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- SF IRL - June 1st, 2026
SF IRL - June 1st, 2026
A curated newsletter showcasing the top tech & startup events in San Francisco
Jonathan Chang
June 01, 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 #197.
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
June 2-3, 2026 - Microsoft Build - San Francisco
Location: Keynotes (Palace of Fine Arts); Sessions and Expo (Fort Mason)
What: This hands-on, no-fluff event is for professional developers and engineers to immerse themselves in the latest advancements across Azure, GitHub, and AI development. After 10 long years we are coming back to San Francisco for 2 days of building together. Learn more. (#MicrosoftPartner)
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
June 2nd, 2026 - MotherDuck + DuckDB June Meetup
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5:30-7:30pm
What: Join us for a special edition of our MotherDuck + DuckDB meetup at our event space "The Dive"! Hear some talks and meet good folks. If you are new to DuckDB or you are a power user, we have you covered. This month, AI is also at the heart of both topics.
June 2nd, 2026 - fal Presents: the 3D GenMedia Meetup
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6-9pm
What: For the people obsessed with 3D, AI, gaming, and generative media.
Join fal and a group of frontier builders exploring the future of AI-generated materials, virtual worlds, animation, and 3D tooling. Expect food, live demos, and a room full of people building exciting things.
June 3rd, 2026 - Hardware Hiring Dinner @ Studio 45 | Hiring Electrical, Mechanical, and Robotic Engineers
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6:30-8:30pm
What: We're pulling together the people powering the future of hardware talent including the recruiters, founders, and engineering leads deciding who builds the next generation of physical infrastructure.
Finding great engineers is one of the hardest hiring jobs right now. Deeptech funding is at record highs, the problems are bigger than they've been in a generation, and the engineers who can solve them are hard to find.
June 5th, 2026 - Immigrant Founders Walk with Venturous Counsel
Location: San Francisco
Time: 2:30-4pm
What: The Bay Area's startup scene draws its strength from founders and investors who've come from every corner of the globe. That diversity isn't a footnote, it's the engine. Varied backgrounds, lived experiences, and different ways of solving problems are what make innovation here so resilient and so electric.
Come join us for a casual walk and connect with others in the startup world who know what it's like to build something from the ground up and far from where they started. No decks, no small talk traps, no hidden agenda - just real conversation with people who genuinely understand the journey. We'll move, we'll talk, and there might even be some free legal wisdom floating around if you catch the right person.
June 6th, 2026 - Figma Field Days: SF Picnic & Bouquets
Location: San Francisco
Time: 1-3pm
What: Join The Figma for Edu team for the first event of Figma Field Days, our summer series bringing together interns who care about design, craft, and community.
We're taking over Graham Street Lawn for an afternoon of bouquet making, charcuterie boards, lawn games, and the kind of easy, unhurried conversation that only happens when you're sitting on a blanket in the sun.
June 7th, 2026 - Flip the Script: WWDC Watch Party + Mac Dev Conference on Building, Distributing & Monetizing AI Apps by MacPaw
Location: Hillsbourogh
Time: 11:30am
What: Two days for app developers, AI builders, and product founders, built around the parts WWDC doesn't cover.
🎁 Prizes worth showing up for: Mac mini and Meta Glasses!
Day 1. The working playbook. A panel on what AI-first actually means for product decisions and how on-device vs. on-cloud affects them. A live demo of shipping an AI app without burning your margin. A hot-chair session on monetizing outside the App Store, with people who've done it.
Day 2. WWDC keynote watch party, then hands-on. Watch the Apple keynote in a room of your peers. Group breakdown of what it really means once the hype clears. Then, workshops, pick your track:
June 8th, 2026 - Design Chat with Joel Lewenstein
Location: San Francisco
Time: 4:30-6pm
What: South Park Commons is delighted to host Joel Lewenstein for our Design Chat series with Soleio.
Event Details
4:30pm: Doors Open
5pm-6pm: Design Chat
Joel leads the design team at Anthropic, and previously worked at Airtable, Quora, and Hustle. Outside of work he's a self-published children's book author and amateur magician.
June 9th, 2026 - Festival: Celebrating humanity in the age of AI
Location: San Francisco
Time: 8:30am-8:30pm
What: Join us for an inaugural gathering designed for people who believe the future is not something we inherit, but something we actively choose. Festival explores the real story of AI. Not the technology’s progress, but the human change that progress causes.
It's a set of conversations we're proud to present: builders, researchers, executives, and journalists, paired to explore the layers shaping the opportunities ahead. From the raw materials beneath AI to the systems that govern its use, every conversation is grounded in hope, experience, and conviction - celebrating humanity in the age of AI.
June 9th, 2026 - Fork it, Branch it, Bop it: New Primitives for Agents
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5:15-8pm
What: Fork it, branch it, bop it... okay well maybe not bop-it. But we’re seeing a new kind of toy for your agents to play with: Forks and Branches.
Branching your LLM chat or forking your sandbox environment has become the new normal. Agents need these new primitives for isolation and iteration, and we’ve been seeing startups include branching tech across databases, filesystems, dev environments, and infrastructure.
June 10th, 2026 - Cafe Cursor San Francisco
Location: San Francisco
Time: 10am-5pm
What: 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!
June 11th, 2026 - StartOut Con
Location: San Francisco
What: Get ready to experience the future of LGBTQ+ entrepreneurship and innovation at StartOut Con 2026—a high-energy, game-changing 2-day event that’s redefining what it means to disrupt industries and build a more equitable entrepreneurial ecosystem. Join us in San Francisco this Pride Month in person and connect with the trailblazers, dreamers, and doers driving progress at the intersection of innovation and inclusion.
June 11th, 2026 - ClickHouse + Hex AI hackathon
Location: San Francisco
Time: 9:30am
What: One full day. Real tools. Real prizes. ClickHouse and Hex are hosting an in-person AI hackathon where you build something using ClickHouse and Hex solo or in a team of up to 5. Partner engineers will be on-site all day at the expert bar to help you move fast. Breakfast, lunch, drinks, and great company in the mix. We'll end the night with demos, judging, and dinner.
June 11th, 2026 - Build with Cursor: San Francisco
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5-9pm
What: We're bringing together a small group for an evening of building together at the a16z SF office.
How it will work
Bring your laptop.
We'll set you up with comped Cursor credits for the event.
We'll get you access to everything you need.
If you already have an idea, feel free to decide on a project you want to work on prior to coming. If not, you can decide when you arrive.
You're welcome to work with a friend or coworker as well, make sure to have them sign up on Luma.
A bunch of folks from the Cursor team will be working in the same room throughout the evening.
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