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SF IRL - July 13th, 2026

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

Author

Jonathan Chang
July 13, 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 #201.

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. 

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: 7-9pm

What: Hosted by Women in AI

​Join Women in AI for an intimate, private dinner bringing together senior GTM leaders from enterprise and mid-market B2B companies.

​Connect with CMOs, VPs of Marketing, VPs of Demand Generation, and RevOps leaders over great food and meaningful conversation as we exchange ideas on AI, go-to-market strategy, and the future of revenue growth.

​Applications only. We keep the group small on purpose.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 5:30-8:30pm

What: An evening for people already building agents. If you've shipped one, you know the demo isn't the hard part. In production, agents struggle to read the live web, forget context between sessions, and hit auth and permission problems the moment they act inside a real app.

​This night covers three layers that address that - reading the web, persistent memory, and secure actions with the teams demoing each one. Three short talks, a Q&A, then time to talk to people working on the same problems.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 5:30-8:30pm

What: ​Every model choice is a bet. It shouldn't be a blind one.

​Join us for a fireside conversation with Deedy Das, Partner at Menlo Ventures, and Shashank Goyal, Founding Engineer & Head of Provider Ecosystem at OpenRouter, on how to make smarter model decisions. Drawing on investments across the AI infrastructure stack and insights from 750T+ tokens routed across every major model and provider, they’ll explore what matters beyond benchmarks.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 7-10pm

What: training LoRAs on Krea 2 at our late night gallery / cafe.

this is a late session for learning how to train a LoRA on a specific style, object, or character on top of Krea 2, a new foundation image model, with friends old and new. we'll share n tell our creations at the end :~)

July 14th, 2026 - THE SF DATABASE MEETUP

Location: San Francisco

Time: 5:30-8pm

What: ​Join us for PlanetScale’s first SF database meetup! We’ll be joined by Ovais Tariq for an in depth on his conversation building and scaling database systems at Uber and now at Tigris Data.

​This will be an in depth conversation covering the tradeoffs between MySQL and MyRocks, performing migrations at Uber scale between engines, the challenges of moving data between regions at a global scale and mo

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-9pm

What: ​We've all been to the AI events. The panels. The hot takes. The "we're exploring AI" platitudes. Everyone's talking — almost nobody is showing.

​This is the opposite of that.

​Show & Tell: AI for GTM is a demo-only event for go-to-market teams actually building with AI. No slides. No pitches. No thought leadership. Just practitioners opening up their laptops and walking you through the workflows they've built — the ones they use at work, every day.

​We're bringing together 5–6 GTM operators and engineers who will each demo a real AI-powered workflow live: how they set it up, why they built it, what it actually does, and what they'd do differently. Expect to see real tools, real data flows, and real results — not a product pitch dressed up as a case study.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-9pm

What: ​Join MongoDB for a paddle-packed evening at SPIN San Francisco on Wednesday, July 15th!

​We’re bringing together AI developers, architects, researchers, and AI leaders for a casual night of ping pong, food, drinks, and great company - No presentations. No agenda. Just pong. 😎🏓

​With plenty of tables in play all evening, you can choose between two ways to play:

  1. ​🏆 Play to win: Arrive by 6:30 PM to join the AI Builder Tournament for a chance to win a Apple AirPods Max 2 🎧(1st place), Ninja Creami 🍦(2nd place), or a $100 Amazon gift card 💳 (3rd place).

  2. ​🏓 Free play: Prefer to keep it casual? We’ll have open tables all evening, plus plenty of food and drinks!

July 16th, 2026 - Workshop: Mastering AI Observability

Location: San Francisco

Time: 3-6pm

What: Your agent is in production. Now you need to understand what it is doing, where it is failing, and what to improve next.

In this hands-on workshop, you’ll use Braintrust to turn production traces into targeted evals. We’ll use Topics to surface patterns across real agent traces, identify the issues worth investigating, and build custom scorers to measure them directly.

July 16th, 2026 - AI x Biosecurity — LatchBio Benchmark Launch

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-9pm

What:​ We're launching RefusalBench, a new benchmark probing how well frontier models handle biosecurity-related questions. Come for the following:

  • ​Technical talks on the challenges of evaluating frontier AI for biosecurity, followed by a social.

  • ​Biosecurity themed food and drinks provided.

​We've been heads-down on biosecurity at Latch for a while now, and we're excited to finally open up and share what we've been building. This space is still small, and we think it's stronger when it's shared - so we're opening our doors to people from frontier labs , biotech, and the broader AI safety community to come hear the talks, meet the people already working in it, and see where we've landed.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 7-8pm

What: Join us for a conversation with Culture Slop's Andrew McClintock and Jason Yuan, moderated by Maritza Lerman Yoes.

July 17th, 2026 - Loop Engineering Hackathon

Location: San Francisco

Time: 9:30am

What: Calling all engineers, PMs, founders, and hackers to dive into loop engineering. Build self-directing agent loops that plan, act, observe, and self-correct across the full build cycle, from spec to implementation to testing and iteration.

​Test that half-built idea, ship something scrappy-but-real, and meet like-minded people solving hard problems.

Location: Stanford

Time: 10am

What: ​Win up to $5M in Seed Funding | July 19th, 10am–6pm PT

​Join GDG Stanford for an elite hackathon where you'll build cutting-edge projects with Google Gemini and earn 30-minute VC pitch meetings with top-tier investors.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 10am-6pm

What: Founders and startup builders (engineers, designers, PMs): join us at Cafe Cursor.

​We're taking over a cafe in North Beach and inviting Cursor users to swing by.

​Bring your laptop with you and spend some time building with other Cursor users and meet the Cursor team. We'll have some Cursor credits and coffee waiting for you. You can also just pop by for coffee and to say hi!

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6:30-8:30pm

What: Talk growth, deals, and everything in between over a private dinner with B2B AI Series A+ founders.

​Join us for good eats and even better discussion with leaders building the next generation of B2B AI companies, hosted by Arceus in the heart of San Francisco. The best insights rarely come from blog posts or panels; they come from founders a step ahead or a step behind you, comparing notes on the same climb.

​Our goal for the evening is simple: everyone leaves with something they can use, whether that's a tactic for the deal you're negotiating, a warning about the mistake you're about to make, or a few peers you can text when the next hard call comes up.

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