Sharing, Export, and the Portability Guarantee

Read-only links for strategic context, full JSON export so vendor lock-in stays off the table.

Sharing and Data Export look like unrelated billing-tier features. They're not. Both encode the same principle: your operating history belongs to you, not to Foundry.

Sharing lets you make a slice of that history visible to a specific person without giving them an account. Export lets you take the entire history with you if you ever leave. Together they're the portability guarantee, what makes Foundry an operating system rather than a walled garden.

Both require Pro. The reason is mostly cost (sharing links generate compute, export generates bandwidth), not gating. The portability promise itself is unconditional: even on Free, your data is yours; Pro just adds the mechanisms that surface it.

Who you'd actually share with:

• Advisors / mentors, give them visibility into a project so the next conversation starts at the substance, not the briefing.


• Co-founders, share decisions in progress for asynchronous feedback before committing.


• Investors / candidates, show strategic thinking without giving full account access.


• Customers, when relevant, share a decision that affects them (pricing, roadmap) to add transparency.

Management: /settings shows all active share links. Revoke when no longer needed, the link stops working immediately on revoke, even before the expiration date.

The most common new-user share mistake: trying to share a raw idea. Don't. Raw ideas are not designed to be readable by outsiders, they're shorthand for you, with all the implicit context that lives in your head.

Decisions are different. The decision form structures your thinking into Context → Reasoning → Alternatives → Assumptions → Risks → Falsification. That structure is what makes the shared view readable. The receiver gets the same scaffold you used to think it through.

If you want to share an idea, promote it to a decision first, even a thin decision is more legible to a reader than a thick idea. Or convert the idea to a vault asset (FRAMEWORK or LESSON_LEARNED) and… also not shareable yet (assets aren't a share target). The takeaway: design the artifact for the audience.

Export produces a single JSON file containing the entire workspace: projects, ideas, assets, decisions, commitments, tags, journal entries, weekly reviews, relationships, capacity profile.

The obvious use case is leaving Foundry. Less obvious but more common:

• Personal backup. A monthly export is a 10-second insurance policy. Save it to wherever you store other founder backups.


• Coach / advisor handoff. A coach who wants to understand your operating reality can read the JSON faster than you can summarize verbally.


• External analysis. Plug the JSON into your own analytics, AI tools, or scripts. The structure is documented and stable.

You don't need a reason to export. The act itself is the value, knowing it works.

Setting 90-day expiration on every link. Most sharing is conversational, 7 days is usually enough. Long-running links pile up and you forget what's exposed.

Never exporting. You'll never need it until you do. Set a calendar reminder to export quarterly.

Sharing instead of meeting. A link is not a substitute for a conversation. It's a way to make the conversation start higher up. Don't send a link with no context and expect alignment.