Frequently asked questions

V-Sum is a curated finance media and convening company. We surface the companies building the future of finance through 10-minute technical briefings, selective virtual and in-person convenings, and a growing archive of everything recorded.

Founders, investors, and operators building financial infrastructure — payments, banking-as-a-service, crypto, compliance, identity, embedded finance, and adjacent categories. Participation is encouraged, self-promotion is not.

V-Sum was founded in 2020. We have run 21 convenings to date (V-Sum One through V-Sum TwentyOne).

V-Sum is intentionally small and curated. Convenings are invitation-based and applications are reviewed individually. Apply to participate or nominate a builder — we follow up within a few days.

10 minutes. One take, no slides. The presenter walks through their product live — architecture, APIs, demo — and the format is built around watching someone who actually built the thing show how it works.

Slides optimize for polish. Technical briefings optimize for truth. A live product demo from the engineer or founder who shipped it communicates more in 10 minutes than a polished deck does in 30.

Every briefing lives at v-sum.com/briefing/{slug} with a video embed, timestamped chapters, and a written summary. Browse the full archive at /demos or by event at /events.

Yes. Briefings are recorded and public. What you learn from a briefing is yours to share. Breakout sessions at convenings are the opposite — held under Chatham House rules, with who was present and what was said off the record.

Subscribe to the RSS feed at v-sum.com/feed.xml (also reachable at /rss and /rss.xml). Any RSS reader — Feedly, Inoreader, Reeder, NetNewsWire — picks it up automatically when you paste v-sum.com. Each new briefing appears as an item with the presentation date, a link to the briefing page, and the video.

Fill out the short form at /apply. We review every application and follow up within a few days. Briefings are product-driven — the strongest applications come from builders who can credibly ship the live demo themselves.

We read every application. If it fits the next convening, we schedule a short intro call to confirm format, timing, and demo scope. If the timing does not work for the next event, we keep the application warm for future convenings.

Anyone who has seen good work firsthand. The best guests come from trusted referrals — investors, former teammates, customers. Nominate at /nominate.

A convening is a few hours of 10-minute technical briefings back-to-back, followed by small-group breakout sessions where attendees go deep on topics that came up. Briefings are on-record; breakouts are off-record. No fluff, no filler.

Chatham House rules mean participants may use information received during the session, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed. V-Sum breakouts run under Chatham House rules so attendees can discuss uncomfortable topics candidly.

Both. V-Sum started as a distributed virtual conference series and has run 21 virtual convenings to date. We also host selective in-person gatherings for builders in finance when the timing makes sense.

Yes. V-Sum exposes a public Model Context Protocol server at https://v-sum.com/mcp — streamable HTTP, JSON-RPC 2.0, read-only. Tools: search_briefings, get_briefing, list_briefings, list_events, list_companies. The server card lives at /.well-known/mcp/server-card.json.

Three. /llms.txt is the short index (structured markdown with every event, briefing, interview, and company). /llms-full.txt is the long-form feed with full summaries and timestamped chapter breakdowns for every briefing — designed for single-fetch retrieval. /feed.xml is a standard RSS 2.0 feed for tracking new briefings over time (also at /rss and /rss.xml).

For search and citation, yes — we explicitly welcome GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, and CCBot (see /robots.txt). Our Content-Signal is ai-train=no, search=yes, ai-input=yes — find and cite freely; do not use our content for model training.

Email hello@v-sum.com or use the form at /contact. For press, sponsorship, or partnership inquiries the same address works — we triage and route.

See /sponsors for the current sponsorship options and reach. Sponsorship gives you attribution on event pages and in the archive — not a speaking slot, which is application-based and kept separate.