Terms of service

1. Who you are contracting with

These terms are an agreement between you and SILESIAN STARTUP FOUNDATION, a foundation established under Polish law, with its registered office at ul. Kaczyniec 9, 44-100 Gliwice, Poland, entered in the National Court Register (KRS) under number 0001023998, NIP 6312711599, REGON 524712858, represented by its management board. The foundation provides Launch Nest and is the provider of the intermediary service under the Digital Services Act.

Our contact address is kontakt@slaskiestartupy.pl. Everywhere these terms tell you to write to us — a complaint, an appeal, a question about the service, correspondence about your data — that is the address.

It is also our single point of contact under the Digital Services Act: for people using the service (art. 12) and for the authorities of the Member States, the Commission and the European Board for Digital Services (art. 11). A person reads it, not only a machine, and you can write in Polish or in English.

2. What the service is

Launch Nest is an invitation-based professional network. Through it you can:

create an account and a profile, which the product can write for you from a voice recording, a document, your own text or your public GitHub, and which you approve before anything is saved;

join communities, and run one if you found it;

ask questions and answer them, comment, react, and be matched by the system to questions you can help with;

send and receive direct messages;

publish and read materials in a community library;

create, publish and attend events, including checking in on site;

build a reputation from the recognition other people give you, and see where each part of it came from;

invite other people;

report content, and appeal decisions the system made about you.

The service is free. There is no payment path in the product today.

3. What you need to use it

A device running a supported version of Android or iOS, the Launch Nest application, an internet connection, and an e-mail address you can receive mail at — sign-in works by a link sent to it.

Some functions need a permission on your device and do not work without it: recording your voice, attaching a file, and checking in at an event.

4. How the agreement is concluded

Entry is by invitation. The agreement between you and us is concluded when you sign in for the first time and accept these terms and the privacy policy.

Accepting is three separate acts and none stands in for another: consent to processing by AI, consent to storing the resulting profile, and acceptance of these terms and the privacy policy. None of them is ticked for you, and the product will not continue until all three are given.

5. Who may hold an account

You may hold an account if you are at least 16 years old. Launch Nest is not directed at children and we do not knowingly hold data about anyone younger.

One person, one account. Do not use somebody else's account and do not let anyone use yours. Do not impersonate another person or organisation; a company account acts openly as a company.

The name on your profile is one you typed yourself — the product never invents a person's name — and it must be a name you are entitled to use.

6. What stays yours

What you write stays yours. Publishing it here does not transfer copyright.

To run the service we need your permission to do the mechanical things with it: store it, show it to the people it is addressed to, back it up, index it for search, compute an embedding of it so it can be matched, and — for a profile — have a model rewrite it into the shape you then approve. That permission lasts as long as the content is on the platform and covers nothing beyond operating Launch Nest.

You are responsible for having the right to publish what you publish, including files you upload and text you paste from elsewhere.

7. What you may not publish

You must not publish, send or upload content that is unlawful. Beyond that, and in the same words the report form uses, content is prohibited when it is:

illegal — anything prohibited by Polish or EU law;

harassment — attacking, threatening or persistently targeting a person;

spam — bulk, repetitive or unsolicited promotion;

impersonation — pretending to be another person or organisation;

self-harm — content encouraging suicide or self-injury.

Those five words, plus "other", are exactly the reasons a person can choose when reporting something. That is deliberate: the list you are held to and the list somebody reports you under are one list.

You must also not inflate reputation artificially — reciprocal recognition rings, additional accounts, or automated voting.

8. Reporting something

Anyone can report a post, a comment, a profile, a message or a community. The report asks what is being reported and why, from the list above, and it is acknowledged.

One limit, stated because a terms document that overstates its own mechanism is worse than one that has none: of the five kinds the server accepts, the application sends four — a post, a comment, a profile and a community. A direct message cannot be reported from the app today. A button filing a report that nothing could reach would be worse than the missing button, because it would look as though it worked. To report a message, use the complaints route below.

Reports are read. Someone with the capability opens the case queue in the console, takes one case at a time, and records one of three decisions: upheld, dismissed, or escalated.

9. What we may do to your content or your account

We may remove content, restrict its visibility, reduce its reach, close a thread, quarantine a reputation event, or suspend or close an account.

The closed list of reasons for which we may do each of those is being drafted with a legal adviser and will stand here. Until it does, we will not suspend an account except where content is unlawful or where an account is being used to attack another person.

One of these measures comes with a statement of reasons today. When a report is upheld and your post or comment actually comes down, you get a notice: that it was removed, which category the report was filed under, and, with it, the appeal described below. The notice does not say who took the decision — it is the service's decision, not a named person's.

The other measures carry no statement of reasons today: suspending or closing an account, closing a thread, quarantining a reputation event, and the restrictions on visibility and reach that happen automatically, with no human decision. Nor is there one where an upheld report was about a profile, a message or a community — nothing is removed there. That is a gap, we have written it down, and we are not describing it as anything else.

10. Disputing a decision

You can dispute a removed post, a removed comment or a reputation event from inside the app, with a note explaining why, and the case joins the same queue that reports go into. The removal notice described above carries the appeal control itself — so the news and the way to contest it arrive together. One appeal per thing: filing a second one about the same item does not open a second case.

What you cannot do today is appeal a quarantine. A quarantine is applied in bulk and no separate decision is created for it that an appeal could point at; the app offers no control for it, and the server refuses such an appeal with a message rather than quietly accepting it. We are saying this rather than describing a path that does not exist. Until it does, write to kontakt@slaskiestartupy.pl and the objection will be handled by hand.

11. How reputation works, and what it is not

Reputation is earned when other people recognise your help — confirming an outcome, recognising an answer. Every movement is a ledger entry and you can see where each of yours came from.

Reputation is not a guarantee of anything: not of visibility, not of matches, not of access to any part of the service. It can go down. Entries can be quarantined or reversed if they were obtained abusively. A company account cannot confer reputation on a person.

12. Direct messages: the plain statement

Direct messages are encrypted in the database, but the keys are ours rather than your device's, so the operator can read them. This is not end-to-end encryption.

We keep it that way so a reported message can be examined and so a lost phone does not lose your correspondence. Treat direct messages as private from other users, not as private from us.

13. What the model does, and what it does not

The product uses a language model to write a draft of your profile from what you give it, to write the sentence explaining why you were matched to a question, and to help classify content.

Nothing generated about you is saved to your profile until you approve it. Every field carries a marker saying whether you typed it or the model wrote it, and you can edit any of them before confirming. The one field the product never invents is your name.

Machine-written text can be wrong. A sentence explaining a match is the model's account of why two things looked similar, not a statement of fact about you.

14. Attending an event

If you attend an event you can check in on site by showing a code from your own phone. Nobody scans you.

Being checked in and being listed publicly under "who is here" are two separate things. The list is off unless you turn it on. Being off the list does not hide the check-in itself from the organiser or from us, and an organiser may record a check-in by hand.

15. There are no payments

Launch Nest is free and contains no payment path. If paid features are introduced, this section changes first and the change is announced before anything is charged.

16. What we do and do not promise

We try to keep the service available and working. We do not promise uninterrupted availability, and we may take it down for maintenance, change how features work, or withdraw them.

Where a change would remove something you rely on, we will say so in the app before it happens rather than afterwards.

17. Our liability

We are liable as Polish law provides.

We are not liable for what other users publish, beyond the point at which the law makes a hosting provider liable for content it stores on someone else's behalf.

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited — in particular for intentional harm, or for harm to life or health.

This section is deliberately short. A fuller limitation of liability is being drafted with a legal adviser, and until it exists we would rather claim nothing than claim something that would not stand.

18. Ending the agreement

You can end it at any time by deleting your data from settings. The screen tells you before you confirm exactly what disappears and what stays. The privacy policy lists the limits — in particular that your login account lives in a separate system that this path does not reach; write to us if you want that removed as well.

We may end it for the reasons described above, and the closed list of those reasons is the part still being drafted.

19. Complaints

A complaint about the service goes to kontakt@slaskiestartupy.pl, the contact address named in the first section of these terms. We answer within the period Polish law provides for a complaint about a service provided by electronic means.

A formal complaint procedure — what a complaint must contain, and what happens if we miss the deadline — is being drafted and will stand here. We would rather say that than describe a procedure that does not exist.

20. How these terms change

We may change these terms. When we do, the version changes, the change is announced in the app, and if it alters what you agreed to, you are asked to accept the new version.

The list of reasons for which we may change them, and the notice period, is being drafted with a legal adviser and will stand here.

21. Governing law

These terms are governed by Polish law.

Nothing in them deprives a consumer of the protection of the mandatory rules of the law of the country in which they habitually live, or of the right to bring a case before the courts of that country.