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SF IRL - Aug 17th, 2026

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

Author

Jonathan Chang
August 17, 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 #206.

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. 

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-8pm

What: ElevenLabs x Pear VC: Voice AI Founders Dinner

​We're bringing together a small group of founders building in and around voice AI, and we'd love for you to join us for dinner at Piccino Dogpatch!

​Most business still runs on conversation. Intake calls, scheduling, support, collections, sales. Almost none of it has ever touched software.

​Voice models just crossed the quality and latency bar that used to make those workflows impossible to automate. So the opening isn't bolting voice onto an existing product. It's building companies where the conversation is the product.

​Some of you are building voice from day one. Others are in a vertical where voice becomes the interface a year from now. Both belong at this table.

​Expect a curated room, real talk, and the kind of conversations that are hard to have anywhere else. Hosted by ElevenLabs and Pear VC.

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: 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.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 5:30-7:30pm

What: AI agents are writing code, taking support calls, running workflows inside internal tools, acting on behalf of users across the products your customers already live in. Getting an agent to work in a demo is the easy part. Getting it to hold up in production at scale with real users and real edge cases is where most teams actually get stuck.

​That's true whether the hard part for you is infra, product design, workflow, trust, cost, or something nobody's named yet.

​If you've shipped something that solves a real "demo to production" problem for agents, this is a room full of the people who'd actually use it. If you're building agents internally, this is where you see what's working elsewhere, and meet the people solving problems you haven't hit yet.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 5:30-8pm

What: ​Product launch coming up? Want to announce your $5m seed round so you can attract customers, partners, and early hires?

We got you 🤝

​We're Press Club, and we help founders land press.

Weida didn't want to pay $10k for a PR agency, so he locked in and spent a week sending 200 cold emails to journalists. It worked, and he landed Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and six other outlets.

In this workshop, we'll talk about exactly how to find those 200 targeted journalists, how we've consistently achieved a 10% response rate (compared to the industry average of 0.5%), and the step-by-step process of how we've landed our clients on Forbes, TechCrunch, and Axios.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6:30-9pm

What: ​5 x 5 min demos. No slides.

​The most interesting designers sharing their latest experiments.

​A ritual gathering, once a month, to open up our minds about the future of designing machines, alongside machines.

​Hosted at 8VC's office. Come, it's beautiful!

Location: San Francisco

Time: 7-10pm

What: ​We’re bringing together a curated room of founders, researchers, and engineers building agents and the infrastructure behind them.

Pool skill's optional but a competitive spirit's strongly encouraged! Dinner and drinks will be served throughout the night.

Between bank shots, you can eavesdrop in on whatever's trending on X, the latest SOTA architectures, trending agents, and what's actually holding up in production.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6:30-8pm

What: A casual meetup for founders and operators building in health tech.

​AI is touching every corner of healthcare, from longevity to peptides to complex chronic care. This is a space for the people shaping that future to gather and talk about the things we're all so passionate about.

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

Location: San Francisco

Time: 7:30-10pm

What: An Evening for Founders Building on the Frontier
A Frontier Table Dinner, hosted by Obvious

​AI is changing how we build products at a dizzying rate. But it's also transforming how we build teams, companies, and even startup ecosystems. And the implications are moving faster than the conversation around them.

​This raises questions that matter more than whether to use Claude Code or Codex.

  • ​What if the way we've built companies for the last 15 years is entirely incompatible with what's needed for the next 15?

  • ​What constitutes a moat anymore?

  • ​What does defensibility look like when anyone can build anything?

  • ​When you're building at the epicenter of AI acceleration — where capital, talent, and ambition are concentrated at unprecedented scale — how do you build something durable instead of just fast?

  • ​How do we separate what's meaningful from what's hype when everything is changing this fast?

Location: San Francisco

Time: 10:30am-8:30pm

What: Spend your Friday building with us & stay to play.

​We're opening a floor of the AGI, Inc. office for a full day of co-working. Bring your laptop, grab coffee and snacks, get work done, and meet the team building on-device AI.

​We're especially excited to welcome mobile and product engineers, and on-device researchers. We're hiring for these roles, so come see how we work.

Aug 22nd, 2026 - AI Valley x Pet Zen Dog-a-thon

Location: San Francisco

Time: 9am-9pm

What: Dogathon — AI Valley × PetZen 🐶

​A hackathon where every project has a real dog on the other end of it.

​200 developers, designers, AI builders, vet techs, and shelter volunteers are coming together to build tools that directly support rescue operations and dog adoption.

​The day begins with rescue dogs meeting participants on-site. Teams will then spend the rest of the hackathon building products that help shelters, rescues, fosters, adopters, and dogs themselves — from adoption matching tools and volunteer coordination systems to AI copilots for rescue operations.

​Our rescue partner will be present throughout the event, so anyone who forms a connection with a dog during the morning meet-and-greet can begin the adoption process on-site.

Aug 26th, 2026 - AI Engineers: Poker Night

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6:30-9:30pm

What: ​Join us for a Poker Night for the engineers, founders, and investors building AI-native companies.

​Three poker tables will be running throughout the night, complimentary drinks and pizza are on us! 🍕🍷

​Come play poker, hang out with some cool folks, and win (or lose?) some rent money 💸

Location: San Francisco

Time: 5:30-8pm

What: ​At Baseten, we have a thesis: obsessives move the world forward.

​Nobody embodies obsession more completely than Bryan Johnson.

​Bryan is a professional rejuvenation athlete and the first human Don’t Die prototype. Bryan’s obsessive level of commitment and passion are the same instincts that drive the builders we work with every day, just pointed at different problems.

​Join us for a series of experiences and off-the-record conversation with Bryan about how to build longevity while doing what you love, obsessively, for longer.

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