Last updated January 2025
Science Founders exists as a semi-open slack community and founder resource repository for entrepreneurs, researchers, and advisor-mentors in the science community to connect, share best practices, find peer-mentor support, and learn about resources that can help starting up a science-based venture.
The core principles of this community are based on focusing on founder support and sharing startup experiences. Feel free to invite other science founders, researchers, and entrepreneur support community advisors or mentors.
This should be a place of open discourse about the challenges of being a science founder. To protect that, a rule of non-attribution of what is said creates a safer community for founders to talk about the real issues they face. We adopt the Chatham House Rule, which has worked for a century for helping real discourse about hard topics result in real-world good.
When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed. — Chatham House
This is a support community, not a sales pipeline. Founders may find collaborative opportunities or other founders services valuable — that’s fine. But disclose any potential conflict of interest you may have and try not to make a habit of hawking your tech/products/investment group to other members of the community.
Do not disclose any proprietary IP in any publicly accessible channel, wiki page. Scrub personally identifying information from information you share wherever possible (especially if it is not yours).
Make sure you disclose what your technology is and if you’re involved with any potential investment groups (many science founders are also asked to be DD reviewers for grants or investment funds) when talking to a a founder of a company that might be a competitor or seeking investment.
Example resources can be shared on this website only if scrubbed of personally identifying information and may be fully public. You must be authorized to share those resources by whoever retains the copyright of them.
Example: Evan Taylor has written many SBIR proposals, and has authorization from his previous company to share them with other founders. To protect the privacy of other team members on those proposals, their personally identifying information has been redacted from the PDFs uploaded to this website.
Other resources such as example pro forma templates, employee handbooks, and various excel models or data sets are opensourced under commercially permissive licensing on the Science Founders git repo.
