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- SF IRL - Mar 9th, 2026
SF IRL - Mar 9th, 2026
A curated newsletter showcasing the top tech & startup events in San Francisco
Jonathan Chang
March 09, 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 #185.
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
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5:30-8pm
What: Meet other women interested in AI, this time over wine 🍷
Join us for a special Women in AI Happy Hour co-hosted by Anything and Jax Vineyards in SoMa.
Mar 10th, 2026 - <AI-Demo-Dev-Dinner>
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6:30-9pm
What: No Investor pitches. Demos Encouraged.
Join us for an evening dedicated to the craft of building. We’re gathering 20 of SF’s most obsessed AI engineers and technical builders for an informal series of demos + dinner.
This is definitely NOT an investor pitch night.
Mar 11th, 2026 - Clay Club SF: Fireside with Clay's CEO + Launching our Ads feature!
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6-8:30pm
What: Join us for the next Clay Club SF on Wed, March 11th! This will be a rare chance to hear from Clay's CEO, Kareem Amin, on where GTM is going and how world-class teams are using AI to grow their business 📈 And the fireside will be moderated by our good friend Jordan Crawford.
We'll also do a demo our latest feature — Ads! We'll show how Clay and our data enrichments can improve the performance of your ads campaign. For example, we'll walk you thru how to use website intent signals to do better retargeting with ads. One customer who got early access said it was "groundbreaking" 🥹 🥹
Mar 11th, 2026 - Health x AI Poker Night
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6:30-9pm
What: Join a curated group of AI founders, healthtech engineers, biohackers, researchers, scientists, who are applying AI to solve problems relating to human health.
No panels. No pitching. Just poker.
Mar 11th, 2026 - Vibe Your SaaS: Startup Pitch Competition + VC/Founder Mixer
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5:30-8:30pm
What: Join hosts Gregory Kennedy (Vibe Your Saas) and Arjun Dev Arora (Advisor to Founders & VCs) for the second invite-only VYS gathering in San Francisco of AI-first founders and forward-thinking VCs reshaping the future of software.
Mar 11th, 2026 - AI Media + Gaming Event with Kindred Ventures
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5:30-8:30pm
What: Join Kindred Ventures in collaborations with the [GDC] Festival of Gaming in San Francisco for a conversation that explores how AI is reshaping the way games and media are built, experienced, and scaled.
We’ll kick things off with a panel discussion on how advances in generative models, agent architectures, and persistent memory are unlocking new gameplay mechanics, development workflows, and entirely new categories of interactive experiences.
Mar 11th, 2026 - How to Become a Founding Engineer
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6:30-9pm
What: An Inside Look at Early Roles in High-Growth AI Startups
Most engineers want to join early. Very few know how.
This AI Collective event is a practical, no-fluff breakdown of what it actually takes to become a founding engineer at a high growth AI startup.
The session features a keynote and workshop with Xinchi Qi, who joined Revamp as its founding engineer and later grew into CTO and cofounder, not by chasing titles, but by doing the work that early companies need most.
Mar 11th, 2026 - The Council Angels x Somato: Invest in Your Wellness
Location: San Francisco
Time: 9-11:30am
What: We’re gathering The Council Angels, select founders, and top operators for a thoughtfully designed morning centered on movement, longevity, and modern wellness.
Featuring Somato - a beautifully engineered Pilates reformer that lives under your bed and supports strength for years to come.
Mar 12th, 2026 - Personal Lindy AI Assistants @ Lindy HQ
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6-8:30pm
What: Lindy released a new personal assistant, that works in text, calendar, email, and other tools with no set up.
Come join for a 2hr session with the Lindy team to see:
Demos from super users on how they their assistants,
Try out your own,
Build time to customize yours to your own need through texting your assistant (yes it can build it's own tools and workflows)
Mar 12th, 2026 - Mocha × Anthropic: Small Business Build Day
Location: San Francisco
Time: 10am-3pm
What: Small businesses are the backbone of the Bay Area economy, yet most don’t have access to engineers or technical teams to build the tools they need.
Small Business Build Day is a focused, in-person buildathon designed for local founders, operators, and SMB owners who want to turn ideas into working tools in hours, not months.
Mar 12th, 2026 - Evals & AI Agents Meetup: Build & Debug
Location: Menlo Park
Time: 3:30-7:30pm
What: This in-person meetup is focused on the practical side of building, evaluating, and debugging complex AI agents in real-world environments.
Enjoy a round of food & drinks while connecting with fellow GenAI practitioners. ✨
Mar 13th, 2026 - the residency - demo day
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5-8:30pm
What: impressive work needs to be shared
the residency is the leading global founders residency network that is inspiring other companies in the category through it’s playbook, design, and founder experience.
our primary purpose is to enable the ambitious
built on a proven operating model and scaled to 14 homes across 3 continents, the residency has become a meaningful part of the AI and startup ecosystem. it gives ambitious builders worldwide direct access to silicon valley knowledge, capital, and momentum.
in just 2 years, companies formed within the residency have exceed $3 billion in aggregate value, establishing the brand as a globally recognized signal for high-agency founders
we are building a global ecosystem that empowers purpose driven humans
our positioning remains unyielding: higher education is flawed and stifles the imagination/creativity and success of the upcoming generation. as more and more students tend to look for alternatives to college, we hope to be the first line of support for the most ambitious
our thesis is designed to resonate with problem solvers, those who can't walk past a challenge without engaging. the hardest problems won't be solved by startups alone, but we live in a world where that’s how problems are being solved
this demo day is for investors hunting for their next unicorn :)
Mar 13th, 2026 - Autonomous Ascent: Free Rock Climbing Night with Arize AI
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5-8pm
What: Lace up and level up! Join the Arize AI community for a free evening of rock climbing, good vibes, and great conversations with fellow builders in AI.
Come hang (literally) with engineers, data scientists, and AI enthusiasts outside the usual meetup setting.
Mar 14th, 2026 - Funding the Commons SF: Intelligence at the Frontier
Location: San Francisco
What: Join Funding the Commons for a 16-floor vertical festival in the newly inhabited Frontier Tower. Intelligence at the Frontier blends conference, workshops, hackathon, and music and arts festival for a 36-hour immersive experience co-designing the super intelligence coordination infrastructure for a future that promotes human flourishing.
Mar 14th, 2026 - πng pong & πzza
Location: San Francisco
Time: 3:14pm
What: In honor of π day, we’re taking it offline!
Peers. Ping pong. Pizza. Pie.
If it starts with P, it's probably here.
PhDs, product builders, ping pong players- all welcome. If you spend your days building or thinking deeply about AI, you’ll be in good company.
Mar 14th, 2026 - Mars Colony Program
Location: San Francisco
Time: 7:30-10:30pm
What: MARTIANS First-Wave Settlement Program
Founding Population Briefing
For 300,000 years, every human who ever lived shared the same sky. That ends now.
You're being considered for a founding position in humanity's first Mars settlement.
M.A.R.T.I.A.N.S (Mars Advanced Real Estate Travel Interplanetary Agency, Naturalization and Settling) is building the first permanent off-world civilization. We've identified the builders, systems thinkers, and edge-case optimists who can turn barren rock into a thriving world. You're one of them.
Mar 16th, 2026 - Unprompted: An Exclusive GTC Dinner with Modular & LlamaIndex
Location: San Francisco
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 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.
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.
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