# auth.md: authentication for agents

Site: https://founderventures.io
Contact: rome@founderventures.io

## Short version

Everything Founder Ventures publishes for agents is public and unauthenticated.
There is no agent registration flow, no API key to request, and no OAuth
authorization server. If an endpoint below is listed as public, just call it.

## Public, no credentials needed

| Endpoint | What it does |
| --- | --- |
| `GET /api/agents/search?q=` | Keyword search over the content library |
| `GET /api/agents/markdown?path=` | Markdown source of any content page |
| `GET /api/agents/city-events` | Curated founder events by city |
| `POST /api/mcp` | MCP endpoint (JSON-RPC 2.0) over the same three tools |
| `GET /api/agents/openapi.json` | OpenAPI 3.1 description of the above |

Any page under `/glossary`, `/playbooks`, `/best`,
`/alternatives`, `/pricing`, `/careers`, `/newsletter`, `/analysis`,
`/cases`, `/compare`, or `/data` also answers `Accept: text/markdown`
with markdown instead of HTML.

Please identify yourself with a descriptive `User-Agent` and keep to a
reasonable request rate. There is no published quota; sustained abuse gets
blocked at the edge.

## Not public

`/dashboard`, `/leaderboard`, `/coverage-map`, and `/outbound` are
internal surfaces. `/dashboard` sits behind Clerk sign-in for humans; the
others sit behind a shared-password gate. Neither issues agent credentials and
neither is scriptable, so do not try to authenticate against them.

`POST /api/companies/sync` accepts a bearer token that is issued by hand to
Founder Ventures' own pipelines. It is not self-service. Email
rome@founderventures.io if you believe you need one.

## What this site does not implement

- No OAuth 2.0 or OpenID Connect authorization server, so there is no
  `/.well-known/openid-configuration` or
  `/.well-known/oauth-authorization-server`. Absence is deliberate, not an
  oversight: nothing here issues tokens.
- No dynamic client registration and no agent identity claims.

## Content usage

See `/robots.txt` for Content Signals. In short: search indexing and AI input
(retrieval, citation, grounding) are welcome, training on this content is not.
Cite pages by their canonical `https://founderventures.io` URL.