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- SF IRL - Apr 27th, 2026
SF IRL - Apr 27th, 2026
A curated newsletter showcasing the top tech & startup events in San Francisco
Jonathan Chang
April 27, 2026
Hi SF IRL! There's a ton of vibrance and energy coming back into the city and at SF IRL, we are excited to be a part of it. Excited to come with you all with some great events for Issue #192.
I'm Jonathan, the creator of SF IRL. I've been a Bay Area resident all my life and moved into San Francisco about 5 years ago. My vision for SF IRL is simple. Showcase the best tech + startup events in SF and to connect all of our builders and investors together. We are a growing community having over 10000+ subscribers. As we keep growing, if you enjoy reading these, please share this with your friends so we can hit 11,000 readers. As always, SF IRL is one of my many side projects. If you like to be involved in helping, please shoot me an email!
Lightfield is an AI-native CRM that remembers everything, then acts on it. It automatically captures and organizes every customer conversation across email, meetings, and notes, creating your team’s collective customer memory. Try Lightfield free today.
Excited to say SF IRL has partnered with ElevenLabs to give founders 33 million in ElevenLabs credits or equivalent to $4k to build voice AI agents.
Check Out the ElevenLabs Startup Grant & use code 11SFIRL723 for expedited review. We believe voice is the most natural way to communicate, and the future of human-AI interaction depends on making those conversations feel real. The ElevenLabs Grants Program exists to give early-stage startups and small teams the tools they need to build the future of AI audio with the best tools available, without cost being a blocker. ElevenLabs is the complete conversational agents platform, so whether a startup is creating an AI tutor, support assistant, or the next generation of voice-powered game characters, the grant will provide them with 12 months and 33 million characters of free access to ElevenLabs' cutting-edge AI audio, equivalent to over 600 hours of audio.
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I’m launching a newsletter that will feature the top founders looking to hire, founders looking for their cofounder, and operators that are looking for their next role. If you are interested in being featured, fill this form here.
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Events Coming Up
Apr 28th, 2026 - The Agentic Shift: Building the Future of Autonomous Work
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5-8pm
What: The Agentic Shift: Building the Future of Autonomous Work
Agentic AI is ushering in a new era of autonomy — one where systems can reason, plan, and execute complex workflows. This paradigm shift is fundamentally redefining productivity, automating end-to-end processes, and reshaping how we interact with technology in our professional and daily lives.
Apr 28th, 2026 - Scaling the Modern Stack w/ Rootly AI, Runpod, Twingate, & Anthropic
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5-8:30pm
What: Hi Join us for an exclusive evening of deep dives into the ecosystem powering the next generation of AI-native enterprise applications.
This event brings together the core pillars of a high-performance engineering stack: Compute, Intelligence, Connectivity, and Resilience. We’ll explore how to orchestrate these four powerhouses to build, secure, and maintain complex systems without the traditional overhead.
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6-8:15pm
What: The night before AMD AI DevDay, Modular and AMD are hosting a reception in Jackson Square for a small group of founders, CTOs, and engineers running image generation in production.
Chris Lattner will cover what state-of-the-art image gen inference looks like on AMD MI355X with Modular Platform, what it costs to serve at scale with Modular Cloud, and how the economics of inference are shifting. The AMD team will join us to share an exclusive sneak peek into their upcoming work.
Apr 29th, 2026 - <agentic refreshments>
Location: San Francisco
Time: 4:30-6:30pm
What: Join Conto and friends for drinks to cap the first day of Stripe Sessions. We'll have a great group in attendance across startups and enterprises that's interested in agents, payments, commerce, and AI
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5:30-8pm
What: Join us for the launch of the Snorkel AI Reading Group, a recurring forum to explore the latest frontier developments in AI while building meaningful connections within the community.
In our inaugural session, Mayee Chen of Stanford AI Research Lab will dive into her paper “Olmix: A Framework for Data Mixing Throughout LM Development.”
Apr 29th, 2026 - Fintech x AI Founders Pitch plus Mixer | Stripe Sessions side event by DigitalOcean & Catalyst Bay
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5-8pm
What: An evening Fintech x AI event during Stripe Sessions week, hosted by Catalyst Bay and DigitalOcean.
We're bringing together fintech x AI founders, investors, and builders for an evening of real content and curated pitches, a short walk from Moscone.
Stripe Sessions Passes for Catalyst Bay community members 🎟️
If you sign up for our event, you'd get a ticket to Stripe Sessions (we send them out in batches a few times a week).
Apr 29th, 2026 - App Founders Dinner – SF
Location: San Francisco
Time: 7:30-10pm
What: Join us for an intimate dinner bringing together founders, builders, and operators in the mobile app ecosystem.
This is a casual, small-group gathering focused on great food, thoughtful conversations, and meaningful connections with fellow app founders.
Apr 30th, 2026 - Unicorner Presents: SF Seed+ Founders Dinner
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6-9pm
What: We're bringing together 20 seed to Series A founders from our community—founders that we believe have a unicorn trajectory.
Apr 30th, 2026 - Canadian demo night
Location: San Francisco
Time: 7-9pm
What: Come hang out with Canadians (and honourary Canadians) in the Bay.
How it works: Mingle, watch demos, mingle some more. Anyone can demo, just fill out this form. Format is ~5 minutes, and it can be anything you're building: something shipped, a work in progress, even a Figma.
Food & drinks: SF's best poutine (from Toronto). Plus drinks.
Dress code: Canadian tuxedos highly encouraged.
May 2nd, 2026 - Builders of Tomorrow: AI Super Hackathon
Location: Mountain View
Time: 9am-5:30pm
What: Full-Day Hackathon · Panels · Demo Day
20 Teams. 3 Panels. $80K+ on the line.
On May 2nd, Beta University brings together the next generation of AI builders, founders, and investors for a full-day experience — where ideas go from concept → product → pitch → capital.
May 4th, 2026 - AI Benchmarks for Human Flourishing
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6:45-8:45pm
What: We benchmark AI for accuracy, speed, reasoning, code generation, but almost no one is benchmarking whether AI is actually good for the people using it.
Not "safe." Not "aligned." Good for them.
Erika Anderson and Yaoli Mao created HumaneBench, an open-source benchmark that evaluates whether AI systems treat users humanely, built on care ethics and tested in production. It was covered by TechCrunch, presented at MIT Media Lab, and is currently running live in production.
One of their key findings: when users are vulnerable or under pressure, model behavior flips 67% of the time. The principle that degrades first? Empowerment, the one most tied to genuine user agency.
Erika and Yaoli will walk through the landscape of human flourishing benchmarks, the philosophy and methodology behind HumaneBench, and what they've learned putting it into production. Then we'll turn it over to you: if you wanted to implement a well-being benchmark for your product, where would you start, and what would get in your way?
May 4th, 2026 - Human Agency in the Intelligence Age with Jason Crawford
Location: San Francisco
Time: 4:30-6:30pm
What: The Intelligence Age may be the next era of humanity, after the Industrial Age. What can we learn from the history and theory of progress about a transition to a fundamentally new mode of production? And what will the role of humans be in a fully automated economy?
Jason Crawford will put AI development into the context of the grand narrative of human progress.
May 5th, 2026 - Proto to Prod: You Built It. Now Ship It Securely.
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5:30-8pm
What: A builder session for engineers, founders, and AI builders who have already built something — and are ready to ship it to production without introducing risk, drift, or broken infrastructure.
May 5th, 2026 - Daytona & WorkOS AI Builders - SF, May 2026
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5:30-8pm
What: An event dedicated to exploring all things AI Engineering!
May 5th, 2026 - Startmate Accelerator Demo Day | San Francisco
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6-9pm
What: After a 7-year hiatus we are back in San Francisco for one night only where 18 of ANZ's top startups will take to the stage. Brought to you by the most active early-stage investor in ANZ, Startmate. 🦘☀️
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5-8pm
What: Lukasz Kaiser, co-inventor of the Transformer, is stepping into the ring for the most gloriously nerdy showdown in SF: a live, tongue-in-cheek Transformers vs. Post-Transformers boxing match of ideas! Adrian Kosowski from Pathway will step into the ring on the post-transformer side, alongside Liquid AI’s CTO Mathias Lechner.
May 6th, 2026 - GenClaw World Tour - San Francisco
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6-9pm
What: The AI Collective and Genspark are partnering for the GenClaw World Tour: 5 cities, 5 days, one global moment.
This is your chance to get hands-on with GenClaw, the enterprise-ready alternative that delivers everything you love about OpenClaw, without the security risk.
Join us for a live demo, guided workshop, and real talk about why GenClaw's architecture is changing how enterprises think about AI, straight from the Genspark team.
May 7th, 2026 - Small Biz Game Night: SF Small Business Week
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5-7pm
What: We’re celebrating SF Small Business Week with a swanky game night!
Join Pilot, Justworks, and Rootly AI for an evening celebrating local small businesses and the community behind them.
Set in the heart of San Francisco, this event is a chance to relax and enjoy a game night with local partners and entrepreneurs.
May 7th, 2026 - Bolt Office Grand Opening
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5-8pm
What: Join us for the grand opening of Bolt’s new San Francisco office.
We’re bringing together builders, founders, product teams, partners, and friends for an evening of cocktails, curated food, dessert, and conversations with the team behind bolt.new, the AI-powered platform now used by 8 million people to build software.
May 7th, 2026 - Camp AI: Agents at Work //San Francisco//
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5:30-8:30pm
What: We've packed our bags, and we're hitting the road. By popular demand, Camp AI is headed on a world tour 🌎 We're starting at our home base in San Francisco and coming to a city near you. 🌉🗽🗼
Tech founders, builders, and AI enthusiasts are invited to an evening of demos, a panel discussion, and conversations around developing, shipping, and scaling agentic workflows. This is a chance to network with up-and-coming startups and leaders developing AI technologies.
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