Privacy Statement
Last updated: August 5, 2026
Center for Venture Education, Inc. and its affiliates (“Kauffman Fellows” “Company,” “we,” “us,” or “our”) want you to be familiar with how we collect, use, and disclose Personal Information. This Privacy Statement describes our practices in connection with Personal Information that we collect through:
- Websites operated by us from which you are accessing this Privacy Statement, including www.kauffmanfellows.org (“Websites”);
- The software applications we make available for use on computers and mobile devices (“Apps”);
- Our WhatsApp bot, which you may add to your contacts and chat with directly (“Kauffman Fellows GPT”)
- Our login portal, where you can view your program, search our network, find events, and access WhatsApp groups (“Kauffman Connect”)
- Social media properties from which you are accessing this Privacy Statement (“Our Social Media”);
- HTML-formatted email messages or other communications that we send to you that link to this Privacy Statement (“Emails”); and
- Any other offline interactions you may have with us (“Offline Interactions”).
Collectively, we refer to the Websites, Apps, Our Social Media, Emails, and Offline Interactions as the “Services.”
Categories and Sources of Personal Information Collected
“Personal Information” is information that identifies an individual or relates to an identifiable individual. We collect the following categories of Personal Information:
Personal Information we receive from you:
Profile Information: Such as first and last name, prefix, email address, telephone number, postal address, date of birth, professional or investment-related information, and other information you may choose to provide.
User Content: Such as content that you may create or share with us during our relationship, including your conversations with Kauffman Fellows GPT or posts on Our Social Media. We use logs of your conversations with Kauffman Fellows GPT to understand what Fellows are asking for on an aggregate level, and to develop products and services that address those needs.
Preferences: Such as language, interests, and other feedback/preferences that you might express during your use of our Services.
Marketing Data: Such as your choices regarding our newsletters, surveys, and other marketing displayed or provided to you, and preferred methods of such communications.
Event Information: Such as dietary restrictions, travel, and accommodation details, issued identification pass to access the premises, and other details specific to a particular event or conference that you share with us.
Commercial Information: Such as details of your communications with us, details of your claims, complaints, and queries in general.
Personal Information collected automatically through your use of our Services:
Online Activity Data: Pages or screens you viewed, how long you spent on a page or screen, navigation paths between pages or screens, information about your activity on a page or screen, access times, and duration of access, and whether you have opened our marketing emails or clicked links within them.
Device Information: Your mobile device’s operating system type and version, manufacturer and model, screen resolution, RAM and disk size, CPU usage, device type (e.g., phone, tablet), IP address, language settings, mobile device carrier, radio/network information (e.g., WiFi, LTE, 3G), advertising ID, and general location information.
This includes data obtained through cookies and similar technologies, as described below.
Audio/Visual Data:Audio, electronic, visual, thermal, olfactory, and similar information, such as call and video recordings, photos and videos taken at one of our events/conferences, CCTV, and site security information.
Geolocation Data: Such as device location and approximate location derived from IP address.
Other sources from which we collect Personal Information:
Social Media: Such as profile pictures, social media account ID, and other public social media profile information, including lists of friends/followers on social media.
Third-Party Logins: When you link, connect, or login to our Services with a third-party service (e.g., Google or Facebook), you direct the service to send us information as controlled by that service or as authorized by you via your privacy settings on that service.
Other Third Parties: We may collect information from publicly available sources such as LinkedIn and other third-party providers.
We need to collect Personal Information to provide the requested Services to you. If you do not provide the information requested, we may not be able to provide the Services. If you disclose any Personal Information relating to other people to us or to our service providers in connection with the Services, you represent that you have the authority to do so and to permit us to use the information in accordance with this Privacy Statement.
Personal Information Processing Purposes
We use Personal Information for legitimate business purposes, including:
Administering the Services: Providing the Services’ functionality to you, such as verifying your information; responding to your inquiries and fulfilling your requests, such as when you contact us via one of our online contact forms or otherwise (e.g., when you send us questions or comments, or when you request other information about our Services); to send you administrative information, such as information regarding the Services and changes to our terms, conditions, and policies; and/or to allow you to send Services-related content to another person through the Services if you choose to do so.
Operations: Administering online Services (including troubleshooting and diagnostic testing, conducting performance analyses of our systems and Services, testing new system features to evaluate their impact, system and log maintenance, technical support, system debugging, and hosting data).
Conferences, visits, and other events: Facilitating and participating in conferences and events, welcoming guests and visitors to our premises.
Marketing: Sending you newsletters, event invitations, and mailings that we think may be of interest to you; fulfilling your event registration requests; and providing services, including providing events.
Personalizing our Services: Personalizing our interactions with you and providing you with information and/or offers tailored to your interests, such as delivering content via our Services that we believe will be relevant and interesting to you.
Improving and developing Services that we may provide to you: Conducting data analysis, for example, monitoring and analyzing Services use and using data analytics to improve the efficiency of our Services; developing new Services; considering ways to enhance, improve, repair, maintain, or modify our Services; identifying usage trends, for example, understanding which parts of our Services are most interesting to users; determining the effectiveness of our promotional campaigns, so we can adapt our campaigns to the needs and interests of our users; and operating and expanding our activities.
Relationship building and engagement: Facilitating and responding to any social sharing and posts on our Services and other relationship building activities.
Aggregation and/or anonymization: Aggregating and/or anonymizing Personal Information so that it will no longer be considered Personal Information.
Security and fraud prevention: Conducting audits, verifying that our internal processes function as intended and are compliant with legal, regulatory, or contractual requirements; monitoring for and preventing fraud; and for security purposes, including maintaining system security and on-site security of our premises.
Legal and compliance: Fulfilling our legal and compliance-related obligations, including complying with applicable laws; complying with legal processes; responding to requests from public and government authorities; meeting national security or law enforcement requirements, compliance with requirements set by industry-specific supervisory bodies. Enforcing our terms and conditions and standards; protecting our operations; protecting the rights, privacy, or property of Company; responding to auditors; and allowing us to pursue available legal remedies and make insurance claims, defend claims, and limit the damages that Company may sustain.
Emergency and incident response: Ensuring the safety of on-site personnel and visitors; responding to, handling, and documenting on-site accidents and medical and other emergencies; actively monitoring properties to ensure adequate incident prevention, response, and documentation (including CCTV); requesting assistance from emergency services; and sending notifications and alerts in the event of incidents or emergencies (such as via SMS, email, call, audio-visual device prompts, etc.).
Individuals in the EEA/UK: Please view the EEA/UK Privacy Statement Supplement at the end of this Privacy Statement for more information regarding our legal basis for processing Personal Information.
Disclosure of Personal Information
We disclose Personal Information to third parties and for the purposes described below, depending on each specific jurisdiction and applicable law:
Third-party service providers and contractors
Including service providers and contractors that provide website hosting, IT and related infrastructure, email delivery, analytics, and other services for the following purposes:
- Administering the Services
- Improving the Services
- Operations
- Security and fraud prevention
- Marketing
- Personalizing our Services
- Relationship building and engagement
- Conferences, visits, and other events
- Legal and compliance
Analytics providers
- Aggregating and/or anonymizing Personal Information
- Security and fraud prevention
- Improving the Services
- Marketing
- Operations
- Personalizing our Services
AI providers
- Processing queries and conversations through Kauffman Fellows GPT. We use several platforms, including Claude.
Organizational partners
- Event co-sponsors
- Third parties in connection with licensing, joint development, or similar arrangements
Law enforcement, public, regulatory, and government authorities, courts, tribunals, or third parties where necessary to comply with applicable law and regulations
- Emergency and incident response
- Security and fraud prevention
- Legal and compliance
- Responding to a request or providing information to public and government authorities (including authorities outside your country or region of residence)
- Responding to law enforcement requests and orders or provide information to law enforcement
- For dispute resolution purposes
- To enforce our terms and conditions
- To protect our rights, privacy, safety, property, and/or that of our affiliates, you or others
Professional advisors, such as accountants, actuaries, auditors, experts, consultants, lawyers, banks, and financial institutions
- Security and fraud prevention
- Legal and compliance
- Improving the Services
By using the Services, you may elect to disclose Personal Information on message boards, chat, profile pages, blogs, and other services to which you are able to post information and content (including, without limitation, Our Social Media), or through which you are able to send messages through the Services (including, without limitation, Kauffman Connect). Please note that, depending on your settings, any information you post or disclose in this context will become public and may be available to other users and the general public.
Cookies and Similiar Technologies
We use cookies and related technologies to support functionality, security, and performance of the Services. A cookie is a small data file stored on your device that allows us to recognize your browser or device and understand how users interact with the Services.
Below are descriptions of the cookies and other technologies we use:
Cookies:
- Essential cookies. Essential cookies enable you to navigate the Website and to use its services and features. Without these necessary cookies, the Website will not perform as smoothly for you as we would like it to, and we may not be able to provide the Website or certain services or features.
- Preference cookies. Preference cookies collect information about your choices and preferences and allow us to remember language or other local settings and customize the Website accordingly.
- Analytics cookies. Analytics cookies collect information about your use of the Website and enable us to improve the way it works. For example, analytics cookies show us which are the most frequently visited pages on the Website, and help us record any difficulties you have with the Website. This allows us to see the overall patterns of usage on the Website, rather than the usage of a single person.
These technologies help us operate the platform, maintain security, analyze usage patterns, and improve user experience. Information collected through cookies may include interactions across websites or applications, regardless of login status.
Pixel tags and other similar technologies:
- Essential cookies. Essential cookies enable you to navigate the Website and to use its services and features. Without these necessary cookies, the Website will not perform as smoothly for you as we would like it to, and we may not be able to provide the Website or certain services or features.
- Pixel tags. We may use pixel tags (also known as web beacons and clear GIFs) to, among other things, track the actions of users of the Services (including email recipients), measure the success of our marketing campaigns, and compile statistics about use of the Services and response rates.
- Analytics. We use Google Analytics, which uses cookies and similar technologies to collect and analyze information about use of the Services and report on activities and trends. This service may also collect information regarding the use of other websites, apps, and online services. You can learn about Google’s practices by going to www.google.com/policies/privacy/partners/ and exercise the opt-out provided by Google by downloading the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on, available at https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.
- Invisible reCAPTCHA. We use Google’s invisible reCAPTCHA application on our Services in order to protect against spam and other automated abuse. The reCAPTCHA tool may make use of cookies, as well as such other information as IP address, date, time, language, screen size and resolution, and mouse movements. The use of the reCAPTCHA tool and information collected through it are subject to Google’s privacy policy, available at https://policies.google.com/privacy and Google’s terms of service, available at https://policies.google.com/terms?hl=en.
In addition, you can refuse or accept cookies at any time by activating the settings on your browser. Information about the procedure to follow in order to enable or disable cookies can be found on your Internet browser provider’s website via your help screen. Please refer to http://www.allaboutcookies.org/manage-cookies/index.html for information on commonly used browsers. Please be aware that if cookies are disabled, not all features of the Website may operate as intended.
Security
We seek to use reasonable organizational, technical, and administrative measures to protect Personal Information within our organization. Unfortunately, no data transmission or storage system can be guaranteed to be 100% secure. If you have reason to believe that your interaction with us is no longer secure, please immediately notify us in accordance with the “Contacting Us” section below.
Email Marketing Choices
You have choices regarding marketing-related communications. Where required by applicable law, we will ask for your prior opt-in consent. If you no longer want to receive marketing-related emails from us on a going-forward basis, you may opt out by following the unsubscribe instructions in any such message or by contacting us by email at press@kfp.org.
We will try to comply with your request(s) as soon as reasonably practicable. Please note that if you opt out of receiving marketing from us, we may still send you important administrative messages, from which you cannot opt out.
Rights and Requests
If you would like to request to access/review, correct, update, suppress/delete, object to, restrict or opt out of the processing of Personal Information, withdraw your consent where relied upon for processing (which will not affect the lawfulness of processing prior to the withdrawal), or if you would like to request to receive an electronic copy of your Personal Information for purposes of transmitting it to another company (to the extent that these rights are provided to you by applicable law), please feel free to contact us in accordance with the “Contacting Us” section below. We will respond to your request consistent with applicable law.
In your request, please make clear what Personal Information you would like to have changed, whether you would like to have your Personal Information suppressed from our database or otherwise let us know what limitations you would like to put on our use of your Personal Information. For your protection, we may need to verify your identity before implementing your request. We will try to comply with your request as soon as reasonably practicable.
Please note that we may need to retain certain information for recordkeeping purposes. Further, certain Personal Information may be exempt from requests pursuant to applicable data protection laws or other laws and regulations.
Depending on your jurisdiction, you may also lodge a complaint with a data protection authority for your country or region, or where an alleged infringement of applicable data protection law occurs. For example, a list of EEA data protection authorities is available at: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/international-dimension-data-protection/adequacy-decisions_en. Information regarding the UK data protection authority is available at: https://ico.org.uk/.
Retention Period
We retain Personal Information for as long as needed or permitted in light of the purpose(s) for which it was obtained as outlined in this Privacy Statement unless a longer retention period is required or permitted by applicable law. The criteria used to determine our retention periods include:
- The length of time that we have an ongoing relationship with you and provide the Services to you (for example, for as long as you have a relationship with us or keep using the Services);
- Whether there is a legal obligation to which we are subject (for example, certain laws require us to keep records or communications for a certain period before we can delete them); or
- Whether retention is advisable considering our legal position (such as in regard to applicable statutes of limitations, litigation, or regulatory investigations).
Third Party Services
This Privacy Statement does not address, and we are not responsible for, the privacy, information, or other practices of any third parties. This includes any third party operating any website or service to which the Services link. The inclusion of a link on the Services does not imply endorsement of the linked site or service by us or by our affiliates.
In addition, we are not responsible for the information collection, use, disclosure, or security policies or practices of other organizations, such as Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft, or any other app developer, app provider, social media platform provider, operating system provider, wireless service provider or device manufacturer, including with respect to any Personal Information you disclose to other organizations through or in connection with the Apps or Our Social Media.
Use of Services by Minors
The Services are not directed to individuals under the age of sixteen (16), and we do not knowingly collect Personal Information from individuals under 16.
Cross Border Transfer
Your Personal Information may be stored and processed in any country or region where we have facilities or engage service providers. By using the Services, you understand that your Personal Information will be transferred to countries outside of your country or region of residence, including to the United States, which may have data protection rules that are different from those of your country or region. In certain circumstances, courts, law enforcement agencies, regulatory agencies, or security authorities in those other countries or regions may be entitled to access your Personal Information.
Some countries outside of the EEA/UK are recognized by the European Commission and/or the UK government as providing an adequate level of data protection according to EEA/UK standards: the list of the EEA’s adequate jurisdictions is available here, and the list of the UK’s adequate jurisdictions is available here. For transfers from the EEA or the UK to countries not considered adequate by the European Commission or the UK government (as applicable), we have put in place adequate measures, such as the standard contractual clauses adopted by the relevant authority to protect your personal data. You may obtain a copy of these measures by contacting us in accordance with the “Contacting Us” section below.
Sensitive Information
Unless we request it, we ask that you not send us, and you not disclose, any sensitive Personal Information (e.g., Social Security numbers, information related to racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religion or other beliefs, health, biometrics or genetic characteristics, criminal background, or trade union membership) on or through the Services or otherwise to us.
Updates to this Privacy Statement
The “Last Updated” legend at the top of this Privacy Statement indicates when this Privacy Statement was last revised. Any changes will become effective when we post the revised Privacy Statement on the Services.
Contacting Us
Center for Venture Education, Inc., located at 3207 Ranch Road 620S Suite 200 Austin, TX 78738, United States, is the company responsible for collection, use, and disclosure of your Personal Information under this Privacy Statement. If you have any questions about this Privacy Statement, please contact us.
You can reach us at: press@kfp.org or 3207 Ranch Road 620S Suite 200 Austin, TX 78738, United States.
EEA/UK Privacy Statement Supplement
We process Personal Information based on the following legal bases:
Administering the Services
We engage in these activities to manage our contractual relationship with you and/or to comply with a legal obligation.
Operations
We engage in these activities to manage our contractual relationship with you, to comply with a legal obligation, and/or based on our legitimate interest, such as maintaining and improving our Services.
Conferences, visits, and other events
We engage in these activities to manage our contractual relationship with you and/or based on our legitimate interest, such as improving the quality of our events and responding to complaints and concerns relating to an event.
Marketing
Where required under applicable law, we obtain your consent to send you direct marketing communications. Where permitted by applicable law, we also engage in marketing activities based on our legitimate interest, such as to promote our Services.
Personalizing our Services
Where required under applicable law, we obtain your consent to provide personalized Services. Where permitted by applicable law, we also personalize the Services based on our legitimate interest, such as providing tailored Services based on your preferences.
Improving and developing Services that we may provide to you
We engage in these activities based on our legitimate interests, such as developing new Services, and with your consent to the extent required by applicable law.
Relationship building and engagement
We engage in these activities to manage our contractual relationship with you, to comply with a legal obligation, and/or based on our legitimate interest, such as improving our Services.
Aggregation and/or anonymization
We engage in these activities based on our legitimate interest, such as to generate anonymized data for our own business purposes which does not identify you or another individual.
Security and fraud prevention
We engage in these activities to manage our contractual relationship with you, to comply with a legal obligation, and/or based on our legitimate interest, such as identifying and preventing fraudulent transactions and cyberattacks.
Legal and compliance
We engage in these activities to manage our contractual relationship with you, to comply with a legal obligation, and/or based on our legitimate interest, such as our interest in enforcing our terms and conditions and bringing and defending legal claims.
Emergency and incident response
We engage in these activities to manage our contractual relationship with you, to protect individuals’ vital interests, to comply with a legal obligation, and/or based on our legitimate interest, such as ensuring the safety of our premises.