Privacy notice
Version 2026-09-v3 · effective 28 September 2026
Who we are
VIBE runs matchmaking for real-world events: you check in, we work out who in the room you should meet, and we introduce you if you both want to be introduced.
VIBE is operated as VIBE Networking, based in Geneva, Switzerland. Swiss data protection law applies to us, and because we handle data about people in the EU, the GDPR does too.
For anything about your data, write to privacy@joinvibe.net. That includes asking for our postal address, which we will give you for a formal data request or a complaint.
What this notice covers
This covers joinvibe.net — the website, event check-in, and matching.
The VIBE Archetype Assessment runs separately. If you have taken it, we explain below where the two connect, because they share a database and your check-in can use your assessment result.
What we collect, and why
When you apply to join VIBE
Membership is by application. What you send us on the application form is:
| What | Why we need it |
|---|---|
| Your name and email address | To know who is applying and to tell you the outcome |
| What you are building | The main thing the decision is made on, and later most of what makes a match meaningful |
| Your industry | Chosen from a fixed list, never free text |
| Whether you work in a technical role | Optional. Complementary skills are part of how matching works |
| What you are looking for | Co-founders, partners, peer learning, a mentor, an investor — any combination |
| Your city | So we know which chapter you are near |
| A profile link, if you give us one | Optional. Usually LinkedIn |
| How you heard about us | Optional. Only ever read in aggregate, to know what works |
We also record when you applied, the outcome, when it was decided and who decided it — and, if you take the VIBE Archetype Assessment as part of applying, a link to your result.
Your assessment result is held until your application has been reviewed. If we do not accept you, we will still show you your archetype.
An application is not shown to other members, and it is never used for matching unless you are accepted.
When you submit your project to the founder network
This is the standing application at joinvibe.net/experiences/founder-investor-conversations/apply. You do not need an account, and we do not create one for you.
About you: your name, your title, your email address, your phone or WhatsApp number if you give one, your LinkedIn if you give one, the language you want us to write to you in, and what you tell us about why you are the right person or team. If you name co-founders, we keep their name and role and nothing else.
About your company: its name, website, location, sector, stage, what it does, the problem and the solution in your own words, your revenue and customers if you share them, your growth, your headcount, what you have achieved, and what you are looking for. If what you are looking for includes capital, we also ask what you are raising, what you have raised, the instrument, and — optionally — your valuation and minimum ticket.
What you want understood: why now, why this opportunity, and your answer to the five-minute question. Your pitch deck, which is required — an evening is five minutes of presenting, and we cannot put you in a room without one. A video link, if you have one, which is optional.
How you found us, and who referred you if someone did.
Why. So that when we put a room together for one of our Founder and Investor Conversations evenings, we can work out whether you belong in it, and come back to you when you do. Submitting does not guarantee an invitation to any specific event, a meeting, or investment, and we say so on the form, in the confirmation, and here.
Your pitch deck is held in private storage. It is not on a public link, it has no guessable address, and every time it is opened — by us, or by you — a new link is created that stops working within minutes.
If you replace your deck from your own link, the one it replaced is deleted at the same moment. We do not keep earlier versions, and removing yourself deletes every deck we have ever held for you, not only the current one.
Your own link. The confirmation email contains a private link to your submission. You can use it to change anything that has moved on, replace your deck, or remove yourself from the network entirely. It is the only credential involved and it is yours; if you lose it, write to us and we will send a new one, which stops the old one working.
We do not track what happens between you and an investor afterwards. Whether you meet, what you discuss and anything that follows are not recorded. There is no field for a deal, a stage, an amount or an outcome anywhere in our systems, and nothing about your place in the network depends on them.
When you check in to an event
This is the main thing we collect, and you give it to us directly.
| What | Why we need it |
|---|---|
| Your email address | To identify you across devices, to show you your matches, and to introduce you if there is mutual interest |
| Your name | So the person we match you with knows who they are meeting |
| What you are building | This is most of what makes a match meaningful rather than random |
| Your industry | Chosen from a fixed list, never free text |
| Whether you work in a technical role | Complementary skills are part of how matching works |
| What you are looking for | Co-founders, partners, peer learning, a mentor, an investor — any combination |
| Your VIBE archetype | Either the one you select, or your assessment result if you have one |
| A profile link, if you give us one | Optional. Usually LinkedIn |
We also record when you checked in, and which event.
If you add a photo
On your own matches page there is an optional photo. It exists for one situation: you and somebody else have agreed to meet, you are both in the same room, and neither of you knows what the other looks like.
| What | Why we need it |
|---|---|
| A photo of you, if you add one | Entirely optional. Shown only to someone you have both said you want to meet, so you can find each other in the room |
Three things about it that are not obvious, so we say them:
- It is resized on your phone before it is sent to us. What reaches us is a small image and nothing else. Photos from a phone usually record where and when they were taken; that information is removed on your device, so we never receive it.
- Nobody browses these. There is no list of faces, for attendees or for a host. The only way a photo is shown is on a match card, to one person, after you have both said yes.
- Removing it deletes it. The "Remove" button next to the photo deletes the stored image; it does not hide it.
Skipping the photo changes nothing about your matches.
What the matching produces
From the above we calculate a match score between you and each other attendee, store the matches that qualify, and record what you do with them:
- Whether you opened your matches, and when you last did. We record the first and last time only — not which matches you looked at, not for how long, and not from what device. It exists so we can tell the difference between "nobody found their matches useful" and "nobody ever saw them", which are different problems with different fixes.
- Your responses — whether you said you want to meet someone, or not this time
- Mutual interest — when you and another person have both said yes. This pairing, and only this pairing, is shown to the event host so they can introduce you
- Introductions — that the two of you met, and when. This can be recorded by the event host, by the app when you and another person have both said yes, or by either of you saying you met. We keep which of those it was, because they are not equally reliable
Whether you opened your matches is not shown to anyone — not to the people you were matched with, and not to the event host. It is used only in aggregate, to count how many people in a room got that far. What *is* visible to another attendee is set out in "What other attendees can see about you" below.
If you have taken the VIBE Archetype Assessment
When you check in, we look up your email against the assessment's records. If you have a result, we use your measured archetype instead of a guess.
We look this up only inside a check-in you are already completing. There is no way to ask VIBE "what is this person's archetype" from the outside.
If you create a VIBE account
Your email address and password, handled by our authentication provider, plus your name and an optional profile photo.
If you fill in a form on the website
The Contact and Chapter forms collect your name, email address, city, and what you are asking about. The event waitlist collects your email address only.
These forms are handled by Formspree, a third-party form service. See "Who else sees your data" below.
The application form is not. It runs on our own infrastructure and the data goes straight into our database, because it is the most personal thing the site asks for.
Measuring traffic and speed on our public pages
On the public pages of joinvibe.net — the home page, the pages about VIBE, chapters and events, the join and contact pages, and these legal pages — we use two Vercel tools. Web Analytics counts visitors. Speed Insights reports how quickly the page loaded and responded for them.
For each visit, Web Analytics records the time, the page address, the site you arrived from, campaign tags in the link you followed, your approximate location — country, region and city — and the general type of device, browser and operating system you used.
Speed Insights records something narrower, and about the page rather than about you: the page address, how the page performed (how quickly it showed you something, how much it moved about while loading, how fast it answered your first tap), which element on the page was responsible for the slowest part, your connection speed, your browser, device type and operating system, your country, and when. Vercel states these records are anonymous, are not tied to any individual visitor or IP address, and cannot be used to reconstruct a browsing session across pages or identify anyone.
It is still the same page address, so it is held to the same limits.
For Web Analytics, nothing is stored on your device. There are no analytics cookies. To tell one visit from the next, Vercel makes a hash from the request itself; your IP address is used to work out roughly where you are and is not stored or attached to the record. That hash is discarded after 24 hours, so nothing links what you read today to what you read tomorrow, and there is no way to follow you from here to another website.
We do not measure the pages that matter most. Neither tool runs on event check-in, on your matches, on the founder dashboard, on the sign-in and password pages, or on either admin panel. That is enforced in code by a single allowlist covering both — a page is measured only if it is named — so a page added later is unmeasured unless somebody decides otherwise.
We accept a real cost for that: we get no speed data for the pages members actually use, which are the ones where a slow page would matter most.
The reason is the obvious one: a page address like *"the matches page for this event"* recorded against a device identifier would tell a third party who was in which room, and none of that is theirs to know. Counting visitors to the home page does not require it.
We never see your identity in this data. It arrives as counts and top-tens — how many people, from where, reading what.
What we do not do
- We do not use advertising or tracking cookies, and we do not build a profile of you across other websites.
- We do not sell your data, and we do not share it with advertisers.
- We do not show anyone a number for how well you match someone. Scores are calculated and used to order your list; they are never displayed.
Our legal basis for each use
| What we do | Basis |
|---|---|
| Consider your application to join | Your consent, given on the application form. There is nothing for us to do with an application we may not read |
| Hold your founder-network submission, and invite you to evenings | Your consent, given on that form. Three boxes, all required, because without them there is nothing lawful for us to hold |
| Share your profile and deck outside VIBE | Your consent, given separately on a fourth box that is genuinely optional. Withholding it changes nothing else about your place in the network |
| Match you with other attendees | Your consent, given at check-in. You cannot check in without it, because matching is the entire point of checking in |
| Send you the VIBE newsletter | Your consent, given separately and optionally. Nothing about your matching changes if you decline |
| Run the event you registered for | Performance of our agreement with you |
| Record whether you opened your matches | Our legitimate interest in knowing whether the thing we built works at all. You can object to this — see "Your rights" |
| Count visits to our public pages | Our legitimate interest in knowing whether anybody is finding the site. No consent box, because nothing is stored on or read from your device and no profile is built — but you can object to it, see "Your rights" |
| Measure how fast our public pages are | Our legitimate interest in knowing whether the site works acceptably for the people using it. You can object to this too |
| Keep security and admin logs | Our legitimate interest in being able to tell what happened |
Consent, and taking it back
The two boxes at check-in are separate, neither is ticked for you, and the newsletter one is genuinely optional.
You can withdraw either consent at any time by writing to privacy@joinvibe.net. Withdrawing matching consent means we stop matching you and remove you from future matching; it does not undo an introduction that has already happened, because the other person already has your email address by then.
We record which version of this notice and of the check-in wording you were shown, so we can always tell you exactly what you agreed to.
What other attendees can see about you
This is the part worth reading twice.
Before mutual interest, someone you have been matched with sees your name, your archetype, what you are building, and your industry. That is all.
Your email address, your profile link and your photo are released only when you have both said you want to meet. Not before, and never to someone you have not agreed to meet. A profile link is public in itself, but the fact that *you* were in *this* room and open to meeting is not, so it waits for the same yes the address does. A photo waits with them: it is the most recognisable thing about you, which is exactly why it is useful to someone you have agreed to meet and why it is not shown to anyone else.
The photo is shown as a link that stops working after ten minutes. Your match's page fetches a fresh one each time it refreshes, so the picture is never sitting at an address that keeps working after the evening ends.
Your responses are private. If you decide not to meet someone, they are not told. Someone who passed on you and someone who has not answered yet look exactly the same from the other side — that is deliberate, and we test for it.
The event host sees who checked in and their matches, so they can introduce people in the room. They also see which pairs have both said yes — your name next to the name of someone you have each agreed to meet — so that the introduction actually happens while you are both still in the room.
Your host also sees that the two of you met, when either of you records it. That is the point of recording it: a host who cannot see which introductions landed cannot tell whether the evening worked.
The host is told nothing else about responses. They are not told who said no, who has not answered, or whether you opened your matches at all, and a pair that is not shown to them could be any of those three. Only a pair where both people have already agreed to meet each other reaches the host, and by then you each hold the other's email address anyway.
Sharing your profile outside VIBE
If you are in the founder network, there is one way your details reach anybody outside VIBE, and it only happens if you asked for it.
On the application there is a fourth box, separate from the others and not required:
I authorise VIBE to share my profile summary and pitch deck with select external investors or partner organisations on my behalf, at VIBE's discretion, as part of these introductions.
If you leave it unticked, nothing of yours ever leaves VIBE. The feature that would share it is switched off for you — not hidden, switched off — and the request is refused on our server as well as in our interface.
If you tick it, we may put together a referral packet: a one-page summary of your company, your contact details, what you are looking for, and your answer to the five-minute question, followed by your own deck. It carries the line "Referred by VIBE Network", the date and a reference, and a note saying that you authorised it and that VIBE has not verified what it contains. Nothing goes out automatically and nothing goes out in the background: a person at VIBE makes each one, and we keep a record of every packet, when it was made, and who it went to.
You can change your mind at any time from your own link. Doing so stops any future packet being made. It cannot recall one already sent, in the same way an email already sent cannot be recalled, and we say that plainly rather than implying otherwise.
Who else sees your data
We use these companies to run VIBE. They process data on our instructions.
| Who | What for | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Supabase | Database, sign-in, file storage | European Union (Stockholm) |
| Vercel | Website and application hosting, and traffic and speed measurement on our public pages | European Union (Frankfurt) |
| Formspree | The Contact, Chapter and waitlist forms — not the application | United States |
Formspree handles only the enquiry forms on the website — your name, email, city and what you tell us about yourself. It is never involved in event check-in, matching, or anything about who you meet. Those run entirely on our own infrastructure in the EU.
Where your data is stored
Your data is held in the European Union. Where a provider is based outside Europe, transfers rely on the European Commission's standard contractual clauses.
How long we keep it
| What | How long |
|---|---|
| An application we accepted | Kept for as long as you are a member, then 24 months |
| An application we did not accept, or that was withdrawn | 12 months, then deleted. Long enough to answer "why", short enough not to keep a file on people who are not members |
| Check-in and matching data, including whether you opened your matches | 24 months after the event, then deleted |
| A photo you added at an event | Deleted when you remove it, and otherwise deleted with the rest of your check-in data 24 months after the event. The image itself is deleted, not just the record of it |
| Introductions | 24 months, so the archive stays useful |
| A founder-network submission | Until you remove it, or we do. We have not yet set a fixed period and we would rather say so than invent one — it is on our list, and in the meantime your own link removes everything whenever you decide |
| A record that we shared your profile | Kept after you leave, with your name, company and details removed. All that remains is that a referral was made and when. We keep it because we have to be able to answer "what did you send, and to whom" about something that has already been sent |
| A pitch deck | Deleted when you remove yourself, at the same time as everything else |
| Account data | Until you close your account |
| Newsletter subscription | Until you unsubscribe |
| Public-page traffic counts | The hash that groups one visitor's pages is discarded after 24 hours. What is left is counts, which are not linked to anybody |
| Public-page speed measurements | Vercel does not publish a period. The records are anonymous and are not tied to a visitor, so there is nothing in them that identifies you to delete |
| Security and admin logs | 12 months |
We delete sooner if you ask us to.
Your rights
You can ask us to give you a copy of your data, correct it, delete it, limit what we do with it, or hand it to someone else. You can object to processing based on our legitimate interests, and withdraw any consent you have given.
Write to privacy@joinvibe.net. We will respond within one month.
If you are in the founder network you do not have to wait for us to correct or delete your own submission: your private link does both immediately. "Remove me from VIBE Network" deletes your name, email, phone, LinkedIn and deck, and takes your company out of the network. What survives is described under "How long we keep it" and is the one thing we cannot remove without losing the ability to say what was already sent where.
If you are not satisfied, you can complain to the Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner, or to the data protection authority where you live if you are in the EU.
Changes to this notice
We keep every published version. When we change it, the previous version stays on record, along with which version each person consented to. We never edit a version that has already been published.
What changed in this version (2026-09-v2): you can add an optional photo to your own matches page, and it is shown only to people you have both said you want to meet. Nothing else changed about what anyone can see. We added it because the thing people actually struggled with at an event was finding the person they had just agreed to meet. The section "If you add a photo" says how it is stored and what is stripped from it before it leaves your phone.
What changed in 2026-09-v1: you can now tell us that you met somebody you were matched with, which until now only your host or a mutual yes could record. We keep which of the three recorded it. Separately, the event host now sees which pairs have both said yes, so they can make that introduction in the room rather than leaving it to two people to find each other afterwards. Nothing else about responses reaches the host: not who declined, not who has not answered, and not whether anyone opened their matches. The section "What other attendees can see about you" says exactly what the host is and is not shown.
What changed in 2026-08-v5: we added Vercel Speed Insights, which measures how quickly our public pages load and respond. It is held to exactly the same limits as the visitor counting described above — the same allowlist, the same pages excluded — and this notice now describes both.
What changed in 2026-08-v4: we started counting visits to the public pages of the website, using Vercel Web Analytics, and this notice now says so. The previous version said we used no analytics at all, which stopped being true; correcting that is the reason for this version. The measurement is deliberately kept off event check-in, matches, the founder dashboard, the sign-in pages and the admin panels, and that limit is written into the code rather than into a setting. Nothing about what other attendees can see about you has changed.
What changed in 2026-08-v3: membership became something you apply for, so there is a new section describing what the application form collects, why, how long we keep it, and that an application is never shown to other members. The application form also stopped going through Formspree and now runs on our own infrastructure. Nothing about what other attendees can see about you has changed.
What changed in 2026-08-v2: we started recording whether you opened your matches page.
Effective from 16 September 2026.
Version 2026-09-v3 · in force since 29 September 2026. Earlier versions are kept and are never edited — ask us if you need the one you agreed to.