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SF IRL - Aug 10th, 2026

A curated newsletter showcasing the top tech & startup events in San Francisco

Author

Jonathan Chang
August 10, 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 #205.

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. 

Where: SF JAZZ Center, San Francisco

Modern GTM got noisy. ApolloNext 2026 is where GTM leaders, founders, and operators come together to see what's actually working, and what's next. Hear from Apollo's CEO on the product vision, watch a growth leader build a live Apollo play on stage, and walk away with playbooks you can apply Monday morning. September 30, SFJAZZ Center, San Francisco. Register (50% off with your promo code)

I’ve made a form to connect the best founders raising with my list of VCs. If you are a founder raising your next round and want to potentially be featured to investors in the SF IRL network, please fill out this form.

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.

You can subscribe to Day Zero here.

Events Coming Up

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-9pm

What: ​Hardware FYI is hosting a happy hour for engineers, operators, and founders building in the physical world.

​Come talk shop with other people working on real products, factories, and industrial systems. Applications are open; we’ll share the San Francisco location with confirmed guests!

Aug 12th, 2026 - WorkOS Agent Night

Location: San Francisco

Time: 5-10pm

What: Agent Night brings the developer community together for an evening at the frontier of agentic AI, where the people building it show what's actually working.

​Join us for the next chapter of our flagship event at the historic Regency Ballroom, with a night of live demos, sharp discussions, and the kind of hallway conversations you can't get anywhere else.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-8pm

What: ​Join us for the August edition of the San Francisco AI Engineers Tech Talk, a gathering focused exclusively on AI engineering. Whether you’re a seasoned machine learning engineer or a fullstack dev curious about how to work with LLMs, this is your space to dive deep into real-world projects, technical challenges, and creative solutions.

Location: Berkeley

Time: 5-7pm

What: ​You're a PhD or postdoc, or an engineer working on technology that could reshape an entire industry.

​Yet most breakthrough research never makes a real impact in the world. It stays in papers, gets buried in approval processes, or dies when funding runs out.

​Alex Teng, partner at Fifty Years, has helped hundreds of scientists and engineers transition from the lab bench to founding deep tech startups.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-7:30pm

What: ​A free, public workshop—no technical background needed
Artificial intelligence is no longer just getting better at narrow tasks—it’s beginning to look general. Many researchers believe we’re entering the early stages of the AGI transition: a period where AI systems start to match or exceed human abilities across a wide range of domains.


This workshop explores what AGI actually means, how to think about it intuitively (without hype or jargon), and what this transition could mean for your job, your relationships, and your day-to-day life—much sooner than most people expect.

Location: Berkeley

Time: 5:30-8pm

What: As models improve and access widens, discovery itself is becoming cheaper.

​But prediction alone doesn't create enduring advantage.

​As AI moves beyond prediction, the advantage shifts to deployment, experimental feedback, and the systems that reduce the gap between computational design and functional biology.

​Beyond Discovery explores what that shift demands.

​Discussion Topics

  • ​When models become commodities, what becomes defensible?

  • ​What actually breaks when AI-generated designs meet biological systems?

  • ​Are we measuring the right things, or simply the easiest things to measure?

  • ​What infrastructure is still missing to close the loop?

Location: San Francisco

Time: 5:30-8pm

What: ​Building an AI prototype has never been easier. Turning it into a reliable, secure and cost-effective system that works inside a large organization remains much harder.

​Enterprise knowledge is often scattered across legacy software, databases, documents and workflows shaped by years of approvals and exceptions. AI can help companies bring that knowledge together and modernize complex processes, but moving from a successful demonstration to production requires much more than a model.

​Join Barcelona-based Timbal AI and global venture firm Cathay Innovation at CI’s San Francisco office for an evening focused on building and deploying enterprise AI at scale, and how European technology companies can successfully expand into the US enterprise market.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-8pm

What: ​FoundersEdge, a pre-seed VC investing in AI, technical teams, and repeat founders, is coming to San Francisco! We're bringing our signature event, Ditch the Deck- AI Show not Tell for the very first time on the West Coast.

Aug 15th, 2026 - Humanoid Sound Bath

Location: San Francisco

Time: 11am-6pm

What: ​There is a very old human act in which one person holds a room through sound, striking bowls and a gong until the vibration moves through everyone present.
It is an act of care, and it has always required a human hand.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 2-6pm

What: Most demo days ask you to imagine the future. We're going to let you walk into it.

​For one night, the legendary Mabuhay Gardens becomes the year 2050 — and every startup in Biopunk Cohort 2 stages an immersive demonstration of what the world looks like if their science wildly succeeds. The disease that's gone. The material that replaced plastic. The therapy grown overnight. You won't sit through slides — you'll move through a future city and meet the founders making it real, today.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 5-8pm

What: ​Salt bread is having a moment. So naturally, we’re maxxing it.

​If you’ve stood in line at a bakery in San Francisco recently, you already know. Shio pan has quietly become one of the city’s most coveted pastries: buttery, flaky, lightly salted, and usually gone by mid-morning.

​Food and context have one thing in common: they’re both better when shared.

​That’s why, every month, we bring the community together to share what we’ve been building over something the city can’t get enough of. We started with Mango Maxxing. Then came Chaat Maxxing. This month, it’s Salt Bread Maxxing.

​We’ll have warm shio pan from Tano SF, drinks, music, and a room full of founders, engineers, designers, operators, and curious people from across the Bay.

Aug 18th, 2026 - SkyRL Meetup

Location: Berkeley

Time: 6-7:30pm

What: From reasoning models and coding assistants to autonomous agents, Reinforcement Learning (RL) is changing how foundation models are trained, adapted, and deployed. SkyRL is a modular open-source library for agentic RL, developed at UC Berkeley Sky Lab in collaboration with Anyscale. SkyRL has quickly grown to be one of the most popular RL libraries over the past year, with 2k+ GitHub stars and a growing user base in academia and industry, including researchers from Stanford, CMU, UC Berkeley, Microsoft AI, Datadog, and more.

Aug 20th, 2026 - Mistral Catfe Coworking

Location: San Francisco

Time: 12-3pm

What: Swing by for a paw-some co-working session where you can:
🧑‍💻 Vibe code with fellow builders
🚀 Experiment with the latest models
🐾 Pet cats
☕ Sip, snack, and meet the Mistral team

​Plus, there will be exclusive Mistral goodies for all guests 🐈

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-8pm

What: As AI agents start to take over the web, search needs to be orders of magnitude more efficient and cheaper than Google.

​Join us for a private audience with Parag Agrawal, founder of Parallel, and former CEO of Twitter.

​Charles O’Neill, Baseten’s co-head of model training, will interview Parag about:

  • ​How and why he started Parallel

  • ​Technical deep-dive on building agents for the web

Location: Half Moon Bay

Time: 5-10pm

What: In celebration of our first anniversary, we are honored to invite you to the second edition of Aureum Aestivalis — our signature summer gathering and one of the year's most anticipated evenings within the Aureum Circle.

​Set against the backdrop of the Pacific Ocean, expect an evening of high-signal conversations where capital, influence, and innovation converge.

​💡 Experience curated partner activations and immersive showcases spanning robotics, longevity, luxury craftsmanship, and fine art.

​🎙️ Hear firsthand perspectives from accomplished creators, entrepreneurs, operators, and investors who have built, scaled, invested in, and shaped influential organizations across industries.

​🥂 Enjoy a refined multi-course dinner, an exclusive performance by a top EMPIRE artist, and a celebratory DJ set, all set within a vibrant summer atmosphere defined by warmth, abundance, and vitality.

​Dress Code: White & Verdant Elegance

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