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- SF IRL - Mar 16th, 2026
SF IRL - Mar 16th, 2026
A curated newsletter showcasing the top tech & startup events in San Francisco
Jonathan Chang
March 16, 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 #186.
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: San Francisco
Time: 6-8pm
What: Join Antler and Lightfield for an intimate fireside chat with Lightfield co-founder and CEO Keith Peiris. Keith will share the story behind the company’s pivot from Tome to building an AI-native CRM, lessons from founder-led sales, and how AI is reshaping modern go-to-market. He’ll also discuss what the team learned from rebuilding the product and GTM from scratch in today’s fast-moving AI landscape. If you're building an AI startup today, this is a conversation you won't want to miss.
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.
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
Mar 16th, 2026 - Unprompted: An Exclusive GTC Dinner with Modular & LlamaIndex
Location: San Jose
Time: 6-10:30pm
What: Join us for an intimate evening with the most interesting people shaping the future of AI infrastructure.
On the first night of NVIDIA GTC, LlamaIndex and Modular are cohosting a private dinner for 40 technical leaders and founders building production AI systems and leading field research.
Mar 17th, 2026 - ClawdTalk & Rime Workshop
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5:30-8:30pm
What: OpenClaw (formerly ClawdBot) has quickly become one of the most talked-about open agent frameworks among builders experimenting with real workflows.
On March 17, we’re hosting our 2nd hands-on workshop with Rime where you’ll deploy your own OpenClaw agent, connect it to Clawdtalk (clawtalk.com) for live voice, and ship something working before you leave.
Mar 17th, 2026 - Break OpenClaw Hack Night (St Patrick's Day)
Location: San Francisco
Time: 4-9:30pm
What: Hack OpenClaw on St Patrick's Day
Break OpenClaw before the beer breaks you.
When: March 17, 2026 | 4:00 PM - 9:30 PM PT
Where: Wordware Beach House, San Francisco
Presented by Wordware (YC S24), Blaxel (YC X25), The Builders Collective, and HackerSquad
Mar 17th, 2026 - GTC 2026 Happy Hours: SGLang x RadixArk
Location: San Jose
Time: 6:30-9:30pm
What: Taking a break from the GTC rush? Come hang out with us. 🍝🍷
We’ve reserved one of the best-rated ⭐ Italian restaurants near the conference — just an easy walking distance from GTC. Expect great food, unlimited drinks, and a relaxed evening with some of the brightest minds in model, inference, and RL infrastructure.
Mar 18th, 2026 - 💸 SF PITCH NIGHT #17 (w/ The AI Collective) 💸
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6-8:30pm
What: Last time, we packed the house for SF Pitch Night – and the energy, crowd, and caliber of builders made it one of our most unforgettable nights. Now we’re bringing it back.
This March, join the city’s ultimate AI + tech pitch showcase. Bigger stage. Sharper demos. Even more electric energy. And with a fresh wave of new AI models + agents like OpenClaw landing, we’re especially excited to see what founders are building on top of this new frontier!
Mar 18th, 2026 - ⛳ The 19th Hole @ GTC w/ Cloudflare & PlanetScale
Location: San Jose
Time: 7-10pm
What: In town for NVIDIA GTC? Tee off with us Wednesday night for a focused, no fluff evening with the engineers and technical leaders building modern AI infrastructure.
Mar 18th, 2026 - OSS AI @ GTC (Guinness Tasting Conference) - Nous Research x Prime Intellect x MiniMax x Hillclimb
Location: San Jose
Time: 6-9pm
What: Come hang with the Nous Research, Prime Intellect, MiniMax and Hillclimb teams @ GTC 🍀🍻
The future of models and research should be open and the people building it are hanging out here and drinking Guinness.
Mar 18th, 2026 - AI for the Physical World: A GTC Breakfast
Location: San Francisco
Time: 9-11am
What: GTC 2026 will show us major breakthroughs from physical AI to robotics to edge computing to agentic systems. Come over for breakfast to chat about what it takes to actually deploy all of this in the real world!
Join us for a morning of conversation over breakfast burritos and Arsicault pastries with other founders, operators, and investors working at the intersection of AI and physical industries like energy, manufacturing, defense, mobility, and everything in between.
Mar 18th, 2026 - -1 to World Labs with Dr. Fei-Fei Li
Location: San Francisco
Time: 11am-12pm
What: South Park Commons is delighted to host Dr. Fei-Fei Li as part of our -1 to Now Series!
Event Details
10:30am: Doors Open
11:00am: Fireside Chat
Mar 18th, 2026 - Contrary SF Tech Talk
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5-7pm
What: Contrary is excited to host our next SF-based Tech Talk of the year on Wednesday, March 18th — an evening built by and for the most talented engineers in the Bay Area.
Join our COO, Jen Yang-Wong, alongside founders and senior leaders from LangChain, Cognition, ElevenLabs, Baseten, and Ando as they demo their startups latest features in front of an audience of top engineers.
Mar 18th, 2026 - Artificially Un-intelligent Tech Comedy Show @ SF w/ Fondo
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6-9:30pm
What: Join us for a night of tech-themed comedy featuring engineers, PMs, sales monkeys, founders, quants, and VCs turned comedians seen on Netflix, The Tonight Show, NBC, NY Times, ABC, NPR, Comedy Central, and more!
Mar 18th, 2026 - AI Builders Welcome Party
Location: San Francisco
Time: 7:30-10:30pm
What: Kick off GTC San Jose with the AI-native community. Together AI, 5C, Hypertec and Pegatron are bringing researchers, engineers, and product leaders together for a high-energy welcome party designed for real networking before the conference begins. Just steps from the convention center, this is where builders connect before the week accelerates.
Mar 18th, 2026 - GTC 2026 After Hours: From Models to Agents to Infra
Location: Sunnyvale
Time: 6-10pm
What: The AI stack is shifting fast — frontier models, agentic architectures, and the infrastructure underneath are all evolving in real time. But what's actually working in production vs. what's still hype?
Novita AI, together with FounderCoho, is hosting a high-energy after-hours event during NVIDIA GTC 2026, featuring speakers from NVIDIA, Google DeepMind, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence (Qwen/Wan), Hugging Face, Kilo Code, Kimi (Moonshot AI), MiniMax, OpenRouter, RadixArk, and Z.ai.
Mar 19th, 2026 - Productboard x Corelight | Beyond the AI Hype: What’s Delivering Value in Product Today
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6-8:30pm
What: Beyond the AI Hype: What’s Delivering Value in Product Today
The AI era is here–but what is actually working right now? Each month, we’re bringing together the SF Bay Area product community to tackle this.
Join us as we kick off this monthly series with Jordan Nolff, VP of Growth & Product at Productboard, and Vijit Nair, VP Product at Corelight, for an evening of candid conversation as we explore the future of product management with AI. They will discuss how they are actively building AI-powered products, evolving their tech stacks, and reimagining how teams work in an AI-first world.
Mar 19th, 2026 - Seedance & Seedream Build Lab
Location: San Jose
Time: 2-5pm
What: This is for creative builders, and it comes with a secret.
Before the release of Seedance 2.0 globally — we're giving a small room of builders an exclusive first look, a week before the rest of the world sees it.
Then you'll spend the afternoon getting hands-on with BytePlus's Seedream and Seedance 1.5 Pro on GMI, building real AI-generated video from scratch.
Mar 19th, 2026 - GTC Afterparty: Builders, Infra & the Next Wave of AI
Location: Palo Alto
Time: 5:30-8:00pm
What: This afterparty is designed as a high-signal gathering for people actively building, scaling, and enabling AI systems. We’re bringing together founders, engineers, operators, and investors who are shaping the next wave of AI infrastructure, tooling, and applications — from foundation models and agents to compute, MLOps, and developer platforms.
Location: San Francisco
What: A bullet hackathon—3 rounds of building, back to back. Short enough that AI gives you leverage, long enough that craft still matters.
Mar 21st, 2026 - Deploy & Scale: AI Agents & the Future of Software — with Qoder, Anthropic, NEA & MAI
Location: Palo Alto
Time: 2-5pm
What: GTC brings together the world’s leading AI researchers, builders, and investors. But the most interesting conversations often happen after the conference — in smaller rooms with the people actually building the technology.
Deploy & Scale is a curated post-GTC gathering with leaders from NEA, Anthropic, Microsoft AI, and Qoder, bringing together founders, engineers, researchers, and investors to discuss where AI development is heading next.
Mar 23rd, 2026 - Night at the Mercantile
Location: San Francisco
Time: 4:30-7:30pm
What: Join Dune Security, Abstract Security, and Reality Defender for an early evening reception to kick off RSA from 4:30 to 7:30 PM on Monday, March 23.
Hosted inside The Pressroom and Mercantile at The Box SF (just 2 blocks from the Moscone Center), the evening will feature networking, hors d’oeuvres, and an open bar. Designed for senior security leaders attending RSA, the reception offers a chance to step away from the expo floor to connect with peers and unwind after day 1.
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