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- SF IRL - Sept 1st, 2025
SF IRL - Sept 1st, 2025
A curated newsletter showcasing the top tech & startup events in San Francisco
Jonathan Chang
August 31, 2025
In partnership with
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 #161. Happy Labor Day! Hope you are enjoying the 3 day weekend as we ramp up things to do in SF in September.
I'm Jonathan, the creator of SF IRL. I've been a Bay Area resident all my life and moved into San Francisco about 4 years ago. My full-time job is at Brex where I meet founders and VCs while trying to create a community in the city. 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 9000+ subscribers. As we keep growing, if you enjoy reading these, please share this with your friends so we can hit 10,000 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!
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Sept 4th, 2025 - Brex Founders & Investors Padel Club
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6-8:30pm
What: No experience necessary! Join us for a high-energy evening of padel followed by great food, refreshments, and conversation with fellow leaders from the Startup/VC community.
Whether you're new to the game or a seasoned player 🎾, it’s all about having fun, getting a little competitive, and making meaningful connections off the court.
Event Details:
📅 Date: September 4th, 2025
⏰ Time:
6:00pm - 8:00pm - Time with the Coach + Game
8:00pm - 8:30pm - Food + Refreshments
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.
Are you a founder looking for accounting for your startup? SF IRL got you covered
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Partner perks: 20% off (Core) bookkeeping for 6 months, 10% off CFO services ongoing
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Small Biz Booster: Bookkeeping for $10/month (for SMBs <12 months old & <$5K/mo in expenses)
Events Coming Up
Sept 2nd, 2025 - Antler SF: Female Founder Interview Superday
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5-6:30pm
What: 📣 Do you want to join the next Antler Residency in SF?
The Antler Fall Residency kicks off on September 30th, and we’re hosting an exclusive in-person interview experience in San Francisco for female founders at the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey.
Sept 2nd, 2025 - Untapped Alpha SF: The Trillion-Dollar Opportunity on Bitcoin DeFi
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5:30-10:30pm
What: Join us at House of Web3 for an evening of practical blockchain innovation, short, sharp demos, and real builder stories from UTXOS, DeltaDeFi, Charms, and BOS. We’ll show how Bitcoin- and Cardano-native UTXO architecture powers apps that onboard users faster, scale reliably, and open new markets across payments, trading, and tokenized assets.
Sept 2nd, 2025 - Build Your First AI Agent | Dust x Paatch
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6-9pm
What: What if you could build your first AI agent… in less than 1 hour?
Join us in San Francisco for a hands-on evening co-hosted by Dust & Paatch, designed for founders, developers, designers, marketers, freelancers, and curious professionals who want to go from exploring AI to actually building with it.
Sept 3rd, 2025 - Agents in the Enterprise with Kindred Ventures
Location: San Francisco
Time: 3-5:30pm
What: On Wednesday September 3rd, Kindred Ventures, in partnership with Microsoft for Startups and Salesforce Agentforce, will host a timely gathering on the rise of intelligent systems.
As builders push to create agents that can reason, automate, and collaborate, this event convenes the voices driving the field forward. You’ll hear from the founders of Parcha and Chicory, building AI agents for compliance and data engineering, as well as Rob Ferguson (Head of AI, Microsoft for Startups), and Vivienne Wei (COO, Unified Agentforce Platform at Salesforce).
Sept 3rd, 2025 - Voice AI Pronunciation Challenges
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6:30-9pm
What: Join us for a deep dive into the challenges with pronunciation when deploying voice AI applications in production:
Why TTS models struggle to pronounce certain words like Chipotle or Acetaminophen
What are phonemes?
Custom pronunciation without needing to learn the international phonetic alphabet (IPA) or brute force spellings
Scaling challenges
Switching to a different TTS provider while in production
Tradeoffs between emotional range and pronunciation consistency
Misleading latency promises and tactics to reduce latency
New tools to catch pronunciation failures before your customers notice
How to set up useful metrics that matter beyond TTFB
War stories from the Voice AI trenches
Sept 4th, 2025 - AWS + Anthropic Gen AI Series
Location: San Francisco
Time: 5:30-8:30pm
What: Join us for an exclusive evening where AWS and Anthropic unite to showcase the future of generative AI development. This unique collaboration brings together leading experts from both organizations for an immersive experience in AI innovation and practical implementation.
Sept 4th, 2025 - Scale your AI apps @ Redis Released
Location: San Francisco
Time: 11am-6pm
What: Learn how developers and industry leaders are building fast, accurate AI apps at scale at Redis Released: San Francisco, a free, all-day event. Whether you’re here for insights on context engineering and agent memory or ready to try new tools that make your AI apps faster, you’ll find it here.
Sept 4th, 2025 - Out of Bounds @ Inbound - Breakout x SuperAGI - GTM Mixer
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6-9pm
What: You’ve earned this.
After a full day of conference chaos, join fellow GTM leaders for an evening that’s just: good food, cold drinks, and hopefully even better conversations.
Welcome to Breakout x SuperAGI's GTM Mixer on Day 2 of HubSpot’s Inbound conference.
Sept 4th, 2025 - Flowstate
Location: Berkeley
Time: 5-9pm
What: How many AI agents are you managing? You have ChatGPT working on a Deep Research query while Claude Code is addressing that Linear ticket? Is Gemini processing your emails right now? Do you have Grok looking for tweets about your brand?
At this live event, we’re going to dig into AI workflows beyond coding agents. You’ll hear from three practitioners whose integration of AI into their workflows goes far deeper than asking ChatGPT to review their writing. This event will be relevant for a broad range of people, from executives looking to level up themselves and their teams, to ICs becoming managers of agents, or independents living in the future.
In addition to interviews with applied AI aficionados, we’re going to invite guests to share their hacks and tricks. We’ll be doing a special “poster session” where attendees can volunteer to demo how they’re using AI to accelerate their productivity.
Sept 4th, 2025 - /BLOK.SIM/01
Location: San Francisco
Time: 7pm-12am
What: This isn’t theatre.
This isn’t a party.
It’s a live experiment in decision, design, and control.
For one night only, the system will open its doors.
Sept 4th, 2025 - Prompt Driven Launch Party presented by Toolhouse
Location: Palo Alto
Time: 6-8pm
What: 6 pm Arrival and open networking
6:30 pm Live demos
• PDD legacy-to-cloud migration powered by Kimi-K2 on Groq hardware
• Toolhouse Agent Studio: YAML spec → running agent
7:30 pm Second networking block
The room is booked until 9 pm; feel free to stay late.
Sept 6th, 2025 - Man vs. Machine
Location: San Francisco
Time: 9am-9pm
What: We’re hosting a live challenge inspired by METR’s latest evals paper to test the real-world impact of AI coding agents. Half of participants will be randomly assigned to build without AI; the other half will use leading tools like Factory. It’s a head-to-head showdown measuring speed, quality, and productivity.
Sept 8th, 2025 - Graph Exchange, Fall 2025 - Agentic AI Memory
Location: San Francisco
Time: 4-9pm
What: Graph Exchange is an innovative mini-conference+unconference on Graph-powered AI Agents, Knowledge Graphs, GraphRAG, and all ways where graphs underpin the modern GenAI stack. Brought to you by Neo4j, the category-defining graph database, we’ll review key use cases for graphs and bring together the leading graph experts.
Sept 9th, 2025 - Deploying agents and MCPs in production with TypeScript
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6-8pm
What: Deploying Agents and MCPs in Production with TypeScript
Hosted by 14.ai
Join us on the evening of September 9th in the Lower Haight for Sushis and thoughtful conversation on what it takes to move MCPs and LLM agents from demos to real-world deployments.
Sept 10th, 2025 - SF Coffee Club | B2B Tech Founders & Funders
Location: San Francisco
Time: 10-11am
What: Calling all early-stage B2B SaaS founders and funders!
👋 Hi! We’re Sruthi Sivanandan and Deirdre Clute from the Forum Ventures team, and we’re teaming up with JustWorks as our event sponsor to help foster deeper connections in the early-stage ecosystem for B2B tech founders and investors.
Location: San Francisco
Time: 9am-11am
What: Women in Healthtech x The Council: Angel Investing in Healthtech
Join us for a morning of learning, connection, and coffee hosted by Women in Healthtech and The Council. This in-person session will explore the essentials of angel investing in the healthtech space. This event is perfect for operators interested in backing innovative healthcare companies and professionals already working in the industry.
Sept 11th, 2025 - Founders + Investors Social w/ Precursor Ventures
Location: San Francisco
Time: 6-8:30pm
What: Join us for a lively evening at our Founders & Investors Social! This casual gathering is the perfect opportunity to mingle, connect, and unwind with fellow founders and investors in a relaxed atmosphere.
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