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SF IRL - Aug 3rd, 2026

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

Author

Jonathan Chang
August 03, 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 #204.

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: 6:30-9pm

What: ​Demo night on model selection & routing for agents in production.

​Benchmarks are ever updating. The "best" model changes with every release week. So how do teams actually decide which model runs their agents in production?

​Five teams share live demos of how they evaluate, select, and route models in the real world, where quality, cost, latency, and reliability all pull in different directions.

​This room is for you if you're building agents or agent infra and asking "which model?"

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-8pm

What: ​Every AI demo looks impressive. Building AI that works reliably in production is a different story. Hear from YC founders at Runtime, 21st, Paper Instruments, Replicas, and Lark share the technical decisions, tradeoffs, and hard-won lessons behind the products they're building.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-8pm

What: ​The most interesting AI startups are owning their models, controlling their inference, and shipping fast - and most people don't know it yet.

“Built on Baseten” is a quarterly showcase where early-stage founders building on Baseten get on a stage and share what they built.

Aug 5th, 2026 - Privy Home: IRL SF

Location: San Francisco

Time: 11am-6pm

What: ​Privy Home is our quarterly community event series, bringing together the builders shaping the future of programmable finance. Following previous editions in New York and Cannes, we're bringing Privy Home to San Francisco for an afternoon of technical talks, hands-on workshops, customer demos, and conversations with the teams building what's next.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 5-8:30pm

What: ​We're bringing together early-stage AI founders, investors, and builders for an evening of high-energy pitches, sharp Q&A, and genuine connection, hosted at the AWS GenAI Builder Loft in San Francisco.

​This is an event happening at AWS Builder Loft, so please make sure that you are not only approved on Luma, but also sign up for the event here at AWS: http://events.builder.aws.com/d/ydzypf

Location: Stanford

Time: 5:30-8:30pm

What: ​Modern biology has become a computational science. Virtual cells, single-cell genomics, protein and molecule design, AI-driven drug discovery — the questions that used to take a lab a decade are being reframed by people who read a genome the way engineers read a codebase. This track puts the researchers doing that work in one room with the founders building on it and the investors backing it.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 5:30-7:30pm

What: localhost is a series for the people who run engineering in SF: twenty seats, drinks and apps, and an honest conversation with peers.

​No slides. No pitches. Just the room.

​This edition we're exploring what shipping looks like now that AI writes half the code: what breaks when agents ship faster than anyone can review, where AI-assisted testing actually holds up, and what "good enough to ship" even means anymore.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 5:30-8:30pm

What: ​2026 is already accelerating fast – new breakthroughs, new companies, and a city doubling down on its role as the global center of AI. This May, we’re bringing together the builders shaping what’s next with 8 hand-picked pre-Series A demos you won’t see anywhere else.

​Powered by The AI Collective – here's what's to expect:

  • ​⚡️ 8 elite curated demos from the Bay's most visionary founders

  • ​🎤 Live Q&A – challenge the builders in real time

  • ​🧬 Interactive Demo Night App to connect, follow up, and join waitlists instantly

  • ​🏆 Live community voting to crown the night’s champions and enshrine them in our Hall of Fame

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-9pm

What: Join Baselayer and an exclusive group of top fintech and commerce leaders for an intimate evening on the water. Enjoy passed hors d’oeuvres and handcrafted cocktails from our private bar, and step out onto the private, heated terrace for sweeping views of the bay and bridge.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 5:30-8pm

What: ​A technical deep dive on evaluating AI products, agents, and workflows against real-world tasks.

​As models get better, the hard question is no longer just “which model is best?” It’s whether your product, agent, or workflow actually performs well on the tasks your users care about.

​Public benchmarks rarely capture your edge cases. Real production systems have messy inputs, multi-step workflows, tool calls, latency constraints, cost tradeoffs, and failure modes that only show up in practice.

Aug 6th, 2026 - Reimagining Proteins with AI: Antibodies and Beyond

Location: San Francisco

Time: 5:30-8:30pm

What: ​AI has changed what’s easy in protein engineering. Structure prediction, de novo binder and antibody design, developability and immunogenicity triage, sequence optimization - work that took years now takes months and even days. The harder question is what that actually buys us. A pipeline moves at the speed of its slowest step, and a step getting cheaper only shortens the timeline if that step was the one holding things up.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 5:30-8pm

What: Data center opposition is the issue bringing together MAGA farmers and feminist academics, conservative NIMBYs and Bernie bros. Midwest comedians are calling it the "most bipartisan issue since beer." New York has just passed a statewide moratorium: the first in the country, but probably not the last.

​Honestly, we didn't get it. So we spent 10 days road-tripping across data center sites in Wisconsin and Michigan to try and find out. We talked to residents, technicians, politicians, activists, planners, and businesspeople to learn why Americans hate them so much — water? AI anxiety? billionaires? something else? — and whether there's a way to build them right.

​Join us at Notion HQ for drinks, bites, and a short presentation and Q&A. Doors/refreshments at 5:30; program from 6-7; hang out until 8. Capacity is limited so please RSVP!

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.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 9am-4pm

What: Build AI agents faster, from prototype to production at MongoDB.local Build Fest San Francisco.

​MongoDB is the data platform for the agentic era. Spend a day learning alongside the founders, architects, and engineers shipping high-performance agents into production — then celebrate at the Builders' Afterparty, featuring a special DJ set (TBA).

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