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  • SF IRL - Dec 15th, 2025

SF IRL - Dec 15th, 2025

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

Author

Jonathan Chang
December 08, 2025

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 #173.

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!

Day ZeroMeeting the top folks in tech, find your next cofounder, and your next role

Lenders spend over $24B every year hiring agents to perform manual, repetitive servicing work. Existing AI solutions try to automate this, but they treat regulatory guardrails as an afterthought - meaning they can’t guarantee compliance and can’t be trusted with critical servicing workflows.

Kato takes a different approach.

Regulations aren’t an afterthought - they’re the foundation. We start with a regulatory rules system and layer an AI decision engine on top of it. With this architecture, we’re building an AI-powered servicing platform that automates critical workflows across every channel with full compliance and best-in-class recoveries. Human teams are then free to focus only on the judgment-driven work that truly needs them.

Kato is founded by a team with deep operating expertise in financial services and software engineering:

  • Pratik Risbud (CEO/Co-Founder): Former Investment Banker at Goldman Sachs and led Credit/Operations at Brex

  • David Zhu (CTO/Co-Founder): Former Software Engineer at Google and Engineering Manager at Brex

Kato is backed by institutional capital from Pear VC and angel investors from top tech companies such as Brex, Bridge, and Square. We are looking for top talent to join our team and power our growth.

We’re looking for a Founding GTM Strategy & Operations hire to help build the operational machinery that turns our early traction into a repeatable, scalable revenue engine. This is one of the most critical hires at Kato - someone who will work directly with the CEO to build out our sales motion, strengthen our brand, and create leverage across the go-to-market function.

This is a role for someone who is hungry, resourceful, and wants outsized career growth. You’ll help build the GTM engine from the ground up, and once it’s running smoothly, you’ll have the option to deepen your role in sales or expand into other high-priority areas of the business (marketing, recruiting, operations) depending on where you want to grow.

The role is full-time and in-person in San Francisco (4 days/week in the office).

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: 2025 has been nothing short of historic – record crowds, breakout startups, and a wave of innovation that’s reshaped the city’s tech scene. This December, we’re finishing stronger than ever with our grand finale: 8 hand-picked pre-Series A demos that prove why San Francisco remains the beating heart of AI.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 10:30am-12pm

What: South Park Commons is delighted to host Kevin Scott, CTO of Microsoft, as part of our -1 to Now series!

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-8:30pm

What: AI is reshaping how the best product teams build. Join us for a private dinner with the leaders driving that change.

​Unicorner + Bolt.new are bringing together 20 Heads of Product, Product Leads, and Founders for a private, curated dinner. Expect sharp insights, great food, and an honest conversation about where AI fits into product strategy. Featuring special guest, Bolt CEO Eric Simons.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-8:30pm

What: ​Join Harrison Chase (Co-founder and CEO, LangChain) and Jason Ginsberg (Head of Engineering, Product at Cursor) for a fireside chat on coding agent UX, how teams are building with Cursor, and what trends Jason is excited about as we head into 2026.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 5:30-10pm

What: ​MCP Night returns this holiday season, bringing the developer community together at the forefront of AI and MCP. Join us at the historic Regency Ballroom for another incredible evening of demos and discussions.

​What to expect:

  • ​A dynamic panel discussion with Anthropic's creator of MCP, David Soria Parra, and OpenAI's MCP Lead, Nick Cooper.

  • ​Live demos and Q&As with engineering leaders building with MCP

  • ​Private afterparty with food, drinks, and a few seasonal surprises

Location: San Francisco

Time: 5:30-8:30pm

What: ​Are you frustrated by building a "perfect" product only to see 10 users try and leave?

​Do you have strong user growth, but revenue is barely moving?

​Are you stuck at a growth plateau where your previous tactics no longer work?

​If these questions hit home, you need more than just hope—you need a proven playbook.

​Join this exclusive panel with top founders and executives! Uncover the hard-won strategies to master your GTM and ignite profitable, sustainable growth for your AI application. Stop struggling with vanity metrics and start building a breakthrough business.

Dec 10th, 2025 - Compute Poker Night

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6:30-11pm

What: Poker chips = GPU chips! A game night for AI infra founders, researchers, and investors to play, talk, and trade compute.

  • ​No buy-ins — play for your share of $30K in Crusoe cloud credits (max $10K per company).

  • ​Light snacks and beverages will be served.

  • ​All games will begin promptly at 7:00 PM.

Dec 10th, 2025 - Coffee Chats

Location: San Francisco

Time: 9am-4pm

What: ​If you're a developer or building with AI, we'd love for you to come meet other people building cool things. We'll have founders and founding teams from some of the hottest startups, developers from the hyperscalers, researchers at the frontier labs, and more all in attendance.

Dec 11th, 2025 - Startup Rage Room

Location: San Francisco

Time: 7-9:30pm

What: ​Building a successful startup is stressful. So are the Holidays. Destroying stuff isn’t.

​We’re looking to blow off some steam, and figured you could too. Come join us and fellow AI builders/founders in beating the absolute life out of some printers, fax machines, and anything else we can get our hands on. Hammers, bats, and clubs supplied.

​Move fast, break everything.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 10am-1pm

What: Your product is one simulation away from making more sense.

Start your Thursday with strong coffee, flaky croissants, and a live look at how real users will actually behave inside your product - before you ship anything.

​We’re opening our doors for a drop-in morning where founders, PMs, and designers can bring whatever they’re building and watch Blok’s AI agents stress-test it in real time. It’s fast, it’s fun, and it’s the closest thing you’ll get to a usability lab powered by controlled chaos.

Dec 11th, 2025 - Christmas Game Night

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-10pm

What: The simulation is getting festive...

​Join us at Blok HQ for a Christmas Game Night packed with retro arcade machines, board-game showdowns, card-game chaos, and the kind of laughter that only happens when smart people get wayyyy too competitive.

​We’re talking:
🕹️ Time Crisis, Pac-Man, Galaga, Mortal Kombat
🎲 Secret Hitler, Catan, Risk, Monopoly, Chess
🃏 Uno, card games, party games, mystery games
🪵 And of course… Jenga (high stakes only)

Dec 12th, 2025 - AI Builders Day San Francisco

Location: San Francisco

Time: 9am-3pm

What: ​AI Builders Day San Francisco ⚡️

​We’re bringing AI Builders Day to San Francisco — connecting the city’s top founders, VCs, and engineers for a full day of building, mentorship, and demos.

​Hosted in collaboration with leading venture partners including Bessemer Venture Partners, ICONIQ and Antler. We’re creating space for founders to co-work on their startup, get mentorship, and demo your product.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 7-11pm

What: Too much shipping, not enough sip-ing. 🥂 Join us for an end of year celebration, hosted by Fireworks, along with AWS, Micro1, Parallel, and Genspark. ✨

​We'll be at Heron Arts - there will be food, drinks, a photo booth, your favorite AI merch, and no AI slop 👀

Location: San Francisco

Time: 7-10pm

What: It's time to put down your laptops and celebrate the holidays with a final sendoff, brought to you by Reducto, Modal, Delve, Exa, Lighthouse, and Momentic!

We're closing out 2025 with custom holiday cocktails, Michelin-starred canapés from Mister Jiu's, exclusive goodies and merch, lively music, and a photographer to capture it all.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 7-9pm

What: ​We are so excited to present, Big Chip Club! Come enjoy your childhood favorite cereals, eat breakfast for dinner, and marvel at the big chips of Cerebras. We'll have tons of desks and office space for folks to come co-work.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 9am

What: Join us during the pre-Christmas week for an exclusive session designed for founders who want to scale faster, avoid common mistakes, and get direct feedback from Igor Ryabenkiy, one of the world's leading investors.

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