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  • SF IRL - May 18th, 2026

SF IRL - May 18th, 2026

A curated newsletter showcasing the top tech & startup events in San Francisco

Author

Jonathan Chang
May 18, 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 #195.

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. 

Location: Lightfield HQ, SOMA, San Francisco

Time: 7-8:30pm

What: An evening for Agent Engineers, AI PMs, and founders building the next generation of AI products.


Join Voker for networking and a panel of category-leading AI CTOs from Lightfield, Sauna by Wordware, and Decisional. They'll share what it actually takes to build the best agent products.


You got your agents into production (no small feat). You wrangled the opinions, the evals, the endless prompt edits. But what now? It's a big jump from shipping your first agent to being the best in your category. We won't be waxing philosophical. This panel will discuss the challenges and specific engineering approaches they used to overcome hurdles with building unique and useful agent products at scale.

Location: San Francisco, CA

Time: 3-6pm

What: The rules of building a startup just changed. The founders currently winning rewrote the playbook entirely — we invite you to join us to hear how and why they're succeeding.

​AI is changing what it means to build and go to market. Engineering teams run smaller and faster. GTM motions look nothing like the classic playbook. But most advice is still theoretical.

​This panel brings together founders and operators actively building AI-native products and GTM at companies like ElevenLabs and Miro for an honest and practical conversation hosted at SVB's office in downtown SF. Stick around after for drinks, food, and conversations worth having.

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

May 19th, 2026 - How She Got the Board Seat | Women in AI

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-8pm

What: ​Join us for a fireside chat with a woman who's done it.

​Board seats at public companies are still rare for women. The women who have them positioned, networked, and navigated deliberately. We're pulling back the curtain on how it actually happens, straight from someone who's lived it. This will be set up as a fireside chat & Q&A, so bring your questions and ask them directly.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 5:30-8pm

What: ​Join the WorkOS Applied AI team for a live look at how we build, deploy, and scale internal AI tooling. From autonomous coding agents that take GitHub issues all the way to merged PRs, to GTM systems that enrich and score accounts on demand across Slack, dashboards, and MCP.

​We'll demo what's actually in production and share what we learned shipping a high volume of internal tools fast.

Location: San Jose

Time: 6-8pm

What: Join us for a special evening bringing together two leaders in computing innovation — Arm and NVIDIA — for a developer-focused event designed to connect, inform, and inspire.

​This co-sponsored meetup will bring together engineers, AI practitioners, system architects, founders, and technical leaders from across the ecosystem for conversations at the intersection of accelerated computing, AI, edge, cloud, and next-generation platforms.

We look forward to bringing the Arm and NVIDIA developer communities together for an evening of ideas, collaboration, and connection.

May 19th, 2026 - Demo Day

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-8 pm

What: ​The Residency's most selective cohort yet — 10 teams selected out of 4,000 applications.

​Event is for active investors.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 5:30-9:30pm

What: ​Following the success of our first event back in February, we will be back in SF with a new and improved format to update you all on the direction on the state of video generation!

​Expect hardy discussion on real-time video generation & more time to pick the brains of expert builders in the community (There may also be a rooftop involved)

Location: San Francisco

Time: 5:15-8pm

What: ​Making the surreal, real. ​Join us for Surreal in San Francisco, a dinner series held at art galleries.

​​​​​​​​​​We'll be joined by Amir Haghighat, CTO of Baseten who will share remarks on his journey and what's at the cutting edge of inference.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 12-3pm

What: Touch grass with the Gen Z marketers & creators actually doing cool things in SF 🌱🫶🏼

​Join us as we take over a corner of Dolores Park for an afternoon of fun and meeting new people✨

Location: San Francisco

Time: 7-8:45pm

What: 85% of world GDP lives in the physical economy: moving goods, generating energy, building infrastructure, maintaining the systems that keep everything running. AI has transformed the digital 15%. Now it's moving into the rest.

​Atharva Atre (Niantic Spatial) walks through the five technical layers making physical AI work:

  • ​Simulated worlds: training robots in synthetic environments before deploying them in reality (NVIDIA Cosmos)

  • ​Foundation models: one model that controls many different robots across many different tasks (Physical Intelligence pi0, Google Gemini Robotics)

  • ​Real-world reinforcement learning: grounding models in actual physical performance (Google DeepMind RT-2, Open X-Embodiment)

  • ​World models: learning the dynamics of how the physical world works (Yann LeCun's V-JEPA)

  • ​Spatial intelligence: mapping reality so machines can navigate it (Niantic's Large Geospatial Model)

Location: San Francisco

Time: 5-8:30pm

What: ​​Join industry leaders from Anthropic, Rootly AI, Port, Descope, and Twingate for an evening dedicated to the practical realities of deploying agentic AI at scale. We’re moving past the hype to discuss how the world’s most sophisticated engineering teams are building secure, reliable, and developer-friendly AI ecosystems.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6:-8pm

What: Our networking events bring together young professionals in their mid-20s to mid-30s from all backgrounds—founders, creatives, job seekers, investors, and curious minds alike. Whether you're growing a startup, exploring new opportunities, or just curious to connect, you'll find your community here.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 6-8:30pm

What: Join technical leaders from Nooks, Decagon, Parallel, and OpenAI for a deep dive on the emerging product engineer-- the technical operator who owns the full motion.

​Today, the top 1% of engineers are not just shipping. They're shaping what gets built AND how it reaches market.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 8-10am

What: Join us for a breakfast hosted by Alchemi Ventures (of Chemonics International) and Cathay Innovation during San Francisco Fintech Week in May 2026, exploring how financial technology is transforming emerging markets.

May 28th, 2026 - AI Insiders: Fintech & Payments

Location: San Francisco

Time: 5-8:30pm

What: The Money Is Moving.

​Stablecoins are replacing rails that took decades to build. Agentic wallets are making decisions that used to require humans. AI is underwriting loans, catching fraud before it happens, and moving money across borders in seconds.

​The financial system is being rewritten in real time. The founders, operators, and investors leading the shift live in a few zip codes. On May 28, they are in one room.

Location: San Francisco

Time: 4-7pm

What: ​Introducing our first Founders Residency:

​• 6 founders
• Batch 0
• All in, building in San Francisco

​Batch 0 founders aren't starting from zero. They're repeat builders, already running ~$1M ARR pipelines across profitable AI companies and longevity ventures, with angels like Balaji already in.

​Come see what they’ve been building over the past 2 months.

​If you're an investor, please register with your investor email.

May 28th, 2026 - How I Met My VC

Location: Menlo Park

Time: 4:30-7:30pm

What: ​What does it actually take to make an investor say yes?

​On May 28th, we're finding out.

​Roya Amini-Naieni is a Forbes 30 Under 30 founder and Co-Founder and CEO of Trilobio, a unified robotics and software platform that makes lab automation more accessible, scalable, and usable for modern biology teams.

​Andrew Sather is a Partner at Initialized Capital, a venture firm whose portfolio includes Coinbase, Rippling, Reddit, and Instacart. He is a serial entrepreneur who specializes in frontier technology, space, and robotics.

​Together, they're sitting down with Venturous Counsel to talk about what made Initialized Capital say yes to Trilobio and what it took to get there. Trilobio closed an oversubscribed $8M seed round led by Initialized Capital, and Roya and Andrew will walk us through what made the investor say yes, with a focus on making a complex startup easy to believe in.

May 28th, 2026 - Agentic Engineering Leadership Dinner | San Francisco

Location: San Francisco

Time: 5:30-8:30pm

What: ​Join Port CEO Zohar Einy and a curated group of senior Platform Engineering leaders for a private evening at Ozumo.

​Hosted in Ozumo’s private Pine Room overlooking the San Francisco Bay Bridge, the evening is designed for peer-level conversation around the future of Agentic Engineering, alongside an exclusive bluefin tuna carving experience and intimate discussions with leaders building modern engineering platforms.

Location: Mountain View

Time: 1-6:30pm

What: ​An evening bringing together some of the most exciting AI and deeptech startups across Silicon Valley and beyond.

​We are selecting a small group of founders to present their companies in front of investors, operators, technical builders, and ecosystem leaders. Top teams will earn sponsored trips to Asia (Location announced at Demo Day) to compete in the global finals with USD 10M+ prize pool this July.

​Whether you are building AI infrastructure, robotics, biotech, developer tools, or next-generation hardware, this is an opportunity to showcase your work, meet strong people in the ecosystem, and connect with potential investors and partners.​

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