Right to Access: Request a copy of the personal data we hold about you. We will provide it in a format that is technically machine-readable.
• Right to Rectification: Request correction of inaccurate data. We will correct it, though we note that most inaccuracies in our dataset are your fault for typing quickly.
• Right to Erasure: Request deletion of your data. We will honor this within 30 days, subject to legal retention requirements and our backup rotation schedule.
• Right to Data Portability: Request your data in a portable format. We will provide JSON, which is the lingua franca of the modern data economy.
• Right to Object: Object to our processing of your data. We will take your objection seriously and process it through our standard intake workflow.

CCPA Rights (California Users)

If you are a California resident — and statistically, many of you are, given that this is a VC satire platform — you have additional rights under the CCPA:

• Right to Know: Request what personal information we collect, use, and share. We have documented this above, with more candor than is legally required.
• Right to Delete: Request deletion of personal information we collected from you. We will comply, and we will not take it personally.
• Right to Opt-Out: Opt out of the "sale" of personal information. We don't sell it, but you can opt out anyway. We respect the gesture.
• Right to Non-Discrimination: We will not discriminate against you for exercising your CCPA rights. We may, however, think less of your deal if your pitch deck uses Comic Sans.

Cookie Preferences

You can control cookies through your browser settings. Blocking cookies may affect your ability to use certain features of VC FOMO, specifically the aesthetic toggle, which will reset to "new money" on every visit. We consider this a minor inconvenience and you will consider it deeply annoying. We have made peace with this asymmetry.

07. DATA SECURITY(Our Risk Management Framework)

We implement industry-standard security measures to protect your data, which is a phrase that appears in every privacy policy regardless of actual security posture. In our case, it happens to be true. Specifically:

• HTTPS encryption for all data in transit. TLS 1.2 minimum. We are not animals.
• Server-side encryption for all files stored in S3. Your pitch deck is encrypted at rest, which is more than can be said for most VC inboxes.
• JWT-signed session cookies with secure and httpOnly flags. We have read the OWASP Top 10.
• Access controls limiting data access to authorized personnel, which is currently one person: the fund manager.

No security system is perfectly secure. If we experience a data breach, we will notify affected users in accordance with applicable law and with the same energy we bring to a down-round announcement: honest, measured, and accompanied by a revised narrative about long-term value creation.

08. DATA RETENTION(Our Hold Period)

We retain your data for as long as is necessary to fulfill the purposes described in this policy. Contact form submissions and attachments are stored for the duration of the platform's existence, plus a reasonable wind-down period. Analytics data is retained for 12 months. Session cookies expire when you close your browser, unless you have configured your browser to retain sessions, in which case they expire when we rotate our JWT secret.

You may request deletion of your data by emailing [email protected]. We will process your request within 30 days, or within a reasonable time frame given our current bandwidth, which fluctuates based on deal flow and the number of conferences we are attending.

09. CHILDREN'S PRIVACY(Our Pre-Seed Policy)

VC FOMO is not intended for children under the age of 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If a child under 13 has somehow found this website, they are either extremely precocious or their parents work in venture capital, which amounts to the same thing. If you believe a child has provided us with information, please contact us at [email protected] and we will delete it promptly.

10. CHANGES TO THIS POLICY(Our Pivot Rights)

We reserve the right to update this Privacy Policy at any time, for any reason, including but not limited to: regulatory changes, product updates, a general feeling that the current version could be funnier, or pressure from our imaginary legal team. When we make material changes, we will update the effective date and, if the changes are significant, notify you by email. Your continued use of the platform after any changes constitutes your acceptance of the updated policy, which is the same mechanism by which most VC term sheets work, and we find it elegant.

11. CONTACT US(Our Open Door Policy)

If you have questions about this Privacy Policy, requests to exercise your rights, or a genuinely interesting data governance thesis that you believe is undervalued by the market, please contact us:

VC FOMO Fund I, LP

Email: [email protected]

Response time: Best effort, subject to deal flow and conference schedule.

* We are committed to transparency, accountability, and the responsible stewardship of your data. We are also committed to disrupting the privacy policy space, which we believe is ripe for innovation and has not yet found its product-market fit.

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