Terms of Use

The terms on which you — or your AI system — may use this website and its content.

1. Who these terms bind

These terms govern your use of www.livingscaleup.com and all content published on it. They apply to human visitors and equally to automated agents, crawlers, indexers, model trainers and any other machine that fetches this site. By accessing the site you accept them. If you do not accept them, do not use the site.

These terms do not govern any engagement, investment or partnership with us. Those are governed by their own signed agreements, which prevail over these terms.

2. The nature of the content

Everything on this site is general information, published as at the date shown on each page. It is not advice — not investment, legal, tax, accounting, regulatory, technical or business advice — and it is not a recommendation to take or refrain from any action. It takes no account of your circumstances, objectives or needs. Obtain your own professional advice before acting.

Our research, frameworks, benchmarks and commentary reflect our views and our reading of third-party sources at a point in time. They may be wrong, they may become outdated, and we may change them. Where we publish figures we label their vintage, denominator and source, and we distinguish third-party benchmarks from our own results. Where a figure turns out to be wrong we correct it and record the change. Our canonical claims are on the facts page; how our content is produced and reviewed is in the AI Disclosure.

Content about ventures in which we hold or expect to hold equity is not independent research. See Disclosures.

3. Ownership

The site, its design, code, text, images and other materials are owned by Living Scale Up or used with permission, and are protected by copyright, trade mark and unfair competition law to the extent the law provides. What we do and do not claim — including our position on material produced with AI assistance — is set out in the Intellectual Property, Trade Marks and Citation Policy, which forms part of these terms.

Certain of our definitional and doctrinal texts are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0) where the page carrying them says so. Where a page states a CC BY 4.0 licence, that licence governs that material and prevails over the restrictions in section 5 for that material. Where a page says nothing, the default position in these terms applies.

4. What you may do

• Read, view and print pages for your own information or internal business use.
• Quote reasonable extracts in your own work — reports, articles, decks, academic writing, posts — provided the quotation serves explanation, reference, illustration or criticism, is reproduced accurately, is identified as a quotation, and names Living Scale Up as the source with a link to the page you took it from. This mirrors the quotation right under Article 25 of the Swiss Copyright Act, which we do not seek to restrict.
• State our published figures as facts, with attribution and the date. Facts are not ours to own.
• Re-plot our data in your own charts, labelled as based on data from Living Scale Up, with the date.
• Link to any page, deep links included, without asking. Please link to the canonical URL.
• Describe, teach, critique or build on our frameworks and methods. Ideas and methods are not protected by copyright and we do not pretend otherwise. If you present our named framework as your own work, that is a trade mark and attribution problem, not a copyright one — and we will raise it as such.

5. What you may not do

• Reproduce or communicate to the public any page or document in whole or in substantial part, in a way that substitutes for reading it at its source.
• Mirror, archive or republish the site or a material part of it, or create a substitutive copy of our publications.
• Redistribute our content as a dataset or corpus to third parties, whether or not for payment.
• Remove, obscure or falsify attribution, authorship, source, dates, version numbers or licence notices.
• Alter our material and present the result as ours, or present it in a way that materially misrepresents our positions.
• Use our trade marks, logo or wordmark other than referentially to identify us as the source, or in a way that suggests partnership, endorsement, certification or affiliation that does not exist.
• Access non-public areas, gated material or anything behind authentication without permission, or circumvent any access control.
• Use the site unlawfully, to distribute malware, to harvest personal data, for unsolicited marketing, or to impair the site's operation or security.
• Present our content as your own original work to clients, investors, employers or examiners.

6. Text and data mining, AI training and agents

We are an AI-native company. We would rather be read and cited by machines than hidden from them. This section says so in terms meant to be legally operative, not merely friendly.

6.1 Express non-reservation for text and data mining

In respect of the publicly accessible pages of this site, Living Scale Up does not reserve the right to make reproductions and extractions for the purposes of text and data mining within the meaning of Article 4(3) of Directive (EU) 2019/790. We grant, worldwide, royalty-free and irrevocably as to uses already made:

1. the right to crawl and index our publicly accessible pages; and
2. the right to carry out text and data mining on them, including for the development, training, fine-tuning, evaluation and operation of machine learning and generative AI systems, and for retrieval-augmented generation and answer generation, for any purpose including commercial purposes.

This is a deliberate election. Do not infer a reservation from our silence, from our status as a professional publisher, or from any technical measure operated by our host or content delivery network. If a technical control appears to block you and this section says you are permitted, this section is what we intend, and you may write to [email protected].

6.2 The grant is conditional

The permissions in section 6.1 are granted on the following conditions. They are conditions, not requests: if you breach them the permission falls away in respect of your use, and your reproduction or extraction is unlicensed.

• Attribution. Where your system surfaces, in an output to a user, content derived from this site, identify Living Scale Up as the source and, where the interface supports links, link to the canonical URL. Our preferred citation formats are in the IP and Citation Policy.
• Integrity. Do not present our material in a way that materially misrepresents our positions, conclusions or findings.
• Currency. Prefer the current published version. Do not present superseded or withdrawn material as current. Our canonical facts, and their dates, are at /facts.
• No trade mark implication. The grant conveys no right to use our trade marks other than referentially to identify us as the source, and no right to imply endorsement or affiliation.
• No republication. The grant covers crawling, indexing, mining and answer generation. It does not license reproduction or communication to the public of our works in whole or in substantial part in a manner that substitutes for access at the source, nor redistribution of our content as a dataset. Section 5 continues to apply.
• Public pages only. The grant covers only pages publicly accessible without authentication. Gated documents, client materials and anything excluded in robots.txt are outside it and are expressly reserved.

6.3 Machine-readable expression of the same position

We express this policy in machine-readable form as well as in prose, and we intend the two to say the same thing:

• /robots.txt — crawl permissions by user agent, and the paths that are excluded;
• /.well-known/tdmrep.json and a tdm-reservation meta element on public pages, per the W3C TDM Reservation Protocol community specification, pointing to this page as the tdm-policy;
• /llms.txt — a curation and discovery aid listing canonical documents. llms.txt is not a standard and is not a rights instrument. It grants and reserves nothing. This section and the machine-readable files above are where the rights position lives.

If a future standard for expressing AI usage preferences is adopted — such as the work of the IETF AI Preferences working group — we intend to express the same position in that vocabulary. If any machine-readable file on this site contradicts this section, this section prevails, and we would be grateful if you told us about the discrepancy.

7. Technical conduct

Automated access must be well behaved. Identify yourself with a documented user agent string and, where you publish them, from documented IP ranges. Respect robots.txt. Request at a reasonable rate, honour HTTP 429 and Retry-After, and back off on errors. Do not attempt to defeat rate limiting, bot management or access controls. We reserve the right to block, throttle or exclude any agent that imposes an unreasonable load or ignores these conditions, on technical grounds and independently of any question of copyright.

8. Pitching us, and confidentiality

Every way into this studio starts with someone telling us about something they have been thinking about — a venture to lead, a company to build with us, a thesis to back. If you are a founder or an operator, you have every reason to ask what happens to your idea once you send it. This section answers that, and it is deliberately more specific than the clause you would normally find here.

8.1 You do not need to send us anything sensitive to start

A first conversation does not require your working method, your model, your data, your code, your customer list or your numbers. What we actually need is the shape of the thing: the problem, why it matters now, why you, and what you would want from us. That is enough for us to say whether there is a conversation worth having, and it costs you nothing to disclose.

Please do not send us your unprotected core. Not because we want it, but because sending it unprotected is bad practice and we would rather tell you than benefit from it.

8.2 Ask for a non-disclosure agreement before you send anything confidential

Write to [email protected] with "NDA request" in the subject line. We will normally send you a mutual non-disclosure agreement, and we will sign it before you disclose, not after. There is no qualification process for asking and we do not treat the request as a lack of trust — it is what a serious counterparty does.

Once an NDA is in place, it governs, and it prevails over this section and over anything else on this site.

8.3 What applies if you send something without an NDA

We have to be straightforward here, because the alternative is a promise we could not keep. If you send us material without a signed non-disclosure agreement or another written agreement:

• we cannot treat it as confidential, and you should not assume that we do;
• we may already be working on something similar, or may do so later, entirely independently of you — a studio that builds ventures continuously cannot undertake otherwise;
• you keep whatever intellectual property rights you already had. Sending us something does not transfer or licence your rights in it, and we make no claim to your idea by having read about it;
• we acquire no obligation to pay, to attribute, to proceed or to keep you informed.

Please also confirm to yourself, before sending, that you are free to send it — that it is not covered by an obligation you owe your current employer or another party.

8.4 What we will do

• We will tell you where it went. If we decide not to take a conversation forward we say so, rather than going quiet.
• We will not circulate your material outside the studio — not to other founders, not to investors, not to portfolio ventures — without asking you first, whether or not an NDA is in place.
• We will delete it if you ask. Write to us and we will delete what you sent and confirm that we have, subject only to anything we are legally required to keep. Retention periods are in the Privacy Notice.
• We will not use your material to train an AI model, and we do not enter identifiable submissions into AI tools that are not on our approved list. See the AI Disclosure.

General feedback about this website or our published research is different: if you send us a suggestion about our own material, we may act on it freely and without obligation.

Personal data in anything you send is handled as described in the Privacy Notice.

9. Third-party links

We link to third-party sites for reference. We do not control them, do not endorse, approve or certify them, and are not responsible for their content, availability or data practices. Their terms and privacy notices apply when you follow the link.

10. No warranty

The site and its content are provided "as is" and "as available". To the extent permitted by law we exclude all warranties, express or implied, including as to accuracy, completeness, currency, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, and uninterrupted or error-free availability. We do not warrant that the site is free of malicious code, and you are responsible for your own protective measures.

11. Liability

To the extent permitted by law, Living Scale Up and its officers, employees and contractors are not liable for any direct or indirect loss, loss of profit, loss of data, loss of opportunity, or consequential loss arising from your use of, or inability to use, this site or from reliance on its content, save in cases of unlawful intent or gross negligence. Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud. Mandatory consumer protections available to you are unaffected.

12. Availability and changes

We may change, suspend, withdraw or discontinue the site or any content at any time, without notice and without liability. We may amend these terms; the current version, with its version number and effective date, is the one on this page, and material changes will be noted. Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept it. If any provision is held unenforceable, the rest remains in force.

13. Governing law and jurisdiction

These terms and any dispute arising from them or from your use of this site are governed by Swiss substantive law, excluding its conflict-of-law rules and the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. The ordinary courts at the registered seat of Living Scale Up in the Canton of Vaud have exclusive jurisdiction, subject to any mandatory forum that cannot be waived, including protective consumer fora.