Events
Rally events, and the rest of AI SF
Builders Night, BSOTA, Speaker Series, and what else is on around the city.
Tuesday, July 21
1 PM - 3 PM
AKOOL is launching an Artist-in-Residence Program and hosting a Palo Alto meetup to show how it works. Creators across video, design, and experimental art can meet the team, see what's possible with their tools, and apply for sponsored studio time with AI credits.
5 PM - 8:30 PM
A pitch night for founders who didn't get the YC stamp but are still building real momentum. Watch determined builders make their case to investors who care about execution over credentials.
5:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Hands-on exploration of agents tackling real-world tasks like payments, voice calls, and verification codes that usually block them. Practical setup with Novita APIs and ActionLayer, with time to build from scratch or finish that agent you started.
6 PM - 8 PM
Five builders showing real Codex workflows and prototypes in short live demos, followed by open conversation about how agentic coding is changing shipping and iteration. Bring a laptop and a project you want to think through with people actually working this problem daily.
6 PM - 9 PM
The night before Advancing AI, gathered with the builders and backers actually shipping AI-native workloads. Lightning talks on value-maxxing inference and infrastructure, then drinks and the conversations that matter.
7 PM - 9 PM
An intimate rooftop dinner for women in tech discussing how to build safer AI and technology aligned with human values. Hosted with speakers from Amazon and Intuit, this is where you'll actually connect with peers shaping the future.
Wednesday, July 22
5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Fastest-growing GTM teams are ditching bloated stacks for lean, integrated systems that actually drive revenue. This panel of operators and founders breaks down which tools matter, how to integrate them, and when to cut the rest.
5:30 PM - 7:30 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.
5:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Different data structures answer different questions well, and forcing every modality through one costs you in latency, storage, or lost meaning. This session walks through vector indexes, Iceberg tables, knowledge graphs, and more, showing what each excels at and how to combine them so agents actually get faster and cheaper.
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.
8 AM - 9 AM
Weekly breakfast for people shipping production agents right now. Real problems, real solutions, no panels or pitches, just hallway conversations with founders and engineers three months ahead of you.
Thursday, July 23
3 PM - 6 PM
A pre-YC Startup School gathering for technical founders, engineers, and investors to have real conversations before the main conference kicks off. Curated for early-stage builders looking to connect with capital and operators in the SF scene.
3:30 PM - 5 PM
Helmy Eltoukhy built Guardant Health from the ground up after pioneering semiconductor sequencing at Stanford and Illumina. A fireside chat with someone who's actually solved the hard problems in genomics and scaling biotech infrastructure.
4 PM - 7 PM
Twelve scrappy founders compete in curated pickleball matches with equipment, coaches, and a private court. Network over dinner after if you're seed to Series A stage or hitting seven figures ARR.
5 PM - 8 PM
The Campfire team is closing massive AI deals at companies like Replit and PostHog while scaling aggressively. Their CEO and VP Sales break down what actually works selling to CFOs in a hyper-competitive market, then stick around for happy hour.
5 PM - 8 PM
Voice agents need better speech recognition in messy real conversations. This demo shows how Universal-3.5 Pro Realtime handles context carryover, multilingual code-switching, and speaker isolation, followed by builders shipping production systems.
5:30 PM - 8 PM
Teams are shipping Claude Tag and ChatGPT Work into their workflows, and this demo night surfaces what's actually working versus what's still rough in multiplayer AI collaboration. Lightning demos plus open discussion on emergent behaviors and where team-based AI goes next.
5:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Technical leaders comparing notes on what's actually broken in modern software teams right now. Previous gatherings drew CTOs from Stripe, GitHub, Supabase and early-stage startups for honest conversations that stay in the room.
6 PM - 8:30 PM
Three builders diving into how local-first knowledge graphs and identity layers transform AI agents into something beyond chatbots. Arto Bendiken, Rayyan Zahid, and Rob Kunkle share concrete approaches to personal intelligence at Frontier Tower.
6 PM - 8:30 PM
Builders sharing what they're actually shipping across coding agents, autonomous systems, and AI-native backends. The speakers include Paradigm's founder and engineers from ByteDance, so expect technical depth on architecture decisions that matter.
9 AM - 11 AM
Casual breakfast for AI GTM professionals building the developer tools ecosystem, from dev relations to growth to partnerships. No talks or agenda, just coffee and actual conversations with people shaping how AI reaches developers.
Friday, July 24
10:30 AM - 5 PM
This is where Breaking Barriers builders bring their projects and find co-founders, hiring managers, and funders in one room. Workshops on founding and funding sit alongside a career fair with organizations actively growing their AI safety teams.
5 PM - 7 PM
A candid dinner on what stays human when AI becomes the default tool we build with. Music from Wavv and conversation curated by 01labs that actually sits with the tension instead of skipping past it.
6 PM - 10 PM
A costume poker night at a hidden North Beach mansion where founders and investors play mafia, watch magic, and gamble on raffle prizes while contemplating what humans will still have after singularity. Rooftop bay views, self-dealt cash games, and the last great argument for why deception and connection will always beat superintelligence.
6 PM - 11 AM
A curated weekend in the Sierra Nevada where seed to Series B founders learn fly fishing alongside investors, all captured for a documentary series. The river humbles everyone equally, making it the perfect mental reset for people who actually want to disconnect.
9 AM - 5 PM
A one-day sprint to build AI agents with real reasoning and tool integration, judged by practitioners shipping production systems. Thirty-five grand in prizes plus credits from Braintrust, ElevenLabs, Fireworks, and others make this worth the intensity.
Saturday, July 25
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 - 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
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
5:30 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 - 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 - 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.
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
5:30 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 - 8:30 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.
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
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 5
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
6:30 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.
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
6:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Past events
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.
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