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- SF IRL - Feb 2nd, 2026
SF IRL - Feb 2nd, 2026
A curated newsletter showcasing the top tech & startup events in San Francisco
Jonathan Chang
February 02, 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 #180.
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.
Sponsored
Known is a new dating company rethinking online dating by replacing swiping with conversation.
Founded by Celeste Amadon and Asher Allen, Known uses voice-based AI to better understand users. Values, personality, communication style, and relationship intent. Not just photos and prompts. The app offers conversational onboarding and continuously refines compatibility over time, helping people cut through the noise and go on meaningful dates with the right matches. This is less about maximizing matches and more about maximizing alignment. Dating optimized for depth, not dopamine.
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
Feb 4th, 2026 - Cathay Coffee Club (ft. Jonathan Chang @ ElevenLabs)
Location: San Francisco
Time: 8:30-10:30am
What: Agenda:
8:30-9:00 - arrival and breakfast
9-9:15 - quick presentation
9:15-10:30 - mixing and mingling
Come grab a quick espresso, pour over, and/or breakfast with your friends from Cathay Innovation while we feature Jonathan Chang - startup partnerships lead at ElevenLabs.
Jonathan will give a quick overview in the beginning of ElevenLabs and how he can help support startups (and may also have some extra goodies for those in attendance 👀). Otherwise, keeping this unstructured to chat on anything and everything Voice AI.
Feb 3rd, 2026 - Cloudflare IRL
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5:30-8:30pm
What: Cloudflare IRL with PlanetScale & Replicate
Tuesday, February 3 // 5:30 PM - 8:30 PM PST
930 Alabama St, San Francisco
What we're doing:
→ Live demos
→ Hosted by Cloudflare + PlanetScale + Replicate
→ Food, drinks, music
→ vibes (both in the coding and music sense)
Feb 3rd, 2026 - CoCreate Demo Day: AI + Design Meetup 2026
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5-8pm
What: Join Design Buddies and Workato for an interactive learning night on designing with AI tools and designing for AI products.
Who Should Attend:
Designers/founders/engineers building AI products
Design students (highly encouraged) pursuing AI projects
Creatives interested in AI, in SF/Bay Area
Feb 3rd, 2026 - AI for Science Series: SF
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5:30-8pm
What: Join Pillar VC in San Francisco, London and Boston as we bring together founders, researchers, theorists, field-builders and funders - all building at the intersection of AI and science.
Each event features a ‘Speakers’ Corner,’ where 15-minute visions for the future will be shared by friends of Pillar VC, alongside a unique element - ranging from the HQs of pioneering builders to experimental architecture.
Join us to meet peers and get inspired to build, all over great food and drinks.
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6:30-8:30pm
What: How will AI change the balance of power between the United States, China, Europe, and Russia? Does it favor democracies or autocracies? And will it make the world more or less secure?
Most conversations about AI and geopolitics oscillate between techno-optimism ("whoever leads in AI wins everything") and vague concern ("AI could be destabilizing"). We're convening people who can go deeper- examining the actual technical capabilities, the structural advantages and vulnerabilities of different political systems, and what strategic competition looks like when the technology itself is evolving this quickly.
Feb 3rd, 2026 - Neural Nets & Nightcaps
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5-7pm
What: Neural Nets & Nightcaps is an informal happy hour hosted by NEAR AI, Phala, and the AI Collective. Join fellow builders and researchers for good conversation, drinks, and connections at the intersection of AI and the open web.
Feb 3rd, 2026 - Scrappy AI Founders Play Pickleball
Location: San Francisco
Time: 4:30-8pm
What: Invite-only series of pickleball games for 12 AI founders & investors in San Francisco & South Bay.
Equipment, coaches & private courts are on us!
Feb 4rd, 2026 - Coffeeflare
Location: San Francisco
Time: 8am-12pm
What: We’re taking over Sightglass Coffee for a laid-back hang with the Cloudflare team. Come nerd out about agents, share what you're building, and get the scoop on what’s shipping next.
Feb 4th, 2026 - Flying Car Racing, Robot Battles and More: How New Sports Media is Having a Love Affair with Deeptech
Location: San Francisco
Time: 7-9pm
What: Join us for a panel discussion with Dezso Molnar, the founder of the Flying Car Racing League and the Streetwing, a fully electric street-legal flying car, Gui Cavalcanti, one of the founders of MegaBots, a giant fighting robot that battled a similar Japanese bot for supremacy, Scott Murphy, a director at Ultimate Fighting Bots (UFB) and Elliot Roth, one of the creators of the Taser Knife Fighting League, moderated by Lauren Tannhauser for a panel discussion sharing stories at the edge of media to create new sporting events that leverage emerging technology for entertainment.
Feb 4th, 2026 - 🧠 The AI Collective San Francisco | Collective Intelligence: Live from San Francisco
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5-7:30pm
What: No pilot. No soft launch. We're recording the first Collective Intelligence podcast live, in front of 300 people, with no script and no safety net.
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5:30-8:30pm
What: Vibe Shift: The Builders Behind the Models
Where foundation models meet product imagination.
Foundation models are evolving fast—but the real differentiation is happening where research meets real-world products. Join Rocket and Twill for an in-person evening with the builders shaping how AI actually gets shipped.
This event brings together leaders across applied science, AI engineering, and product to unpack what it really takes to turn foundation models into scalable, user-loved experiences. Expect candid insights, practical lessons, and forward-looking perspectives from those working at the frontier.
Feb 5th, 2026 - Dust x Anthropic: It's called having Skills
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6-9pm
What: What if your AI agent could go from "I'm not sure how to help with that" to "I've been doing this for years" in about three seconds?
That's what Skills are: modular capabilities that let AI agents pick up specialized expertise on demand.
Anthropic and Dust are teaming up for an evening of demos, architecture talk, and tons of delicious food.
Feb 5th, 2026 - ✶ Fractal Alignment ✶
Location: San Francisco
Time: 10am-6pm
What: Fractal alignment: aligning ourselves, our teams, and our AIs.
A one-day immersion for founders and builders who want to upgrade themselves and their life’s work.
Agenda:
Building resilience for the intelligence age - Wojciech Zaremba, co-founder of OpenAI
Organic alignment - Emmett Shear, co-founder & CEO of Softmax
Warriors & caretakers of existence - Bryan Johnson, founder of Don’t Die
Human gradient descent
Aligning organics - Scott Phoenix, partner at 50Y and co-founder of Vicarious AI
AI & human secrets - Olivia Tai from Synthetic Wisdom
Unconference talks with reinforcement from human feedback
“Put the AI in the box” competition with fabulous prizes :)
Feb 6th, 2026 - The Slice Lab by Sentry & Vercel
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5-8pm
What: Join Sentry and Vercel as we take over Joyride Pizza Yerba Buena Gardens and transform it into The Slice Lab on the Friday of Super Bowl Week.
We’ll be in the heart of the action, overlooking Yerba Buena Park while BAHC hosts the Fan Zone — think of this as the exclusive VIP section from all the fun around. Whether you’re bouncing between the Pro Bowl at Moscone, the Fan Zone, or the Innovation Summit, swing by just steps away for pizza, beer, and plenty of goodies.
Feb 7th, 2026 - AI-Memory Hackathon by cognee
Location: San Francisco
Time: 9am-6pm
What: You’ll work with a local model + a prebuilt knowledge graph over realistic finance and operations data (vendors, invoices, payments, discounts). The core challenge: turn question-answering into useful agents, tools, or workflows that solve concrete problems. Think:
Finance or ops agents that reason over transactions
Auditing, anomaly detection, vendor analysis, or internal QA tools
Interfaces or automations powered by structured + free-text answers
Systems that combine memory, retrieval, and inference locally
Feb 9th, 2026 - WorkOS AI Night w/ The Pragmatic Engineer
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5:30-8pm
What: WorkOS AI Night with The Pragmatic Engineer
Love APIs and dev tools? Building something cool with AI?
Join us for pizza, lightning demos, and a fireside chat with The Pragmatic Engineer, Gergely Orosz. Meet new friends, founders, and learn how folks are building at the edge.
Feb 12th, 2026 - ⛷️ Ski Camp AI: Building Agents and MCP
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5:30-8:30pm
What: Camp AI is back by popular demand with a winter twist: Ski Camp AI on February 12, in San Francisco ⛷️ with speakers from Anthropic, Mintlify, Atomicwork, Inkeep AI, and Tusk AI.
Tech founders, builders, and enthusiasts are invited to an evening of demos, a panel discussion, and conversations around AI and MCP development. This is a chance to network with up-and-coming startups and leaders developing AI technologies.
Feb 12th, 2026 - Robot Demo Day
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5:30-8:30pm
What: Have you built an awesome robot, research or other robotics related project? Here's your opportunity to show it off to the world. Join us for a night of robot demos and meet fellow builders.
Feb 14th, 2026 - Build What You Love - Women in Tech Hackathon
Location: San Francisco
Time: 9am-5pm
What: Following a series of successful community-first hackathons, we’re hosting the largest hybrid AI hackathon for women and nonbinary folks in tech — with in-person attendance in the Bay Area and a fully supported virtual experience.
We’re proud to be supported by Replit, Vercel, Daytona, MiniMax, and BEM, helping make this an accessible, high-impact build experience for our community.
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