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- SF IRL - July 27th, 2026
SF IRL - July 27th, 2026
A curated newsletter showcasing the top tech & startup events in San Francisco
Jonathan Chang
July 27, 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 #203.
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.
Sponsored
Location: Grand Hyatt, San Francisco
Time: 8am - 7pm
What: After years of research and development, Modular is now serving billions of tokens in production. Mojo, the foundation behind all of it, is scaling fast and about to hit a huge milestone. ModCon 2026 is Modular's flagship developer conference, and you can expect major announcements from every level of the Modular stack, alongside tech talks and panels with speakers including Cristiano Amon, Chris Lattner, Paige Bailey, Micah Hill-Smith, Dylan Patel, and more.
ModCon is at capacity, but you can join the waitlist for 50% off if a seat opens up using this exclusive registration link.
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 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
July 28th, 2026 - Customer Obsession in the AI Era ft. Granola
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6-8pm
What: Join us in person in SF!
Support used to mean filing a ticket and waiting. That's changing; the same teams who used to escalate every small fix are now opening the codebase themselves, shipping the change, & moving on. Vicky Firth has watched this shift happen inside Granola's support org firsthand.
Why attend
∙ What actually changes when support can vibe-code a fix
∙ How Granola decides what support should touch vs. what stays with engineering, & how that line has moved
∙ The broader shift for customer-facing teams in the AI era: doing more, faster, without losing the closeness to the customer
July 28th, 2026 - Circle × Pantera: The Agentic Economy
Location: Stanford
Time: 5:30-8:30pm
What: An agentic evening presented by Circle, Pantera Capital, and Stanford Open Lab
Join us on July 28 for an evening exploring how AI agents, payment infrastructure, privacy technologies, and new forms of digital coordination are shaping the emerging agentic economy.
Doors open at 5:30 PM. The program will feature a series of short talks and demos from leaders working across agentic payments, privacy, and investment.
July 28th, 2026 - on Mercury - SF
Location: San Francisco
Time: 9 am
What: Bring the team. It's on Mercury.
Spend the day with Mercury at SŌHN Cafe and get great food, good conversation, and time with the founder community.
On Wednesday, July 29, stop by SŌHN anytime between
9 am–4 pm for food and drinks on Mercury, a live DJ, and a few surprises. Grab breakfast with your team, take a coffee break, or swing by between meetings — we'd love to see you.
Also, IO credit card¹ and Mercury debit card holders, we'll have limited-edition Mercury merch while supplies last.
July 30th, 2026 - Built Different: Auth0 x Stripe Hackathon
Location: San Francisco
Time: 12pm
What: Are you built different? Come hack with Auth0 and Stripe using Stripe Projects. Check out how developers and agents can provision and manage services, including Auth0, from the Stripe CLI here >>
What will you build? A monetized, multi-user SaaS app from scratch using Stripe and Auth0.
Team size? 1-3 (bring your most trusted comrades, or come alone and meet your future co-builders)
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5:30-8pm
What: 🚀 The 2nd Event of the NATEA Silicon Valley 3-Part Startup Series
Beyond the giant AI labs, San Francisco is home to world-class startups quietly transforming diverse industries in every corner.
The AI hype is everywhere, but the real challenge lies in the "Last Mile." While Foundation Models provide the "brain," vertical startups provide the "hands and feet"—the integration, trust, and deep domain knowledge required to make AI work in the real world.
Following our successful kickoff in Palo Alto, the second stop of our series moves to San Francisco to explore the boundary where general intelligence ends and proprietary moats begin. This event is not another high-level AI overview. It is a deep dive into the practical realities of deploying AI in "non-obvious" and unforgiving industries like fintech, architecture.
Expect a raw, zero-slides conversation on the survival of vertical startups in the era of giant models, followed by a high-energy Open Mic session showcasing grassroots builders from the SF ecosystem.
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6-8pm
What: Baseten is proud to present Heavyweights, a series of talks where AI founders learn from the greats.
Few people have navigated how to scale revenue quite like Jeanne DeWitt Grosser.
As one of Stripe's earliest revenue leaders, she helped build the go-to-market motion that turned a developer tool into the payments infrastructure of the internet. Now as COO at Vercel, she’s scaling a platform that's become the default deployment layer for modern web development.
Dannie Herzberg, President at Baseten, will sit down with Jeanne for a candid conversation on what it takes to scale revenue at an ai-native company like Vercel.
July 30th, 2026 - BlueDot SF Launch
Location: San Francisco
Time: 7-10pm
What: We made it. BlueDot Impact's San Francisco office is officially up and running.
Join us for the first of many evenings at our new home: good food, good drinks, and a room full of people working on making AI go well.
We've been looking forward to this for a long time, so come say hi!
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5:30-8pm
What: Behind every enduring company is a founder who understands the metrics that drive it.
The CEO's Guide to Financial Clarity
Pilot welcomes Aureum members and leaders from across the startup ecosystem for an evening exploring one of the most overlooked competitive advantages: making better decisions through financial clarity.
Aug 3rd, 2026 - Agents That Pay
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6-8:30pm
What: Agents That Pay is a live workshop with networking and talks. Bring any agent and leave with it being able to pay.
Our first ever Agents That Pay event was 10x oversubscribed. We heard the feedback loud and clear: "run it again, and make it hands on." So we are. Last time we sat down with Visa, Coinbase, and Exa to talk about the payment stack for the agentic web. This time we're not just talking about it - you're building on it. Note - you must register here as well for the event: http://events.builder.aws.com/d/gcz8kt
Aug 6th, 2026 - SF DEMO NIGHT 🚀 (w/ The AI Collective)
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5:30-8:30pm
What: 2026 is already accelerating fast – new breakthroughs, new companies, and a city doubling down on its role as the global center of AI. This May, we’re bringing together the builders shaping what’s next with 8 hand-picked pre-Series A demos you won’t see anywhere else.
Powered by The AI Collective – here's what's to expect:
⚡️ 8 elite curated demos from the Bay's most visionary founders
🎤 Live Q&A – challenge the builders in real time
🧬 Interactive Demo Night App to connect, follow up, and join waitlists instantly
🏆 Live community voting to crown the night’s champions and enshrine them in our Hall of Fame
Aug 6th, 2026 - Bridging the Agentic Era: The Future of Commerce Cocktail Hour
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6-9pm
What: Join Baselayer and an exclusive group of top fintech and commerce leaders for an intimate evening on the water. Enjoy passed hors d’oeuvres and handcrafted cocktails from our private bar, and step out onto the private, heated terrace for sweeping views of the bay and bridge.
Aug 3rd, 2026 - Extraordinary Founders Dinner (hosted by Andrew Yeung)
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6-8:30pm
What: Hey! Andrew Yeung here.
On Aug 6, I'm returning to SF with my friends at Attio, Plain and Rho to host a dinner for extraordinary founders. The tastemakers of SF.
These are people who've succeeded against the odds. Immigrants who moved thousands of miles to chase something bigger. Builders who created entire categories. Founders who overcame obstacles most never face.
If that's you, I'd love to meet you.
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