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- SF IRL - June 8th, 2026
SF IRL - June 8th, 2026
A curated newsletter showcasing the top tech & startup events in San Francisco
Jonathan Chang
June 08, 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.
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Events Coming Up
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 9th, 2026 - Open-Weight Models on Amazon Bedrock with Artificial Analysis, MiniMax, Nvidia and Startups
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5-8:30pm
What: Join us for an inspiring technical evening focused on unlocking the value of open-weight foundation models on Amazon Bedrock.
The fastest-growing use cases in GenAI today, AI coding assistants, autonomous agents, and developer tools, all share one thing in common: they run part of their workloads on open weight models. Companies like Code Rabbit, and Daily are building products on top of models they can fine-tune, deploy flexibly, and scale without vendor lock-in.
June 9th, 2026 - Reimagining Creative Work in the Age of AI w/ Emmett Shine
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5-7:30pm
What: New tools don't just speed up old work. In the right hands, they push boundaries and open a door to what didn’t exist before. Stranger, sharper, more specific. More human, not less.
What can you make now that you couldn't a year ago? What happens when AI is thoughtfully integrated in the design process, not just used as a research tool? And since everyone is talking about taste, yes we’ll talk about that too.
June 9th, 2026 - [Fireside Discussion] From Tokens to Robots
Location: San Francisco
Time: 4:30-8:30pm
What: A fireside discussion on VLAs, robotics, and world models.
What does it actually take to build systems that can see, understand, and act?
This event explores how developers and researchers can use web-scale data to power the next generation of vision, multimodal, and robotics applications. We’ll look at how teams are thinking about training data, data pipelines, and real-world use cases for Vision-Language-Action systems — and why access to the right data layer matters.
June 9th, 2026 - Banking on Startups: An Evening with Immad Akhund
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6-8pm
What: Join us for an in-person evening with Immad Akhund, co-founder and CEO of Mercury, the banking* platform powering hundreds of thousands of startups and small businesses, and one of the more active angel investors in tech.
Our portfolio manager Ankur Nagpal will sit down with Immad for a candid fireside chat on building Mercury from the ground up, what he's learned backing early-stage founders, and where he sees fintech and private markets heading next.
June 9th, 2026 - Antidatasets with Morry Kolman
Location: San Francisco
Time: 7-8pm
What: Roll through Tiat on Tuesday for a lecture from Morry Kolman ahead of the opening of his installation “First Light” at the San Francisco Exploratorium!
Morry Kolman (@WTTDOTM) is a multimedia artist coming to Tiat to debut a new talk about “antidatasets” and the art that can come from the byproducts, forgotten remnants, and blind spots (intentional or not) of data creation and capture. Tracing the concept through artistic interventions over the past century as well as Kolman’s own work with datasets like MNIST, star catalogs, and traffic camera listings, it will flesh out the concept of antidata and explore ways to deploy it in a practice. The talk will be followed by an informal Q&A and discussion, attendees are welcome to come with their own datasets or projects to show and workshop together!
June 10th, 2026 - Pope Leo's Encyclical: AI and the Human Good
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5:30-8:30pm
What: Last month, Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”) on safeguarding the human person in the age of AI. It argues that technologists face a pivotal choice: to build technologies that exploit the vulnerable, concentrate power, and flatten our humanity; or to serve individual dignity and the common good.
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.
June 11th, 2026 - World Cup Watch Party (YC Founders)
Location: San Francisco
Time: 11:30-2:30pm
What: Take a break from the build sprint and catch the World Cup with fellow YC founders at Splash Sports Bar in Thrive City.
Clerk is hosting. Come grab a drink, settle in, and enjoy the first 2026 World Cup match with people who you've probably been meaning to meet anyway.
June 12th, 2026 - World Cup w/ Rootly AI, Twingate, MongoDB, Thine & More!
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5-8:30pm
What: The Ultimate World Cup Watch Party & Tech Mixer ⚽️🤖
Get ready for kickoff! Join Rootly AI, MongoDB, Twingate, and Thine for a high-stakes, high-energy afternoon where world-class soccer meets SF’s tech community.
Whether you’re a die-hard fan tracking every tactical formation or just here for the legendary stadium snacks and networking, we’re bringing the electric energy of the global arena straight to the heart of San Francisco. Come talk shop about building resilient systems, scaling databases, securing networks, and optimizing workflows - all while cheering on the world's best on the big screen.
June 15th, 2026 - Compile 2026 Opening Party
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6-9pm
What: Presented by Cursor + PlanetScale
Join us on June 15th at the Argonaut Hotel as we kick off Compile 2026 together.
We’re bringing together founders, engineers, builders, and friends across the ecosystem for a relaxed evening by the waterfront with good conversations, cocktails, and community.
Doors open at 6pm. We'll be serving light bites, desserts, and Café Cursor espresso martinis.
June 16th, 2026 - Big Data 3.0 - Data Systems for Large Scale Research
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6-9pm
What: Big Data is being re-invented for AI. As models scale, research labs and infra companies are co-designing systems for extreme scale and throughput. We’re in the era of big nodes, fast object storage, high throughput networking, and exabyte scale systems.
Fast evolving research workloads are neither OLAP nor OLTP, and invalidate years of abstraction in existing tools. Memory and storage prices are skyrocketing, and the scale of every piece is 10x’ing every year.
June 16th, 2026 - Stripe Startups Build Day San Francisco—featuring Wen Sang, co-founder/COO of Genspark
Location: San Francisco
Time: 9:30am-4pm
What: Meet and cowork with Stripe experts and the founder community
Join the Stripe founder community for a day of hands-on building and coworking with the Stripe team. Whether you’re looking for a chance to connect with other founders, 1:1 guidance from the Stripe team, or just a change of scenery amidst the week, we’d love to have you join.
June 16th, 2026 - Women in AI | Founders Golf Clinic with Human Interest & EVCO Insurance
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5-7pm
What: ⛳ Golf for Founders: Learn the Game, Build the Network
Golf is a game a lot of founders play. Not everyone has had the chance to learn.
Join us for a golf clinic designed for founders, operators, and investors who want to get on the course confidently. Whether you've never swung a club or just want to clean up your game, this is a low-stakes afternoon to learn the basics and meet people worth knowing.
June 18th, 2026 - Lightyear Residency Demo Day
Location: San Francisco
Time: 3-5pm
What: Incubated by HF0, Lightyear is a one-month residency built for repeat founders who do a year's worth of work in a month.
Demo Day will showcase founders building tech pushing the boundaries of AI, robotics, space, and energy.
Schedule:
3pm: Light Refreshments
329pm: Doors Close
330pm: Demos Begin
4pm: Investor / Founder Reception
June 18th, 2026 - Render localhost:2026 SF
Location: San Francisco
Time: 9am
What: localhost is a one-day gathering of the builders shaping what’s next in application development
The patterns of software are changing. Background processes running for hours instead of seconds. Agents calling tools, retrying, recovering. Isolated environments to execute generated code. Teams shipping the fastest-growing products are inventing new infrastructure patterns as they go.
localhost is a day with the people doing this work: founders, engineers, and lean platform teams redefining how software is built for the AI-native web.
June 18th, 2026 - SF Private Content x GTM Founder Breakfast ft. Eric Lay (Virio Co-Founder, 42K+ LinkedIn) & Conor Brennan-Burke (Hyperspell Founder, YC F25)
Location: San Francisco
Time: 9-11am
What: Five years ago, content was a brand exercise. Today it's a GTM motion. The fastest-growing companies in SF aren't winning on outbound — they're winning on attention, owned audiences, and founders who post.
We're taking over a private room for a morning of high-signal conversations on how content actually drives pipeline, with two founders who live it. Eric runs Virio, the agency rebuilding B2B content as a measurable revenue channel. Conor is best known online for "no dating until Series B" and a feed that turned Hyperspell into one of the most-watched AI infra companies of YC F25 before they shipped a single customer.
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