privacy policy.

Buzz ("we") is a private, invitation-only web app operated by Lightyear for founders in Lightyear's residency and for the Lightyear team. This policy explains what Buzz collects, how it is used, who can see it, and how to delete it.

What we collect

Information you give us

• Account details: your name, email address and a hashed password. For founders, your company, cohort and stage.
• Things you write in Buzz: requests to partners, replies, notes, your sprint settings (who you want to meet, your proof points), and edits to email drafts.
• Files you upload: your LinkedIn connections export (names, companies, job titles, profile URLs, connection dates, and email addresses where LinkedIn includes them), and any contact list you upload or paste.

Information from Google, when you connect your Google account

• Your Google account email address, to identify the connected mailbox.
• Gmail message metadata (scope: gmail.metadata). For messages in your Sent folder from about the last two years: the To, Cc and Date headers, labels and message and thread IDs. For email threads Buzz created as drafts for you: the From and Message-ID headers, labels and dates, so Buzz can tell whether you sent the email and whether the recipient replied. Buzz cannot read message bodies or attachments with this access, and does not store full headers. From this we store, for each person you emailed: their name and email address as shown in the header, their email domain, how many times you emailed them, and when you last did.
• Gmail drafts (scope: gmail.compose, founders only). Buzz creates a draft in your Gmail only when you click to put an email you approved into your drafts, and deletes a pending follow-up draft if the recipient has already replied. Buzz never sends email on your behalf. You review and send every email yourself in Gmail.
• Calendar events (scope: calendar.events.readonly, founders only). Buzz lists events on your primary calendar from the start of your sprint to 60 days ahead and checks attendee email addresses against the people you emailed during your sprint, to mark a meeting as booked. We store only that a meeting was booked and when. We don't store event titles, descriptions or other attendees.

Lightyear partners connect Gmail with metadata access only (no drafts and no calendar).

Information collected automatically

Our hosting provider records standard server logs (such as IP address, browser type and request times) for security and reliability. Buzz doesn't use advertising or analytics trackers.

How we use it

Only to provide and improve the features you use in Buzz:

• Showing you who you know and how recently you've been in touch, and suggesting people to contact for your traction sprint.
• Drafting emails and follow-ups for you to review, and placing approved drafts in your Gmail.
• Tracking whether an email was sent, replied to, or led to a meeting, so your sprint progress is accurate.
• For partners: building the Lightyear network, so a founder can ask for an introduction to someone a partner knows, and routing that request to the partner.
• Keeping Buzz secure and preventing abuse.

AI processing

Buzz uses Anthropic's Claude API to rank suggested contacts and to draft emails. To do that, Buzz sends Anthropic the minimum needed: names, job titles, companies, email domains, how many times you've emailed someone and when, your sprint settings, and draft text. Message bodies are never sent, because Buzz never has them. Under Anthropic's commercial terms, Anthropic may not train its models on this content. We do not use any Google user data to develop, improve or train generalized AI or machine learning models.

Who can see your information

• Founders: your contacts, Gmail data and LinkedIn data are private to you. Lightyear partners see your sprint totals (emails sent, replies, meetings) and the requests you choose to send them, never your contacts.
• Partners: the people you know (from your Gmail and LinkedIn) are visible to other Lightyear partners in Buzz, so the team can route introductions. Founders see only the role and company of someone a partner knows and which partner knows them, never their email address or how often you are in touch. A partner can choose to also show names. Founders can ask for an introduction; the partner decides.
• Service providers who run Buzz for us and may process data only on our instructions: Vercel (hosting), Neon (database), Anthropic (AI processing) and Google (sign-in and the Google APIs you connect).

We don't sell your information, use it for advertising, or share it with anyone else, except if required by law or to protect the safety and security of Buzz and its users.

Google API Services: Limited Use

Buzz's use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. In particular:

• We use Google user data only to provide or improve the user-facing features described above.
• We transfer it only as needed to provide those features, to comply with law, or as part of a merger or acquisition with notice to you.
• We don't use or transfer it for serving ads, including retargeting or personalized ads.
• We don't allow humans to read it, unless you give us permission for specific data, it's needed for security purposes such as investigating abuse, it's necessary to comply with law, or it's aggregated and anonymized for internal operations.
• We don't sell it, and we don't use it to determine creditworthiness or for lending.

Security

All traffic is encrypted with TLS. Google access tokens are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM, passwords are stored as salted scrypt hashes, and access to data is limited by account role. Sign-in attempts are rate limited.

Keeping and deleting your data

• We keep your data while your account is active.
• On the My data page you can disconnect Google at any time (Buzz revokes its access with Google), rescan, re-upload LinkedIn, or delete all your contacts. You can also remove Buzz's access from your Google account settings.
• When you disconnect Google, we delete the stored access tokens immediately.
• You can delete your whole account and everything in it yourself, under Account, Delete my account. Buzz revokes its Google access and deletes your data right away; it is removed from backups within 30 days. You can also ask the Lightyear team to do it for you.

Children

Buzz is for professionals and is not intended for anyone under 18.

Changes

If we change how Buzz uses your data, we'll update this page and the date above, and tell users in the app before the change applies to data already collected.

Contact

Questions or requests: the Lightyear team.

Terms of service