Terms of Service

The agreement between you and Mekable.

Mekable — operating https://baby-quest.com

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1. The agreement

These Terms of Service (the “Terms”) are a binding contract between you and Mekable. They govern your use of https://baby-quest.com, and every service, application, event, and communication we provide through them (together, “"Baby Quest"”).

The following documents are part of these Terms and are incorporated into them by reference. Agreeing to these Terms means agreeing to all of them:

• the Privacy Policy, which describes what we collect and what we do with it;
• the Acceptable Use Policy, which describes conduct that will get your account removed; and
• the Anonymity & Takedown Policy, which governs investor reviews and term sheets specifically.

Read section 19 carefully. It requires most disputes to be resolved by binding individual arbitration and waives your right to a jury trial and to participate in a class action. It contains a 30-day opt-out, and it does not apply to you if you are a consumer resident in the European Union or the United Kingdom.

If you do not agree to these Terms, do not create an account, submit an application, make a donation, or otherwise use "Baby Quest".

2. Who you are contracting with

Mekable is a "Corporation organized under the laws of California, United States". Its address of record is 100 Ralston Road, San Gregorio, CA 94074, United States.

"Baby Quest" is a program of Mekable, not a separate legal entity. When you interact with https://baby-quest.com — including when you apply, donate, or become a member there — you are contracting with Mekable, and any donation you make is received by Mekable.

3. Eligibility

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account, submit an application, or make a donation. "Baby Quest" is not directed to children and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If we learn that we have, we will delete it.

Membership is invite-only. Submitting an application does not create a membership, entitle you to one, or oblige us to explain a decision. We may accept or decline any application, for any reason or none, and we may withdraw an acceptance at any point before membership begins.

You must have the legal capacity to enter this contract, and you must not be barred from receiving our services under the laws of the United States or your own jurisdiction, including applicable sanctions and export-control laws.

4. Accounts and security

Accounts are personal to you. Do not share your credentials, and do not let anyone else use your account. You are responsible for everything that happens under it.

Everything you tell us must be true. Misrepresenting your identity, your company, your role, or your affiliations is grounds for immediate removal under section 15, without refund.

If you believe your account has been compromised, tell us at support@baby-quest.com immediately.

5. Membership and dues

What membership is

Membership is a revocable licence to access member-only areas of "Baby Quest" and to participate in its programs. It is not a security, not an ownership interest, not a partnership, and not an employment or agency relationship. It confers no voting right, no right to any share of our assets or income, and no right to direct our activities.

Dues, billing, and automatic renewal

Where dues apply, the current amount and billing period are shown to you before you pay. Payments are processed by Stripe; we do not receive or store your full card number.

Membership dues renew automatically. Unless you cancel before the end of the current billing period, your membership will renew for another period of the same length and the payment method on file will be charged the then-current rate. You may cancel at any time, effective at the end of the current period, from your account’s billing page or by emailing support@baby-quest.com. Cancelling stops future charges; it does not refund the period already paid for.

We will give you at least 30 days’ notice before any increase in your dues takes effect, and the increase will apply from your next renewal. If you do not want to pay the new amount, cancel before that renewal.

Refunds

Dues are non-refundable. When you cancel, your access continues to the end of the period you have paid for, and we do not prorate. If we remove you under section 15 for violating these Terms, no refund is due. We may make exceptions at our discretion; doing so once does not oblige us to do so again.

Deductibility of dues

Membership dues are generally not tax-deductible as charitable contributions, because you receive substantial benefits in return for them. Where the law requires it, we will provide a good-faith estimate of the value of those benefits, and only the amount you pay in excess of that value may be deductible. We do not give tax advice — see section 14. Consult your own advisor.

6. Donations

Donations to Mekable support our charitable purpose. We will send you a written acknowledgment for each donation. Where you receive nothing in return, that acknowledgment will say so; where you do receive something, it will describe it and give a good-faith estimate of its value, and only the excess may be deductible.

Donations are non-refundable. We will correct duplicate charges, obvious input errors, and unauthorized transactions when you tell us promptly — write to support@baby-quest.com and we will work it out. Beyond that, a completed gift is complete.

Donations made on any of our sites, including https://baby-quest.com, are received by Mekable. We apply gifts to our charitable purpose and, subject to any restriction we have accepted in writing, we decide how to allocate them among our programs.

In-kind donations

We are grateful for donated goods and services, and we may decline any of them. We will acknowledge what you gave; we will not state what it was worth. Valuing an in-kind gift, and substantiating that value, is the donor’s responsibility, and for some gifts the law requires a qualified appraisal. Talk to your tax advisor.

Donated services — including pro bono professional time — are generally not deductible as charitable contributions under United States law, however valuable they are to us.

7. Events

We run events, some free, some ticketed, some hosted on third-party platforms with their own terms. Tickets are non-refundable but you may transfer yours to someone else — tell us who, in advance, so they can be admitted.

We may change an event’s date, format, location, or program, and we may cancel one. If we cancel a ticketed event outright and do not offer a replacement, we will refund the ticket price. That refund is our entire liability for a cancelled event; we are not responsible for your travel, accommodation, or other costs.

Recording and photography

We photograph and record some events. If you attend one, you may appear in that material, and you grant us the licence in section 8 to use it to operate and promote "Baby Quest". We will tell you when an event is being recorded. If you do not want to appear, tell the organizer at the event or write to support@baby-quest.com and we will make reasonable efforts to exclude you or to remove you from material we control.

Some sessions are expressly not recorded, and we say so where that is the case. Do not record a session yourself, or reproduce what was said in it in an attributable way, without the consent of the people involved.

8. Your content and the licence you grant

“Your Content” means anything you submit, post, or upload: application materials, profile text and images, posts, reviews, event proposals, documents, and messages.

You keep ownership of Your Content. We do not claim it.

You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, adapt for formatting and display, publish, and distribute Your Content for the purpose of operating and promoting "Baby Quest" — which includes showing it to other members, featuring it in our newsletters and social media, and using it in materials about our work. We will not sell Your Content, license it to third parties for their own marketing, or use it to train a machine-learning model that we make available to anyone outside "Baby Quest".

The licence lasts as long as we host Your Content, and survives afterwards only to the extent needed for backups, archives, and material already distributed that cannot reasonably be recalled — a newsletter already sent, for example. If you want us to stop using a specific piece of Your Content in promotion, write to support@baby-quest.com and we will stop using it going forward.

You promise that, for everything you submit:

• you have the right to submit it and to grant this licence;
• it does not infringe anyone’s copyright, trademark, privacy, or publicity rights;
• it does not breach a confidentiality obligation or non-disclosure agreement you are under; and
• it is not false, and where it states facts about an identifiable person or company, you believe those facts to be true.

We are not obliged to review, publish, or keep Your Content. We may decline it, edit it for length or formatting, moderate it, or remove it, at our discretion and without notice.

9. Investor reviews and term sheets

Members may publish reviews of investors and share term sheets with other members. Because this material makes statements about identifiable people and firms who are not parties to these Terms, additional rules apply, and they are set out in full in the Anonymity & Takedown Policy. In summary:

• This material is member-only. It is not public and we do not allow it to be indexed by search engines.
• Reviews must be your honest, first-hand experience. State opinions as opinions and facts as facts, and only state facts you believe to be true.
• Anonymity is limited. We may hide your name from other members, but we retain your identity and we will disclose it where we are legally compelled to, or where it is necessary to protect someone’s safety or our own rights. Read the policy before you rely on being anonymous.
• Do not upload a document you are contractually forbidden to share. A term sheet is very often confidential. That is your call to make and your risk to carry, and section 18 applies to it.
• A named person or firm may ask us to remove or correct material about them, through the process in the policy. We may remove anything, at any time, without deciding who is right.

We do not endorse, verify, or adopt member reviews. They are the views of the members who wrote them.

10. Confidentiality of member-only material

Much of what happens inside "Baby Quest" is shared on the understanding that it stays inside it. Member-only material — the directory, investor reviews, term sheets, discussions, and what is said at closed sessions — is confidential.

You may use it for your own purposes as a founder or operator. You may not republish it, forward it outside "Baby Quest", feed it to a public tool, or use it to build a competing product or dataset. This obligation continues after your membership ends.

It does not apply to information that is already public through no fault of yours, that you already knew, that you develop independently, or that you are legally compelled to disclose — and if you are compelled, tell us first if you lawfully can, so we have the chance to respond.

The member directory exists so members can find each other. Do not scrape it, export it, or use it to send bulk solicitations.

11. Acceptable use

The Acceptable Use Policy sets out what you may not do. Breaking it is a breach of these Terms. Read it — it is short, and it is the document we will point at when we remove someone.

12. Our intellectual property

"Baby Quest"’s name, logos, seals, wordmarks, site design, written material, and software are owned by Mekable or our licensors, and are protected by copyright and trademark law. “Mekable” is our mark.

We grant you a personal, non-transferable, revocable licence to access and use "Baby Quest" for its intended purpose while you are permitted to. You may not copy our material for republication, use our marks without written permission, scrape or bulk-download "Baby Quest", reverse-engineer it, or use it to build a competing service.

13. Third-party services

"Baby Quest" depends on services we do not control — payment processing, email, event hosting, scheduling, community software, and others. They are listed in the Privacy Policy. When you use one, that provider’s own terms and privacy policy also apply to you.

We are not responsible for third-party services, for links from our sites, or for anything another member, partner, sponsor, or investor does. Introductions we make, and listings we publish, are not endorsements, and we do not vet the people behind them beyond our own admission process.

14. No investment, legal, tax, or professional advice

Mekable is not a broker, dealer, investment adviser, placement agent, finder, law firm, or tax advisor. Nothing on "Baby Quest" is an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy any security, a recommendation about any investment, or legal, tax, accounting, or financial advice.

Investor reviews, term sheets, ratings, benchmarks, discussions, and introductions are information shared among founders, nothing more. They may be incomplete, out of date, one-sided, or wrong. Do not treat them as diligence, and do not substitute them for your own advisors.

We do not receive transaction-based compensation for introducing anyone to an investor, and we do not participate in negotiating your financing. Any conversation you have with an investor you met through "Baby Quest" is between you and them; we are not a party to it and we have no responsibility for its outcome.

Content published by members, partners, sponsors, or guest speakers is theirs, not ours, and we do not adopt it.

15. Suspension and termination

You may leave at any time, by cancelling from your account page or writing to us. Your access continues to the end of the period you have paid for. Dues already paid are not refunded.

We may end or suspend your membership at any time, with or without cause, on notice to you. We may do so immediately and without notice where we believe you have violated these Terms or the Acceptable Use Policy, misrepresented yourself, harassed or endangered someone, exposed us to legal liability, or acted in a way that seriously damages "Baby Quest" or its members. No refund is due when we remove you for cause.

"Baby Quest" is a curated community and our judgment about who belongs in it is ours to make. We are not obliged to give reasons, though we usually will.

When membership ends, your access to member-only material stops. We may keep Your Content that other members have relied on — a published review, for instance — and we keep records as described in the Privacy Policy. Sections 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, and 21 survive termination.

16. Disclaimers

"Baby Quest" is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, express or implied. To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, and non-infringement.

We do not warrant that "Baby Quest" will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free, that any information on it is accurate or complete, or that membership will produce any particular outcome — funding, introductions, customers, or otherwise.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of implied warranties. Where that is so, the exclusions above do not apply to you and any implied warranty is limited to the shortest period the law permits.

17. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Mekable and its trustees, officers, employees, and volunteers will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost business opportunity, lost data, or reputational harm, arising out of or relating to "Baby Quest" — even if we were told such damages were possible.

Our total liability for all claims arising out of or relating to "Baby Quest" will not exceed the greater of (a) the total amount you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) one hundred United States dollars (US$100).

These limits do not apply to liability that cannot be limited by law — including, in many jurisdictions, death or personal injury caused by negligence, and fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation. Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion or limitation of certain damages; where that is so, our liability is limited to the greatest extent the law permits.

You accept that these limits are a reasonable allocation of risk, and that the dues we charge reflect them.

18. Indemnification

You will defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Mekable and its trustees, officers, employees, and volunteers against any claim, demand, loss, liability, or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of:

• Your Content, including any claim that it is defamatory or infringing;
• your disclosure of information you were not entitled to disclose, including a term sheet or other document covered by a confidentiality obligation;
• your breach of these Terms or of any law; or
• your dealings with another member or with anyone you met through "Baby Quest".

We will tell you promptly about any claim we want indemnified, and you may control the defense — except that you may not settle in a way that admits fault on our behalf or imposes an obligation on us without our written consent, and we may participate with our own counsel at our expense.

19. Disputes, arbitration, and class-action waiver

Talk to us first

Most problems can be solved by a conversation. Before starting a formal proceeding, send a written notice describing the dispute and the relief you want to support@baby-quest.com and to our address of record. We will do the same for you. Both of us agree to try in good faith to resolve it for 60 days before going further. This period does not suspend any limitation deadline.

Who this section does not apply to

If you are a consumer resident in the European Union or the United Kingdom, the arbitration agreement and class-action waiver in this section do not apply to you. You may bring proceedings in the courts of your country of residence, and the mandatory consumer-protection law of that country applies to you regardless of section 21.

The same is true anywhere else that a pre-dispute arbitration agreement is unenforceable against you as a matter of mandatory local law. Nothing here is intended to deprive you of a protection you cannot waive.

Binding individual arbitration

Except as stated above and immediately below, you and Mekable agree that any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms or "Baby Quest" will be resolved by binding individual arbitration, and not in court. You and we are giving up the right to a trial by jury.

Arbitration will be administered by JAMS under its Streamlined Arbitration Rules (or, for consumer disputes, its Consumer Arbitration Minimum Standards), before one arbitrator. The seat is San Mateo County, California. If the amount in dispute is under US$25,000, you may elect to have it decided on documents alone, by telephone, or by video, without travelling. We will not seek our legal fees from you in arbitration even if we win, unless the arbitrator finds your claim was frivolous.

Where you are a consumer, we will pay the arbitration filing, administration, and arbitrator fees beyond the amount you would have paid to file in court. Arbitration is meant to be cheaper for you than litigation, not a toll gate.

The arbitrator decides all issues, except that a court decides whether the class-action waiver below is enforceable. The arbitrator’s award may be entered as a judgment in any court with jurisdiction.

What you can still take to court

• Small claims. Either of us may bring an individual claim in small-claims court if it qualifies.
• Injunctions. Either of us may ask a court for an injunction or other equitable relief to stop infringement or misuse of intellectual property or confidential information, without waiving anything else in this section.

Class-action waiver

You and Mekable may bring claims only in an individual capacity, and not as a plaintiff or class member in any class, collective, consolidated, or representative proceeding. The arbitrator may not consolidate more than one person’s claims or preside over any form of representative proceeding.

If this waiver is found unenforceable as to a particular claim, that claim — and only that claim — goes to court; everything else stays in arbitration.

How to opt out

You can opt out of arbitration entirely. Send us written notice within 30 days of first accepting these Terms, at support@baby-quest.com or our address of record, saying that you opt out of the arbitration agreement and giving your name and the email on your account. That is all it takes. Opting out costs you nothing, changes nothing else about your membership, and we will not hold it against you. If you opt out, section 21’s courts decide your disputes.

Changes and survival

If we materially change this section, the change does not apply to a dispute we already had notice of, and you may reject it by writing to us within 30 days of the change. This section survives the end of your membership.

20. Changes to these Terms

We may change these Terms. Every version carries a version number and an effective date at the top, and the history is public in our source repository.

For a material change — one that meaningfully affects your rights, what we do with your information, or what you pay — we will give you notice by email or in the product at least 30 days before it takes effect, and we will ask you to agree to the new version. If you do not agree, you may cancel; continuing to use "Baby Quest" after the change takes effect means you accept it.

For a non-material change — a correction, a clarification, a broken link — we update the document and the version number without asking you again.

21. General

Governing law and venue

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Where a dispute is not subject to arbitration, it belongs in the state or federal courts located in San Mateo County, California, and both of us consent to the jurisdiction of those courts. None of this deprives you of the protection of mandatory law in your country of residence.

Severability, waiver, assignment

If a provision is held unenforceable, it is narrowed to the minimum extent necessary or severed, and the rest stays in force. Our failure to enforce something is not a waiver of it. You may not assign these Terms; we may assign them to a successor to our activities, on notice to you.

Notice

We give you notice by email to the address on your account or by posting in the product; it is effective when sent. You give us notice at support@baby-quest.com and, for anything formal, also in writing to our address of record. Keep your email address current — it is how we reach you.

Force majeure

Neither of us is liable for a failure to perform caused by something outside our reasonable control.

Entire agreement

These Terms, together with the documents incorporated in section 1, are the entire agreement between us about "Baby Quest", and replace anything said or written before. Nothing here creates a partnership, joint venture, agency, or employment relationship, and nobody other than you and us has any right to enforce these Terms.

22. How to reach us

Questions about these Terms, and all formal legal notice: support@baby-quest.com

Privacy requests and anything about your personal information: support@baby-quest.com

By post: Mekable, 100 Ralston Road, San Gregorio, CA 94074, United States