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- SF IRL - Aug 11th, 2025
SF IRL - Aug 11th, 2025
A curated newsletter showcasing the top tech & startup events in San Francisco
Jonathan Chang
August 11, 2025
In partnership with
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 #158.
I'm Jonathan, the creator of SF IRL. I've been a Bay Area resident all my life and moved into San Francisco about 4 years ago. My full-time job is at Brex where I meet founders and VCs while trying to create a community in the city. 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 9000+ subscribers. As we keep growing, if you enjoy reading these, please share this with your friends so we can hit 10,000 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!
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Aug 21st, 2025 - SF MANGO++ Madness Gala
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6-9pm
What: Connect with 300+ operators from top tech companies [MANGO & FAANG++], founders (we'll have a YC table!), and VCs in the Bay Area. Join us for an exclusive night of fun and mingling with different sections for games 🎮, professional networking 🔁, singles-only 😳 (we’ll have traffic light wristbands with green for available & red for taken), and VIPs ✨
🎯 Dress Code: Formal & Cocktail Attire. We’re bringing New York to SF for one night to remember! 🗽
Aug 12th, 2025 - Seed & Series A Founder Baseball Game with Brex
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6-8:30pm
What: Baseball game with Brex for seed & Series A founders
Building ou IRL SF community for young huss starting out in thunder journey. Will have a series of intimate events in SF all designed to meet your fe coder, customers and collaborators. We also have a Whatsapp group to join as well!
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.
Are you a founder looking for accounting for your startup? SF IRL got you covered
Pilot handles accounting, tax, CFO, and now COO support for startups and SMBs
Partner perks: 20% off (Core) bookkeeping for 6 months, 10% off CFO services ongoing
Startup Booster: Bookkeeping + tax for $750/year (for tech startups <12 months old & <$15K/mo in expenses)
Small Biz Booster: Bookkeeping for $10/month (for SMBs <12 months old & <$5K/mo in expenses)
Events Coming Up
Aug 12th, 2025 - The AI Hustle: Happy Hour for Startup Founders & VCs
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6-8pm
What: Calling all AI founders in San Francisco! 🧠 Join us for an evening of networking, learning, and fun as we connect with fellow founders, explore fundraising strategies, and discover the latest advancements in AI. 📈
Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting your AI journey, this event is for you. 💯 We'll have plenty of opportunities to mingle with like-minded individuals and get insights into the ever-evolving AI landscape. 🚀
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5:30-8:30pm
What: An invite only evening for DevRel and community leaders as we launch our new series for practitioners to share case studies swap tactics and build networks
Aug 12th, 2025 - SEA in the Bay: Networking Night for Southeast Asian Founders, Operators, and Friends 🌴
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6-9pm
What: 🎤 SEA What’s Brewing? Founders, Friends & Fast Intros
A mixer for Southeast Asia-US founders, operators & friends.
What’s Happening:
60-Second Mic Raffle: Pitch what you’re building or who you want to meet.
Winners get a mic spot or a fun SEA-themed gift.
The Rest: Southeast Asian catering, good drinks, and even better company.
Aug 12th, 2025 - San Francisco Tech & Finance Happy Hour
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5-7pm
What: SF Summer Happy Hour
Join us for a casual happy hour to meet peers across industries — from bankers & investors to product managers & engineers. Whether you're starting a company, growing your network, or just looking to meet cool people in SF, this happy hour is for you.
Aug 12th, 2025 - Closing the Loop
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5:30-8pm
What: An ongoing series for those pushing real intelligence into the physical world.
Closing the Loop is a speaker series and community hangout for folks working at the edge of robotics, control, embodied AI, and physical intelligence.
Aug 12th, 2025 - Coding agents | AI Show and Tell
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6-8:30pm
What: Join us on Aug 12th for our AI Show & Tell monthly event at the GitHub HQ. We'll have several fantastic talks, snacks & drinks, in a beautiful venue. Can't wait to see you there!
Aug 12th, 2025 - MCP Hackathon: Launch Party
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5-9:30pm
What: Join fellow AI developers and builders in a one-night event focused on the secure adoption of MCP and agentic AI.
Aug 13th, 2025 - Building a Career in Venture: From First Role to Future Leader
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6-8:30pm
What: Join us at Hotel Zeppelin San Francisco for an exciting event where we will discuss what’s it really like to build a career in venture capital—and how do early-career investors grow into decision-makers and leaders? This panel brings together VCs, from early professionals to leaders, to share what they’ve learned since stepping into the industry, how they’ve carved out influence at their firms, and what it takes to progress toward more senior roles.
Aug 13th, 2025 - AI Agent Founder Dinner w Partners at Defy VC, HOF Capital, Sierra Ventures and The Westly Group
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6:30-9pm
What: An intimate dinner focused on fundraising, bringing together AI Agent founders and top Bay Area VCs. Special guests include:
1. Brian Rothenberg, Partner at Defy VC
2. Hansae Catlett, Partner at HOF Capital
3. Vignesh Ravikumar, Partner at Sierra Ventures
4. Shaun Chaudhuri, Partner at The Westly Group
These investors have backed iconic Gen AI companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, and xAI.
Aug 13th, 2025 - Afore Hours
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5:30-7pm
What: Join Us for an Exclusive Founder Happy Hour!
🎯 What: A casual evening of networking with founders and VCs
⏰ When: 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
📍 Where: San Francisco (Address provided upon registration)
🍻 Refreshments: Light food and drink provided
Aug 13th, 2025 - Shepherd x Browserbase - AI Fireside Chat
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6:30-8:30pm
What: Two companies. Two wildly different approaches to AI. One unfiltered conversation.
Join us for an exclusive fireside chat with Browserbase founder (Paul Klein IV) and Shepherd founding engineer (Avi Banerjee) as they go deep on the trade-offs, triumphs, and curveballs of building AI that actually works in the real world. Hosted by Shepherd's very own, Gabriel Dalessandro.
Aug 13th, 2025 - Stateful Agents Meetup: Deep Research
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5:30-8:30pm
What: Join the Letta team for hands-on workshops building stateful deep research agents that actually remember, learn, and evolve.
Experience live demonstrations of building a stateful, customizable AI deep research agent using Letta's no-code Agent Development Environment (ADE), and lightning talks from the Letta developer community.
Aug 14th, 2025 - Inworld x Lightning AI: How To Integrate & Deploy Voice AI Agents
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6-8:30pm
What: Join us in San Francisco for a hands-on developer workshop with Inworld’s Director of ML Engineering, Feifan Fan. Learn how to leverage Inworld + Lightning to integrate state-of-the-art voice AI (STT, TTS, LLM) into a consumer application and make it production ready.
Aug 14th, 2025 - SkyPilot AI Infra Meetup with Nebius
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5-8pm
What: Join us for the SkyPilot AI Infrastructure Meetup with Nebius! We'll be talking about open-source AI infra, using Kubernetes for AI, building AI platforms on neoclouds and more! Come connect with AI platform leaders, share insights, and learn from experts on the latest in AI infra 🚀
Aug 14th, 2025 - Frontiers in Fibrosis @ age1
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5:45-8:30pm
What: Join us at the age1 office to explore the next wave of innovation in reversing tissue aging and fibrosis. This event will bring together researchers and founders to discuss the next generation of therapies from reprogramming cellular damage, modulating immune-mediated inflammation, and AI-driven discovery platforms for new targets.
Aug 14th, 2025 - Cracking b2b GTM w/ 12 (scrappy) founders
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5-8pm
What: What is this?
An invite-only roundtable for 12 AI founders (post-revenue and/or pre-seed+) sharing and learning B2B sales and GTM.
Who is it for?
You’re post pre-seed, have early users or revenue.
You’ve got customers and looking for faster GTM
Aug 15th, 2025 - AI4Quantum
Location: San Francisco
Time: 4-8:30pm
What: Join us to learn about how you can use AI for quantum computing, accelerate your research with GPUs, and embrace rapidly growing quantum technologies!
Aug 15th, 2025 - Hyperspace: Agentic OS
Location: San Francisco
Time: 11-1pm
What: Join us for a special keynote presentation on the detailed product vision of the Hyperspace Agentic OS, including an extended live demo of our breakthrough new agentic browser with it's spatial AI, and the announcement of the first-ever agentic blockchain protocol.
Aug 15th, 2025 - LangChain Presents: Hacking Hours
Location: San Francisco
Time: 4-7pm
What: Join us for LangChain Hacking Hours, a community-driven co-working event where AI builders come together to work on their personal projects in a focused, collaborative environment at our office.
Aug 16th, 2025 - Enforced Ratio
Location: San Francisco
Time: 7-11pm
What: The Enforced Ratio Event is a historic tech event in San Francisco where for the first time ever, there will be an equal 50/50 ratio of both women and men.
A Barbie-pink disco-ball themed tech event featuring a live DJ, cybertrucks and cocktails. The vibe is unapologetically feminine and fun.
Aug 16th, 2025 - Robotics Paper Reading - Kickoff
Location: Berkeley
Time: 12-1pm
What: Join us for the first in a series of informal robotics paper reading sessions. This kickoff event is meant to bring together students, researchers, and engineers who are interested in cutting-edge work in robotics and AI.
Whether you’re into imitation learning, motion planning, multimodal perception, or control theory, come discuss the latest research with others in the field.
Aug 17th, 2025 - Code Cafe 4™ popup at Weights & Biases
Location: San Francisco
Time: 9am-1:30pm
What: Join us for artisanal coffee (and some artisanal code) at the Weights & Biases space in Mission!
Aug 17th, 2025 - The Intern Ship Games
Location: Mountain View
Time: 12:30-6:30pm
What: 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐢𝐧𝐠: 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧 Ship 𝐆𝐚𝐦𝐞𝐬 — a one-day IRL competition in the Bay Area with a $1,000 cash prize.
💥 100 of the most cracked students, interns and early career pros will compete — in teams — across 5 epic tracks:
🦾 Strength
⚡️ Agility
🧠 Intelligence
🎭 Creativity
🧟 Unity
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5-8pm
What: Join us for an exciting gathering in San Francisco that connects enterprise leaders with leading startup founders! The "AI Talks at Qlay" series is a monthly event where industry experts within Qlay's community share about their insights on the latest trends in AI.
Aug 20th, 2025 - Harry’s Healthtech Hang
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5:30-8pm
What: A happy hour but one where everyone has the intention of helping others, empowering them to achieve their professional and personal goals. You will mingle, enjoy beverages and light bites (read: open bar for beer & wine), pay it forward, and maybe get help in return.
Aug 21st, 2025 - Tote in SF Vol. 2
Location: San Francisco
Time: 7-9pm
What: Join us on Fillmore for a Style & Sip event hosted by Tote for the fashion tech community.
We'll be sharing tips for finding your personal style & styling wardrobe staples from personal stylists. Come enjoy some light refreshments alongside fashion tech founders, brand owners & community members!
Aug 21st, 2025 - Cocktail Class | Intercom, Numeral, Fondo
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6-9pm
What: 🍸Numeral x Intercom x Fondo: Summer Cocktail Class & Happy Hour
Raise a glass with Numeral, Intercom, and Fondo at a cocktail class as we toast to the end of summer.
You’ll learn how to make two classic cocktails (one shaken, one stirred) in a guided class. No prior experience necessary!
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5-8pm
What: Join engineers from Anthropic, Cloudflare, Stytch, and Arcade for an evening exploring the cutting edge of MCP and AI agents.
We’ll open with a panel and dig into:
How AI agents are being applied in real-world systems
The latest standards development in MCP
Real-world use cases for MCP and agent frameworks
How to prepare your systems and architecture now
Aug 14th, 2025 - Taser Knife Fight Club #1
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6:30-9:30pm
What: The first rule of Taser Knife Fight Club is You do not talk about Taser Knife Fight Club. The second rule of Taser Knife Fight Club is You do not talk about Taser Knife Fight Club.
If someone says "stop" or goes limp, the fight is over. 4) Only two people to a fight. 5) One fight at a time.
First we build, then we fight.
Come to a workshop to build your weapon, then test it out in the ring. Tickets include x1 taser knife + an hour of expert help in building it just the way you want.
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