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  • SF IRL - Feb 16th, 2026

SF IRL - Feb 16th, 2026

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

Author

Jonathan Chang
February 16, 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 #182.

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: Lightfield is hosting our next Founding Sales Masterclass with Mark Roberge, founding CRO of HubSpot, who built one of SaaS’s most iconic revenue engines - scaling sales from 1 to 450 people and driving 6,000%+ growth.

Today, Mark is the bestselling author of The Sales Acceleration Formula and a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, where he teaches the science behind modern go-to-market, and how to build predictable, data-driven revenue engines.

The transition from founder-led sales to a scalable revenue engine is where most startups stall or break. In this masterclass, you’ll get practical insights on scaling your sales org from early traction to repeatable growth - straight from one of the pioneers of modern sales science.

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.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6:30-9:30pm

What: Join us for an intimate founder dinner hosted by Norwest, ElevenLabs and Rho, bringing together a highly curated group of people from across the ecosystem. Over food, drinks, and conversation, we’ll connect on what it means to build impactful companies, share lessons from the journey, and celebrate the community of entrepreneurs driving meaningful change in AI.

​​RSVP now, as spots are limited

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: 6:30-9:30pm

What: Join us for an intimate founder dinner hosted by Norwest, ElevenLabs and Rho, bringing together a highly curated group of people from across the ecosystem. Over food, drinks, and conversation, we’ll connect on what it means to build impactful companies, share lessons from the journey, and celebrate the community of entrepreneurs driving meaningful change in AI.

​​RSVP now, as spots are limited

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-9pm

What: 2026 is the year we go bigger – more ambitious, more momentum, more history in the making. Our Demo Nights have become the proving ground for breakout teams and the city’s most energized builders, and this February we’re taking it up another notch with 8 hand-picked pre-Series A demos you’ll be hearing about long before the rest of the industry catches on.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-8pm

What: You are invited to an exclusive event hosted by Brex.

​Scaling SF - What Tech CFOs Bring to the Public Sector.

  • ​Panelists: 

    • ​Ned Segal- Chief of Housing and Economic Development for San Francisco

    • ​Anshul Shah - Head of Accounting & CFO Partnerships

​Ned Segal is the Chief of Housing and Economic Development for the City and County of San Francisco and a passionate San Franciscan. He previously served as CFO at Twitter, SVP of Finance for Intuit’s Small Business Group, and a board member of Tipping Point Community.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 5:30-10pm

What: ​Artificial intelligence is reshaping digital creation—transforming static visuals into responsive, real-time experiences. From virtual performers to interactive avatars, new AI models are enabling digital characters that think, move, and adapt with human-like realism. 

​Join us for a panel discussion featuring leading experts from both academia and industry who will present the latest techniques for generating realistic characters—diffusion transformers, GANs, and 3D modeling. The conversation will cover the benefits, limitations, and possibilities of combining these approaches to achieve stable and convincing results.

Feb 19th, 2026 - Healthcare AI Happy Hour

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-8pm

What: Join us for a curated healthcare AI happy hour at our office!

Meet builders and operators working at the intersection of healthcare and AI. We will serve drinks and light bites.

Feb 19th, 2026 - The 2026 Fundraising Playbook: What Founders Must Do Today

Location: Palo Alto

Time: 5:30-8pm

What: ​Join us for an in-depth conversation with four leading investors as they break down how fundraising will evolve in 2026 — the new expectations, the metrics that matter, and how early-stage founders can position themselves to win in a rapidly shifting market.

​This event is designed for founders actively exploring fundraising, and anyone building in AI, SaaS, or frontier tech. You'll walk away with a clear understanding of what investors are looking for today, what’s changing, and how to adapt your strategy now so you’re not left behind.

Feb 21st, 2026 - RETURN OF THE AGENTS - Hackathon

Location: San Francisco

Time: 9am-9:30pm

What: Build the future of Generative AI. Selected teams will be considered for Afore Capital’s pre-seed program ($500k–$2M+).

​Following the success of Agent Foundry, Return of the Agents is the third and final installment in our trilogy of hackathons — pushing the frontier of generative AI. This exclusive gathering convenes top founders, ambitious developers, and frontier researchers to create venture-scale products.

Return of the Agents is a hybrid hackathon - anchored by an in-person build weekend, with remote participation available for select teams.

​Over one high-energy weekend, 500+ hand-selected builders will design, prototype, and deploy groundbreaking systems — from state-of-the-art image and video generation to multimodal platforms redefining how we create, communicate, and collaborate.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 9:30am-1:30pm

What: Tired of seeing AI SaaSy ad builds?

​Come explore how to build something meaningful with like-minded people.

​Our goal is explore what's possible with the latest in machine learning for better education.

​The status quo is bleak (outdated, debt, and limited access), and we want to help fix that.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-9pm

What: ​We're bringing together 20 seed to Series A founders from our community—founders that we believe have a unicorn trajectory.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-9pm

What: Join us for a formal Lunar New Year Gala bringing together founders, operators, and investors in AI for an evening focused on connection, reflection, and community. This gathering is designed for those actively building or backing companies who value thoughtful conversation and meaningful relationships.

​Rooted in the spirit of Lunar New Year, the night will celebrate renewal, culture, and collective momentum, with space to spotlight founders and builders in a natural, celebratory way. The goal is simple: foster genuine connections and start the year energized by community. Dress to impress!

Location: San Francisco

Time: 9:30am-7:30pm

What: ​We've brought together serious firepower: AWS, Modulate, OpenAI, Tavily, Yutori , Numeric and Neo4j backing you with integrations, APIs, and inspiration. Your ideas won't just stay ideas. You'll build them into working agents and real products.

​🚀 In just one day, teams will prototype AI copilots, autonomous research agents, customer-support brains, real-time data explorers, and creative design systems. The kind of tools real companies ship.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-8pm

What: Lightfield is hosting our next Founding Sales Masterclass with Mark Roberge, founding CRO of HubSpot, who built one of SaaS’s most iconic revenue engines - scaling sales from 1 to 450 people and driving 6,000%+ growth.

Today, Mark is the bestselling author of The Sales Acceleration Formula and a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, where he teaches the science behind modern go-to-market, and how to build predictable, data-driven revenue engines.

The transition from founder-led sales to a scalable revenue engine is where most startups stall or break. In this masterclass, you’ll get practical insights on scaling your sales org from early traction to repeatable growth - straight from one of the pioneers of modern sales science.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 9:30-4pm

What: ​Join the Stripe founder community for a day of hands-on building and coworking with the Stripe team. Whether you’re looking for a chance to connect with other founders, 1:1 guidance from the Stripe team, or just a change of scenery, we’d love to have you join. 

​Build Days are coworking days with Stripe designed specifically for founders, whether you’re already building on Stripe or just getting started. Plus, get lunch, coffee, and swag on us. 

​Don't miss the morning as we kick off with an intimate fireside chat featuring Zach Lloyd, CEO of Warp.dev. Warp is an agentic development environment that empowers developers to ship better software more quickly. Previously the principal engineer at Google, cofounder and CTO at SelfMade, and the interim CTO at TIME, Zach will walk us through his founding journey to Warp. Join us in the room to hear his practical advice on how to build and scale a company in the AI era.

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