Events
Rally events, and the rest of AI SF
Builders Night, BSOTA, Speaker Series, and what else is on around the city.
Saturday, July 25
10 AM - 1 PM
Build a coding agent from scratch in 100 lines and actually understand what's happening inside. This Saturday-morning sprint walks you through the core loop of plan, act, observe, repeat, then you wire it to real tools and watch it run end-to-end.
10 AM - 7 PM
Two-week sprint building agents with persistent memory on XTrace infrastructure, tackling real customer workflows and operational bottlenecks. Winners demo at Berkeley Summit House and retreat to Napa with founders and investors, plus up to $10k in prizes.
2 PM - 5 PM
Haoru Xue presents ENPIRE and CaP-X, demonstrating how coding agents outperform vision-language-action models on robot manipulation by preserving frontier model intelligence. This reading group brings together roboticists from DeepMind, Boston Dynamics, and Bay Area labs to examine why training-free agents reach 99% on dexterous tasks.
6 PM - 10 PM
A low-key gathering of YC AI Startup School attendees, hosted by Moss, Supabase, and Modal with free food and networking. This is where you'll actually talk to builders beyond the conference schedule.
6:30 PM - 8:30 PM
9 AM - 6:30 PM
Three tracks for building physical AI experiences: photoreal worlds using 3D capture, multiplayer social spaces, or whatever you imagine with VLGE's spatial data tools. Judges from NVIDIA, DeepMind, and NASA, plus up to $10K in prizes.
9 AM - 9 PM
One-day high-intensity build event where you ship AI-powered products using prompts instead of traditional code, then pitch to investors. Fast iteration, real deployment, and the chance to launch something meaningful before sunset.
9:45 AM - 6 PM
This hackathon tackles what breaks most agent demos: making them act as a specific user with real permissions in actual systems. Spend the day building agents that respect identity, tenant, and access controls instead of calling APIs as root.
Sunday, July 26
2 PM - 5 PM
Low-key Sunday co-working session at Salesforce Park where AI developers and founders mix with coffee and whatever projects they're building. Show up solo or with colleagues, catch the intro circle where people share what they're working on, then self-organize from there.
3:30 PM - 5:30 PM
Teams spent 24 hours tackling cell cultivation with ML tools and robotics, now they're demoing their solutions with judges from VC, biotech, and medicine. This is the rare hackathon where biology meets AI infrastructure, worth watching if you're building at that intersection.
8 AM - 10 PM
A one-day AI hackathon at Founders Inc with 15+ startups recruiting directly from your projects and judges from Salesforce, Apple, and Google offering referrals to top teams. Backed by DeepMind and NVIDIA, this is where you ship fast and potentially find a co-founder or next opportunity in a single day.
Tuesday, July 28
5 PM - 9:30 PM
Sit down with your laptop and walk out with a working coding agent plus one real automation built from your actual work. Small group, hands-on from setup to show and tell, with a week of practice time and support included.
5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
The fifth gathering for people actually selling AI infrastructure tools and hardware, built on real conversations from the field. A chance to compare notes on what's moving in GPUs, storage, and cloud without the usual pitch dynamics.
5:30 PM - 8 PM
Fifteen founders get two minutes each to show working products, not pitches, with live VC feedback at rotating SF tech offices. The scrappy energy matters as much as the demos, where early-stage AI builders actually connect with investors and the scene.
5:30 PM - 8 PM
When your AI agent needs to speak, generate video, and handle heavy compute simultaneously, reliability becomes non-negotiable. HeyGen, Vapi, and Modal share how they're shipping multimodal systems at scale with lightning talks, demos, and the kind of technical crowd that actually gets it.
5:30 PM - 9 PM
TwelveLabs and Qdrant are demonstrating how to build video search into AI systems using multimodal embeddings. If you're working with video data or need retrieval patterns for production, this hands-on demo is worth seeing.
6 PM - 9 PM
Most agents fail due to weak context, not weak models. This meetup covers LLM wikis as the emerging pattern for agent memory, featuring talks from LangChain and Cognition on building and maintaining these systems.
7 PM - 9 PM
Sixteen founders and CTOs swapping notes on what actually works in production agent loops, from context management to human handoff timing. Capped and curated tight, this is the first in a series designed for people shipping systems that run for hours, not single calls.
Wednesday, July 29
1 PM - 3 PM
This meetup covers how agents find and load the right context without bloating token counts, a practical problem if you're building anything retrieval-dependent. Qdrant's bringing people who've solved this at scale to share concrete search and retrieval patterns.
5:30 PM - 8 PM
Groundcover is showing agents that run inside your cloud, reading live production telemetry and acting across Slack, Linear, and GitHub without shipping data anywhere. The demo triggers a real anomaly on stage and watches Agent Mode isolate the cause and open a patch end-to-end.
5:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Embodied AI research track launching with two curated talks on world models, robot learning, and sim-to-real, followed by live robot demos on Mission Robotics' floor. Rigorously selected presentations prioritize discussion over slides, with papers shared in advance to ensure high-level technical critique.
6 PM - 8 PM
Support teams at Granola are now shipping code changes themselves instead of escalating, and Vicky Firth breaks down how that changes everything from org structure to customer closeness. This one's for founders, support leaders, and product engineers figuring out where the support-engineering line actually sits in an AI-first world.
6 PM - 9 PM
Emergent just closed their Series C and is throwing a casual celebration at their new SF office with founders, builders, and industry folks. No panels or pitches, just drinks, bites, and direct conversation with the team about what's next.
6:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Small-group fireside with Webflow's CEO on engineering leadership challenges and opportunities, structured for real peer conversation rather than polished talking points. Limited seats for senior engineering and product leaders wanting unscripted dialogue with someone who's scaled teams across Google, Cisco, and now an AI-forward platform.
6:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Intimate dinner for hardware founders, engineers, and investors across all stages, hosted by Gigascale Capital's team backing climate tech and physical AI. Three courses, curated conversation, and post-event intros with 30 people actually building infrastructure that matters.
6:30 PM - 9 PM
Twelve founders at seed through Series A race go-karts while getting to know each other, then debrief over dinner. Speed, competition, and actual peers who understand the grind.
7 PM - 10 PM
Stop shipping coding agents on vibes. VCN #45 walks you through building a real eval using tasks from your own codebase, then measures pass rate and consecutive reliability so you actually know what your agent can do.
8 AM - 9 AM
Weekly breakfast for people shipping production agents at scale. No panels or pitches, just hallway conversations with builders three months ahead of you on problems you're about to hit.
Thursday, July 30
5 PM - 9 PM
A focused gathering for founders and builders shipping voice agents, hardware, and support automation, with StepFun sharing insights on speech models and what's blocking production. Two hours of founder panel on latency and UX, then dinner to actually talk shop with people building realtime voice products.
5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Kwindla Hultman Kramer from Daily and Pipecat talks about rethinking software design around LLMs, alongside builders from Postman, dari.dev, and CodeRabbit. Practical for anyone thinking through how agents reshape basic architecture patterns.
5:30 PM - 8 PM
The first SF Bay Area multi-agent systems meetup brings together people actually building coordinated AI teams. Go deep on agent communication, orchestration, and production infrastructure with a panel of founders and technical leaders.
5:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Technical practitioners building real agentic systems on MCP will hear directly from engineers and architects working on enterprise AI orchestration. Workato's setup makes this a solid chance to see where the integration layer meets agent infrastructure.
6 PM - 8 PM
Jeanne DeWitt Grosser built go-to-market at Stripe and now scales Vercel as COO. A rare chance to hear directly from someone who knows how to turn developer tools into infrastructure at scale.
6:30 PM - 9:30 PM
Casual happy hour with founders and engineers actually building AI agents and automation. No pitches or panels, just straightforward shop talk with people in the trenches.
7 PM - 9:30 PM
A paper reading series at Frontier Tower, the new vertical village for AI, biotech, and frontier tech in SF. Details on which papers and speakers are coming soon, but the venue alone is worth watching.
7:30 PM - 9:30 PM
Five-minute pitches to show off your best loop and the prompts that power it, hosted in Frontier Tower's vertical village. Top winner gets a month of token-capped GLM credits.
Friday, July 31
6:30 PM - 9:30 PM
Thirty curated founders bring their stalled deals to a panel of four who see enterprise GTM from every angle: the founder ahead of you, the operator who built the first sales team, the buyer rejecting 48 of 50 pitches, and the practitioner running today's stack. You leave with answers on why deals stall and three intros that matter.
Saturday, August 1
10 AM - 1 PM
Six coding agents compete head-to-head on your eval bench from VCN #45, scoring real cost, latency, and quality metrics. Leave with a ranked board and actual data on which agent wins for your stack, not vibes.
6:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Monday, August 3
10 AM - 11:30 AM
Agents are moving real money through Stripe, Robinhood, and Public, but founders and engineers are still debating what safety actually looks like. This walk brings together people building at the intersection of agents and finance to figure out the hard questions before the playbook gets written.
6 PM - 8:30 PM
Build an agent that can actually spend money autonomously within guardrails you set, then network with founders thinking through the agentic economy's pricing layer. Bring any agent in production and a credit card to walk through payment delegation and autonomous API purchasing.
Tuesday, August 4
3:30 PM - 5:30 PM
5 PM - 7 PM
GTM leaders sharing how they're actually deploying AI across prospecting, RevOps, and customer growth at scale. Rich Campbell from Canva breaks down what's working in practice and where the motion heads next.
6 PM - 8 PM
Four early-stage founders share why they're owning their models and building custom inference stacks instead of relying on APIs. Short technical talks followed by networking with engineers and builders thinking seriously about model control and deployment.
6 PM - 8 PM
Five YC founders share technical decisions and tradeoffs from shipping real agent products across infrastructure, testing, and knowledge work. Worth hearing if you want to skip the demo hype and learn what actually works at scale.
Wednesday, August 5
5 PM - 8:30 PM
Eight pre-seed AI startups pitch live to investors from Antler and Llama Ventures, followed by sharp Q&A that reveals how founders think under pressure and what actually moves investor needles. Walnut AI's matching tech ensures you network with the right people instead of scanning name tags blindly.
5:30 PM - 8:30 PM
The hidden stack powering AI products gets its moment: model infrastructure, inference systems, evals, agents, and the engineers building close to the metal. Lightning talks and live demos from founders at Luminal, Attentio.ai, and others working on inference, research automation, and alignment.
6 PM - 7:30 PM
Early-stage AI founders get evaluated on tech credibility and defensibility through a structured framework, then top performers pitch directly to VCs and angels. Limited spots for the August 5th session in Palo Alto, so apply now if you're fundraising-ready.
6 PM - 8:45 PM
An evening of robotics and AI demos with short talks and networking at Foxglove. Connect with the hard tech ecosystem or just watch what others are building.
6:30 PM - 10:30 PM
Casual poker night for technical founders and senior engineers building in the Bay Area, hosted by the .local Build Fest crew. Cards optional, but the real value is the curated room of repeat faces and new high-signal connections.
7 PM - 10 PM
A hands-on night fixing the core problem with local models: they're glacially slow. You'll walk through quantization and serving tradeoffs, benchmark against Claude Code, then tune your own endpoint live until tokens/sec actually climbs.
8 AM - 9 AM
Weekly breakfast for people shipping production agents, no panels or pitches, just hallway conversations with founders and engineers three months ahead of you. Invite-only seats with YC founders and people from Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, and Walmart who are solving the same scaling problems you're about to hit.
Thursday, August 6
6 PM - 8:30 PM
An intimate dinner with founders building agents, plus strategic leaders from Google DeepMind and Stripe. Previous sessions covered real workflow value, enterprise pricing, distribution challenges, and the future of autonomous systems.
6:30 PM - 9:30 PM
Summer demo night where you can walk around and see physical hardware projects in a casual happy hour setting. Bring your own prototype, product, or component if you want to show it off to the Bay Area hardware community.
8 AM - 9:30 AM
Early-morning conversations with founders and engineering leaders building agents inside Claude, Cursor, and similar tools. No agenda or pitches, just tacos and coffee with people deep in the same work.
Friday, August 7
4 PM - 11 AM
A vetted group of 12 founders and investors trading desks for a campsite, with gear, meals, and drinks covered. Two days outside cooking together and talking shop in the woods beats any conference room.
5 PM - 7 PM
Saturday, August 8
10 AM - 1 PM
Your coding agent resets every session and wastes twenty minutes relearning your repo. This hands-on build sprint teaches you RAG over your own codebase so the agent actually remembers what it figured out yesterday, shipping with persistent memory by 1pm.
6:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Tuesday, August 11
6 PM - 8 PM
A 5k run along the Embarcadero for founders and founding engineers who need a break from grinding, hosted by Lore and LlamaIndex. All paces welcome, meeting at Sue Bierman Park around 6:15pm for a loop to Pier 39 and back.
Wednesday, August 12
5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
AI coding hype meets reality as builders share what actually works automating the software factory, from GitHub Actions to agent memory techniques. Bring a five-minute demo of a tactical win you've found, skip the pitch, and learn where the real landmines hide.
7 PM - 10 PM
You'll wire up a swarm of coding agents in parallel across git worktrees so multiple agents tackle independent tasks simultaneously on one repo. Hands-on walkthrough covers the conductor pattern, merge strategy, and when parallelism actually pays off versus tangling your codebase.
Thursday, August 13
5:30 PM - 8:30 PM
DataFusion is quietly reshaping how companies handle query engines at scale, and this meetup brings together the people actually building with it. Expect real-world use cases and performance deep dives from teams pushing the boundaries of modern data infrastructure.
6 PM - 8 PM
9 AM - 4 PM
MongoDB.local Build Fest brings together AI founders and engineers shipping production agents at Pier 48, with hands-on workshops on LangGraph, vector search, and data patterns from speakers at Rivian and Google. Eligible founders get free access including expert office hours and startup credits through MongoDB for Startups.
Friday, August 14
5 PM - 7 PM
Past events
Twice-monthly working sessions where builders using Claude Code, Cursor, and custom agents show real setups and workflows, then spend the night comparing approaches and solving problems together. This is where isolated experimentation becomes shared knowledge.
Anthropic researchers found evidence that language models might have something like conscious access, using global workspace theory as their lens. David Valdman walks through the interpretability paper and what it reveals about how information flows inside LLMs.
Show up with a project, spend two hours building side by side with others, and leave with actual momentum. The focus is deep work in good company, with a brief share-back to learn from what everyone's making.
A weekly coworking session built for side-by-side building, not networking. You'll show up with a project, sprint in focused silence, then share what you made or got stuck on with people who get it.
Most builders using Claude Code, Cursor, or custom agents are still figuring out workflows alone—BSOTA gets you in a room with others doing the same work. You'll see live walkthroughs of real setups and spend the rest of the night comparing notes and debugging approaches with people who actually use these tools daily. Bring your laptop and a project you're stuck on.
A weekly coworking session where builders show up with projects and leave with real momentum through focused work and peer support. The quiet deep work sprint is interrupted only by genuine moments of discovery, making it one of the few spaces where building alongside others actually feels less lonely.
A weekly coworking session built for the lonely part of building, where you show up with a project and leave with momentum from working alongside others. Quiet deep work sprints with a share-back to learn from what everyone's making.
Most builders using Claude Code, Cursor, or custom agents are figuring out workflows in isolation—BSOTA fixes that. You'll see live walkthroughs of real setups from active users, then spend the rest of the night working alongside other builders who are deep in the same problems. Bring your laptop and a project you're stuck on.
A weekly coworking session where builders show up with projects and work side by side through focused sprints and share-backs. The antidote to solo building: momentum, accountability, and the particular energy of making things real alongside others.
Every Monday, builders bring a project and work in focused silence alongside others doing the same. You'll get 90 minutes of deep work time, then a structured share-back where people show progress, get unstuck, and offer real help. It's accountability without pressure — just the momentum that comes from building in the room with people who get it.
Most builders using Claude Code, Cursor, or custom agents are still figuring out workflows alone—this session gets you in a room with others doing the same work. You'll see live walkthroughs of actual setups and spend the rest of the night comparing notes with people solving similar problems. Designed for regular users who want to level up by learning what's actually working for other builders.
Most networking events end when people leave. Keep in Touch adds structure to what breaks: matching you with relevant people upfront, then using Signal the next morning to actually follow up.
Monday co-working for AI builders. Two hours of focused build time with a share-back round to close.
Bi-weekly community event for builders working with agentic coding tools, with techniques going back to a shared repo at github.com/bsota/collective. RSVPs are open.
The first wave of AI rebuilt the digital 15% of the economy. The next wave runs on the other 85%: manufacturing, energy, infrastructure. Atharva Atre (Niantic Spatial) walks through the five technical layers it runs on, from simulated training environments to spatial intelligence.
Monday co-working for AI builders. Two hours of focused build time with a share-back round to close.
Builders Night
Monday · 2026-05-11 · 6:30 PM - 9:00 PMMonday co-working for AI builders. Two hours of focused build time with a share-back round to close.
Most AI benchmarks ask whether a model is smart. HumaneBench asks whether it's actually good for the person using it. The team tested how models hold up when users are stressed or vulnerable, and found that 67% of the time the model stops looking out for the user. Talk on the methodology, then a working session on what a benchmark like this would look like for your own product. Best for builders who want to ship AI that doesn't quietly fail the users who need it most.
Spend a Saturday going from tokenization to training a working language model from scratch. You'll write the core architecture, understand the math behind attention mechanisms, and leave with code you actually understand. Best for engineers who want to stop treating LLMs as black boxes.
A deep dive into the design decisions that shape agent architectures, from tool use patterns to memory systems to orchestration strategies.
Monday co-working for AI builders. Two hours of focused build time with a share-back round to close.
Monday co-working for AI builders. Two hours of focused build time with a share-back round to close.
Monday co-working for AI builders. Two hours of focused build time with a share-back round to close.
A Rally SF hackathon. Why can't the most technical community on Earth coordinate dinner?
Monday co-working for AI builders. Two hours of focused build time with a share-back round to close.
Monday co-working for AI builders. Two hours of focused build time with a share-back round to close.
BSOTA #2. Hands-on session exploring agentic workflows and collaborative AI building.
This session explores AI alignment through Anthropic's Constitutional AI framework. We'll dig into the 84-page constitution that guides Claude's behavior, the difference between rules and dispositions, and how Constitutional AI compares to RLHF. Co-facilitated by Anup Gosavi and Emily Hough-Kovacs. Pre-read: "Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback" (Bai et al., 2022).
Monday co-working for AI builders. Two hours of focused build time with a share-back round to close.
Monday co-working for AI builders. Two hours of focused build time with a share-back round to close.
Justin Lebar (ex-NVIDIA, Google TPU) broke down GPU architecture fundamentals and what they mean for the economics of AI inference. Standing room only.
Weekly co-working session for AI builders. Laptops out, projects in progress, peers to get unstuck with.
Our inaugural BSOTA session. Everett Kleven led the group through shared vocabulary, live demos, and breakout discussions on agentic computing workflows with Claude Code. 93 RSVPs, 40 attended.
We surveyed practical approaches to long-context LLMs including RoPE scaling, sparse attention, and state-space alternatives, then mapped the real engineering tradeoffs: when expanding context windows makes sense versus when retrieval-augmented generation still wins. The takeaway: accepting tokens isn't the same as using them well.
We examined how linear directions in a model's activation space correspond to specific character traits like sycophancy, hallucination propensity, and moral reasoning. The group discussed what personality means for language models and the implications for alignment, safety, and developer tools. Paper: "Persona Vectors" (Chen et al., 2025).
Our first session explored the foundational paper behind modern generative AI. We broke down how diffusion models gradually add noise to data and learn to reverse the process, why this approach outperformed GANs and VAEs, and the connections to Latent Diffusion and Consistency Models. Paper: "Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models" (Ho et al., 2020).
Our inaugural session explored DeepSeek-R1 — how reinforcement learning for reasoning, GRPO, and distillation are reshaping what open-source models can do.
Don't miss the next one.
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