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  • SF IRL - Aug 24th, 2026

SF IRL - Aug 24th, 2026

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

Author

Jonathan Chang
August 24, 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 #207.

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!

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: 6-9pm

What: We've been quietly building Soma and have finally introduced it to the world. We'd love to celebrate with you and premiere our full motion story in person.

​We're building for your mind, and it's important to let it experience beyond a screen. Join us at 26 August for an evening of art, film, and interaction to discover what your voice can tell you about your mind.

Hear from our founder Jiali on the conception of Soma, meet the team, and mingle with others curious about their minds.

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 (Free tickets 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: 6-8pm

What: Join us for the August edition of {AI} in Production, 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: San Francisco

Time: 5:30-8:30pm

What: We're back for round three of our monthly demo night.

​A lot of AI demos are one person, one tool. This night is squarely about how teams actually work together with AI. How you share context. Which internal tools are being used. What works when five people are in it together. What breaks.

​We are a strict no pitches and only team demos evening!

​Multiplayer demos show how teams work together when everyone is using AI. See real workflows where one person, or one agent, starts the work, shares context, and hands it off to a teammate or another agent who picks it up and continues. This could happen in a shared coding-agent session, a Slack-to-tool workflow, an issue handoff, or any other team process. The point is not to pitch a product; it is to show how AI changes collaboration, context-sharing, and handoffs at work.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 5:30-8:30pm

What: We’re back for another exciting event on Tuesday, August 25, 2026, this time in partnership with SGLang and the San Francisco community.

What to Expect:
- Technical demos
- Meet the teams at Mistral and SGLang
- Happy hour refreshments with a SF view

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-9pm

What: We've been quietly building Soma and have finally introduced it to the world. We'd love to celebrate with you and premiere our full motion story in person.

​We're building for your mind, and it's important to let it experience beyond a screen. Join us at 26 August for an evening of art, film, and interaction to discover what your voice can tell you about your mind.

Hear from our founder Jiali on the conception of Soma, meet the team, and mingle with others curious about their minds.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-9pm

What: You can now look for cancer in a vial of blood, years before a symptom or a scan.

​The catch is the signal. The disease may occur in only a small fraction of people your age in a given year. The signal can be a few fragments of tumor DNA among billions of healthy ones.

​Miss it and you have false reassurance. Call it when it isn't there and a healthy person can enter a cascade of imaging, biopsies, and anxiety.

​That's the real problem, and a better sensitivity number doesn't fix it.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-8pm

What: ​Come to explore, stay to collaborate. Join us at Bar Darling on Weds 8/26, and mingle with like-minded young professionals in the city.

Aug 26th, 2026 - AI Infra Kebab

Location: San Francisco

Time: 5-8pm

What: Summer vibes, Döner Kebab, and tech chatter about all things AI infrastructure.

​Join us for an agentic after-hours event at the One Kearny Club rooftop terrace and lounge, featuring freshly prepared Döner Kebab, founder networking, and a lightning panel with Malte Ubl (Vercel), Nikita Shamgunov (Databricks), and Max Stoiber (OpenAI).

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6:30-8:30pm

What: ​Keep the conversation going after Ray Summit and the vLLM Conference.

​A year ago, open weights were a cost play: worse performance, cheaper price. Intelligence is the product now, and companies want to own it and compound it inside their own walls. This is a night for that shift: owning your intelligence, staying open across hardware and models, and valuemaxxing every dollar and hour of infra.

​Join a select group of founders, engineers, and operators, and builders for demos worth watching, good conversation, and cold drinks in a room full of people who take tokens seriously.

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.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 5:30-8pm

What:

Location: San Francisco

Time: 7-9pm

What: ​Cheers to another Happy Hour with Arceus!

​Join our Non-Billable Cocktail Hour, an evening designed to bring people together in a relaxed, lively setting with good drinks, great conversation, and music setting the tone. It’s a chance to unwind, meet new people, and enjoy the energy of the night in a private setting.

​Expect a fun mix of networking and socializing, with plenty of time to connect and mingle. Whether you’re coming to catch up with familiar faces or meet someone new, we’re keeping it easy, upbeat, and memorable.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 5:30-8:30pm

What: ​Will AI consolidate around a handful of frontier labs - or will intelligence become an open, competitive commodity?

​Join us for an evening of networking, drinks, and a fireside conversation with Vincent Weisser, CEO & Co-Founder of Prime Intellect, and Jake Randall, SVP, GTM at OpenRouter, about the future of the intelligence layer.

​Together, they’ll explore two sides of a rapidly changing AI ecosystem

Aug 28th, 2026 - Forms of Capital

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-8pm

What: ​We spend our lives accumulating things that aren't money and spending them like they are. Who you know, what you've read, how you carry yourself, the networks you can call on.

​This is a show-and-tell for exactly that. Everyone brings something short: an excerpt, a passage from a book, an essay, an idea or ideology, a fragment that has been sitting with them. You get a few minutes to show it to the table and say why it caught you. We go around the room, one by one, and then we open the floor to the bigger questions about status, taste, networks, and power that the night surfaced.

​No slides, no speaker, no expertise required. Bring one thing short enough to walk us through in a few minutes.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-8:30pm

What: ​Most teams still evaluate their AI the same way: run a few prompts, eyeball the outputs, and ship if it feels right.

​That works until it doesn't — until the agent fails silently in production, the hallucination reaches a customer, or nobody can explain why last week's change made things worse.

​This fireside gets into what comes after the vibe check: what a production eval actually is and how to build one, where eval datasets come from, using online evals as live guardrails, the LLM-as-judge vs. purpose-built eval models debate, and whether you can grade a multi-step agent's whole trajectory or just its final answer. Plus the practical calls every team faces — build vs. buy, and who owns evals inside a company.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-9pm

What: SaaS is convenient right up until you need your data out, your vendor raises prices, or you need to connect internal systems. Bring Your Own Cloud splits the difference: the vendor runs the control plane, you keep the data plane in your own account.

We'll go deep on design: how the control plane reaches into your VPC, where the shared responsibility line actually falls, leveraging open source databases, and cost reduction tricks that don't kill performance. Our speakers have built BYOC systems at every layer of the stack and will show the plumbing and failure modes. 

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