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SF IRL - July 20th, 2026

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

Author

Jonathan Chang
July 20, 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 #202.

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

July 21st, 2026 - Last Mile Agent Hackathon

Location: San Francisco

Time: 5:30-8:30pm

What: Join us for an AI hackathon designed for anybody frustrated by AI agents completing real world tasks.

​This is not a high-pressure coding competition. It is an exploration of what agents can do when they aren't limited by verification codes, making payments, voice calls in a different language, and so much more. Please feel free to bring an AI agent you have started, but never finished.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 5:30-7:30pm

What: ​The explosion of AI and SaaS tools has transformed how modern companies build and scale go-to-market teams. But with thousands of solutions promising better productivity, automation, and insights, many organizations find themselves managing bloated tech stacks, disconnected data, and rising software costs.

​Join us for an engaging discussion on how today’s fastest-growing companies are designing lean, high-impact GTM stacks that drive revenue without unnecessary complexity. We’ll explore the tools teams actually use, how they integrate systems across sales, marketing, customer success, and revenue operations, and how leaders evaluate which tools to adopt, consolidate, or retire.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-8:30pm

What: ​Agents can already write code and answer questions. The real frontier is letting them use a computer — seeing the screen, moving the cursor, clicking through apps, and navigating the web the way a person does.

​Join the people building that future — from the frontier lab that pioneered computer use to the infrastructure teams making web agents fast and reliable at scale — for an unfiltered conversation on where computer use agents work today, where they still break, and what's next.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 5-8pm

What: ​Join us on July 22, from 5:00–8:00 PM PT, at the Databricks San Francisco office for a technical meetup on building effective multi-agent coding workflows.

Coding agents have become a critical part of engineering work, and many of us use multiple coding agents every day. Using multiple agents together raises some important questions: which agents should handle which tasks? How do you organize tools, sessions, and policies across multiple agents?

Location: San Francisco

Time: 5:15-8pm

What: Making the surreal, real. ​Join us for Surreal in San Francisco, a dinner series held at art galleries.

​The Future of LLMs is a conversation we keep coming back to because it keeps changing. Part 1 left us with more questions than answers, so we're gathering a small group again to go deeper.

​Over dinner, we'll get into where large language models are actually headed: what's plateauing, what's compounding, and where the next real gains come from - reasoning, post-training, data, and the architectures beginning to challenge the status quo.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 9-11am

What: Event partners: ZeroClick & Corgi

​AI GTM Breakfast is a casual gathering for professionals across go-to-market roles in the AI Developer Tools ecosystem — including developer relations, marketing, partnerships, community, growth, and field marketing.

​Join us at Corgi Cafe in San Francisco for coffee, pastries, and conversations with fellow AI GTM professionals. Exchange ideas, share experiences, and build new connections with others shaping the AI developer ecosystem.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-9pm

What: Join us for an evening of live pitches and demos from hardware founders working on frontier technologies for the physical world.

​We'll be showcasing 6 breakthrough hardware startups pitching to a live panel of leading VCs giving on the spot feedback. Real pitches, real feedback, and the kind of in-person networking that only happens when people who love hardware, build hardware, and invest in hardware are in the room.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 5-8pm

What: ​Nearly every buyer is looking to implement AI. At Campfire, we're winning the most competitive deals on the market, and now working with some of the hottest logos in tech, including Decagon, Replit, and PostHog. We're bringing together some of the best sellers in the Bay Area to discuss what it takes to succeed in a hyper-competitive space.

Join us, as our CEO, John Glasgow, and VP Sales, Chris McDonough, walk through what worked, what almost didn't, and what it actually took to get those logos signed. We'll keep the night going with happy hour, so you can meet the team behind these wins.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 7-11pm

What: ​Ship to Prod is a curated, exclusive, invitation-only black tie gala held alongside Y Combinator’s AI Startup School 2026 in San Francisco.

​Hosted on a private yacht, the event convenes approximately 150 hand-picked attendees across AI startups, research, and early-stage investment.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 10-5pm

What: ​🏁 The most fun you'll have during YC Startup School week.

​There are dozens of events during YC Startup School. Same rooftops, same name tags, same "what are you building?"

​Join us as we take over SF in a convoy of 40 iconic yellow GoCars - cruising from Fisherman's Wharf along the waterfront all the way to Chinatown. It's the most memorable way to meet fellow builders during YC Startup School week.

July 24th, 2026 - Post-Singularity Speakeasy (hosted by 500 Global, Zendesk, CRED)

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-10pm

What: ​Join us for our Post-Singularity Speakeasy Costume Game Night with poker, mafia, magic shows, raffle prizes, DJs, and more. We’ll be at a secret 4-story mansion perched atop North Beach overlooking the Bay. It's unlike anything you've ever experienced this side of AGI.

Play hands most wouldn't at the poker tables. Take part in a game of Mafia and see if investors or founders are better at deception. Be spellbound by a magician from the world-famous Magic Castle in LA. Take your chance at winning an Oura Ring 5, Kylie Jenner Meta Glasses, and more in the raffle, because why the hell not?

July 24th, 2026 - tasteslop w/ Emily Segal

Location: San Francisco

Time: 7-8:30pm

What: Emily Segal coined the term “tasteslop”, which speaks to the sort of slick, recycled modern visuals that we think are cool but feel strangely empty of human idiosyncrasies. It is beautiful blandness, an empty aestheticism, much of it generated by AI platforms such as Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT and replicated by the algorithm.

July 24th, 2026 - JacHacks San Francisco

Location: San Francisco

Time: 8-10am

What: ​After hosting JacHacks at the University of Michigan and launching our first global edition with 500+ builders from 10+ countries, we're bringing the next chapter to San Francisco.

​JacHacks SF is a one day AI hackathon at Founders, Inc. for builders, founders, engineers, designers, and students who want to spend a day shipping alongside some of the Bay Area's most ambitious people.

July 28th, 2026 - Devin for Startups Kickoff

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-10pm

What: Join us for a hands-on working session celebrating the launch of the Devin for Startups program. Bring your laptops with your Devin set up, and we'll guide you through custom workflows, automations, and advanced usage to clear your backlog and help you ship faster! Cohosted by 8VC

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