Rally events, and the rest of AI SF

Mixer / networking

A low-key sauna morning at Point San Pablo's waterfront with founders, investors, and talent folks where actual conversations happen. Limited to 30 people with transportation handled, so you can show up and connect without the usual conference noise.

Mixer / networking

A casual space for people leaders to discuss managing humans alongside AI systems and what agentic workflows mean for team structure. Good for figuring out how leadership itself is shifting in this moment.

Mixer / networking

Mixer / networking

A gentle yoga session designed for women founders, investors, and operators, with breakfast and tea ceremony to follow at the Embarcadero. No experience needed, just show up early and stay for the connections.

Mixer / networking

A morning run along the Embarcadero with cortisol testing from Lume to measure how exercise impacts your stress hormones. Energy gels included, and you'll get early access to their wearable if you're curious about biometric tracking.

Talks & panels

Most AI transformations plateau after automating ten processes. This breakfast unpacks why great programmes reach scale by touching 500 workflows, with five other patterns ops leaders should know.

Mixer / networking

Small group of DTC founders, operators, and retention marketers gathering for an unstructured breakfast during SF Tech Week. Coffee and introductions, no panels or pitches, just people solving similar ecommerce problems.

Mixer / networking

Two pace groups ensure no one gets dropped on a run toward the bridge, followed by coffee to kick off SF TechWeek. A rare chance to connect with the Tavily founders and wider tech ecosystem in motion.

Mixer / networking

A ride for people who notice things: the light on the bridge, bad kerning, color theory. Krea and a16z are assembling the visually obsessed to climb Hawk Hill while arguing about AI, taste, and whether craft survives.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

A half-day founder lounge with coffee, co-working space, and panel discussions from experienced operators and investors. Useful for early-stage builders looking to focus, network with peers, and refresh materials before fundraising.

Mixer / networking

A guided breathwork session outdoors during Tech Week's chaos, hosted by Arra's founder and certified hypnotherapist. Grab a mat, breathe, then stick around for no-agenda coffee with other founders who actually showed up.

Your nervous system needs a reset after a week of back-to-back pitches and demos. Pause Studio's float therapy, cold plunges, and IV shots are built for exactly this, with 40% off for first-timers using code SFTECH40.

Mixer / networking

A practical break from shipping code: 30 minutes of guided yoga followed by community time. Good for resetting focus and connecting with other builders who actually prioritize their nervous systems.

Mixer / networking

Canyon's sponsoring a morning stop during SF Tech Week where you can grab coffee and pastries while chatting about connected mobility and rider safety. It's a low-friction way to network with the team before your day kicks off.

Mixer / networking

Casual breakfast for agent founders during SF Tech Week to swap what's working and what isn't. Particularly relevant if you're building on iMessage or messaging platforms.

Talks & panels

Nordic founders who've successfully scaled in the Bay Area are sharing unfiltered advice on avoiding pitfalls and building the right network. This is tactical talk from people who've actually made the transatlantic leap, not theory.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Nico from Verdict, Pramod from Napkin AI, and Viraj break down what actually works when you're building and shipping, with founders in the room operating at your level. Breakfast included, plus exclusive perks like a QSBS diagnostic and founder media coaching.

Talks & panels

Investors are getting pickier about what they fund, and this breakfast cuts through the noise on what actually matters right now. Hear directly from the market on positioning, traction signals, and team dynamics that move the needle for early-stage raises.

Mixer / networking

Free B12 shots and coffee fuel a morning of founder networking during SF Tech Week, with optional drop-in consultations from Grellas Shah lawyers on fundraising, equity, and contracts. Practical advice for whatever stage you're at, no pitch required.

Talks & panels

GPU-native clouds are becoming the actual infrastructure AI runs on, and this summit puts the whole ecosystem in one room: the neoclouds, silicon partners, enterprises, and investors. Main stage covers cloud economics to token costs to enterprise AI architecture, with the expo floor open all day for working sessions.

Talks & panels

A panel on what happens when the physical world becomes machine-readable and the infrastructure challenges that emerge. Heavy roster of robotics and 3D folks from NVIDIA, Google, and Dassault Systems thinking through what actually breaks on the way there.

Talks & panels

Bots are 53% of web traffic and AI-enabled fraud costs billions, yet platforms still rely on outdated verification methods. Hear from Persona and Helix on how startups can actually prove humans are human as AI evolves.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Snowflake and Google Cloud are taking over SOHN's cafe to connect builders working at the intersection of data and AI. Two panels, demos, and casual coffee conversations with founders and operators actually shipping these systems.

Workshop / hands-on

HR and tech leaders will walk through practical frameworks for keeping teams aligned when priorities shift constantly and AI adoption accelerates. It's worth attending if your org is scaling fast and you need concrete strategies for protecting talent and maintaining momentum.

Talks & panels

Four women leading at Deel, AWS, Sunshine Lake, and beyond share how they built influence across functions and navigated their paths to board roles. Tactical, unfiltered advice on gender dynamics and real power in tech.

Mixer / networking

Start your SF Tech Week morning with a yoga class and conversations about content marketing, growth, and capital. It's a rare moment to reset while meeting founders and investors actually thinking about these problems.

Talks & panels

The conversation among AI investors and founders is shifting from speed to trustworthiness, especially in regulated industries like insurance and financial services. This breakfast gathers the people actively building production systems where reliability actually matters.

Talks & panels

Enterprise buyers care less about AI itself and more about how it actually ships inside their orgs. Hear from CTOs at 2K and Palo Alto Networks on what they look for in startups, how they build scaled engineering teams, and why technical founders should understand their buying process.

Talks & panels

An open integration layer built on MCP and shared standards beats rebuilding connectors in every platform. This session explores portable agent integrations, reusable connectors, and the infrastructure to replace proprietary silos.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Z21 Ventures and SVB break down what actually works for hardware AI founders: fundraising expectations, manufacturing reality, and why your hiring playbook needs to be different. Practical insights on the prototype-to-production gap and scaling from founding through Series B.

Talks & panels

This conversation examines whether AI can expand mental health access for communities historically underserved by traditional systems. Black technologists, mental health professionals, and cultural leaders think through what responsible AI support actually requires beyond convenience.

Mixer / networking · Workshop / hands-on

Early-stage founders get a rare drop-in coaching setup with experienced operators like Stripe and Rackhouse during Tech Week. Free coffee, pastries, and 1:1 sessions on product, marketing, and GTM if you snag a spot.

Mixer / networking

Wind down after Tech Week with free coffee at Graphon's office, where you can chat with their team and other founders. They're hiring, so it's worth showing up if you're curious what they're building.

Mixer / networking

A36 Builders convenes founders, investors, and operators for intimate conversations during SF Tech Week, skipping the usual panel theater. Good coffee and curated introductions beat networking theater every time.

Hackathon · Demo night

A hackathon built around agents that actually do things: discover, decide, transact, coordinate, and operate in the real world. Four tracks span autonomous businesses, embodied AI, discovery engines, and wildcard systems, with live demos and working prototypes by day's end.

Mixer / networking

A morning ride through SF's best views with founders and builders who actually ride motorcycles, no pitches required. Small group, real conversation, and lunch in Hayes Valley beats another panel anyway.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Selected AI founders pitch two minutes (no slides) to investor judges for direct feedback and warm intros. Networking with investors and experienced founders fills the rest, offering real conversations and actual funding opportunities.

Demo night

Hamlet Azarian demos Growth OS, the operating system his PE firm uses to automate deal analysis and portfolio management. This is live, unscripted software running in the room, not slides.

Workshop / hands-on

Open source inference infrastructure is matured enough that self-hosting LLMs makes financial sense for real workloads. This half-day covers vLLM, distributed inference patterns, and routing strategies to cut costs without quality loss, plus hands-on time to experiment on your laptop.

Demo night · Talks & panels

Valon Labs is demoing Ditto, an AI agent that actually moves real money on mortgage loans, with a deep dive into why code-based guardrails beat prompts. Skip the coffee talk and watch how they keep hallucinating models from breaking the rules that matter.

Workshop / hands-on

A hands-on workshop for professionals redesigning work around AI and better outcomes. Bring a real process to rethink, build something with Base44, and learn from organizational leaders on careers and climate.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Hundreds of founders, investors, and operators converge at Finix HQ for a full day of panels, pitches, demos, and one-on-one meetings during SF Tech Week. Whether you're raising capital or hunting for the next generation of companies, this is where the right connections actually happen.

Talks & panels

Matt Perry and Rob Cannon dig into what actually happens inside companies when AI arrives, from legitimate pushback to organizational psychology. Essential for leaders who need their teams to adopt, not resist.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Founders and investors behind Pandora's $2.6B IPO and Nuance's $19.7B Microsoft acquisition share scaling playbooks with accredited investors in a curated room. Two panels cover agentic AI enterprise deployment and B2B scaling strategies with operators who've been there.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

A curated brunch for B2B operators at Series A-D startups navigating GTM, pricing, and AI integration. The real value is the room: peer-level conversations with founders and execs who can become customers, partners, or trusted advisors.

Mixer / networking

Tech Week's relentless schedule calls for a reset, and Alma's offering their office as a drop-in sanctuary with coffee, quiet booths, and meditation space. Grab office hours with their immigration attorneys if you're figuring out global hiring or talent moves.

Workshop / hands-on

Boutique agencies win by systematizing expertise into repeatable workflows, not by hiring more bodies. This workshop walks through concrete moves to increase client capacity, improve margins, and build AI-powered delivery loops without losing strategy or quality.

Talks & panels

US immigration decisions ripple through hiring, fundraising, and founder equity in ways most startups don't anticipate until too late. This AMA with immigration attorneys cuts through the fragmented advice and gives you direct answers to the questions you're actually afraid to ask publicly.

Mixer / networking

Lawyers from Brogan Law who actually work in crypto space will answer your questions over coffee. Useful if you're building something that touches tokens, regulatory uncertainty, or just need someone to sanity-check your legal concerns.

Talks & panels

Everyone claims human-in-the-loop is the answer, but by approval fifty the human's stopped reading. This fireside cuts through the theater to discuss what actually works when oversight needs to fire on decisions that matter.

Talks & panels

Gamma scaled from 3M to 100M users through creator marketing, and this conversation pulls back the curtain on how. Grant Lee talks with the founder of the agency that built their creator program from day one, covering which channels actually moved numbers and what they'd run differently today.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

The Pentagon made commercial-first procurement permanent, and the Bay Area has the capital, founders, and veteran talent to execute it. This curated summit of 250 defense innovators, frontier AI leaders, and veteran technologists aboard The Klamath during Fleet Week is engineered for 1:1 matchmaking where introductions become contracts.

Talks & panels

Lightbringer has built an AI agent that handles patent work with a real attorney in the loop, and over 200 founders already trust it. Hear from a former engineer turned patent attorney and a seed-stage VC on why IP protection matters earlier than most founders think.

Talks & panels

Anthropic's IPO has Sarah Fu's fingerprints all over it: she's bought IPOs at Fidelity, taken companies public at Morgan Stanley, and prepped them inside Stripe. This intimate session breaks down what institutional buyers actually care about, how bankers frame the story, and the valuation questions that matter beyond headlines.

Talks & panels

George Bandarian from Untapped Ventures breaks down where AI actually stands in Q3 2026, the emerging Autonomous Economy framework, and which investment themes matter most right now. This is the kind of signal-focused, founder-friendly market read that usually only happens in partner meetings.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Founders who've shipped before share what they're doing differently on their second act, from YG Leboeuf (Deck, ex-Flinks) to Dori Yona and Drew Glover. Stick around for coffee, chair massages, and Founder Clarity Sessions to reset your own overwhelm.

Demo night · Talks & panels

Spatial AI and 3D builders from 30+ countries are showing off playable worlds, games, XR, and creative tools at Tripothon's SF Demo Day. Panels on world models and creative AI, plus judges and founders working the room.

Workshop / hands-on

Talks & panels · Workshop / hands-on

For founders who've shipped product and raised initial capital, this rotating workshop session tackles what's next: systematizing GTM with AI, building operating visibility, and turning customer support into growth intelligence. Three practitioners walk you through the concrete moves that separate early traction from venture-ready scale.

Demo night · Talks & panels

Tripothon brings 3000+ builders from 30+ countries to SF for a Demo Day showcasing AI-powered 3D, games, XR, and physical creations you can actually play with and touch. Hero panels on world models and creative AI, plus live announcement of $80,000 in prizes from the global hackathon.

Mixer / networking

Real conversations with other founder moms navigating the startup and parenting juggle during SF Tech Week. This is unfiltered networking designed around what actually matters: swapping war stories, finding your people, and maybe scoring that one piece of advice you've been needing.

Workshop / hands-on

Founders learn the marketing and sales systems to convert leads into high-ticket deals faster, without expanding headcount. Walk out with a framework to identify where revenue is hiding in your current business.

Talks & panels

Mixer / networking · Talks & panels

Lovable and Anthropic are hosting a brunch conversation on AI stacks for founders moving from prototype to customers, with Elena Verna and an Accel partner. Practical advice on tool selection plus pancakes with fellow builders in the scene.

Workshop / hands-on · Talks & panels

Candid takes on what's shifting in SF's startup and AI scenes, straight from founders and builders in the trenches. Then hack together an AI agent solving a real business problem using modern tools.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Building clean code means nothing if you can't get users to pay for it. This session cuts through deployment friction and marketing noise with concrete GTM frameworks, live demos from Mojave Cloud and Aim-Hi, and direct access to founders solving the same scaling problems.

Workshop / hands-on

Tight feedback on your pitch from investors and strategists who've seen hundreds of funded decks. Bring a specific problem with your narrative and leave with concrete changes that move your raise forward.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

SF's German tech contingent discussing where AI and technology head next, with founders shipping at Recursive, Anthropic, and Zoox alongside investors sizing up the moment. Useful for understanding how European operators think about building in this cycle.

Workshop / hands-on

Hands-on workshop where CFOs and finance leaders rotate through working sessions on AI across accounting, AR, and procurement. You'll leave with a prioritized roadmap of where AI actually moves the needle in your organization and what you're ready to tackle first.

Mixer / networking

Silicon Valley and international VCs mingling over lunch during SFTechWeek, with focused conversations on AI, fintech, and deep tech. This is the move if you're looking to lock in cross-border deal flow or expand your network beyond the Bay Area.

Talks & panels

As AI moves into critical business functions, data governance gets messier fast. Axios gathers business, tech, and policy leaders to debate who owns information, how companies pick AI partners, and what regulations actually control.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

The real constraint for most AI companies isn't the model, it's everything around it: data pipelines, compute efficiency, and production tooling that barely exists yet. This panel tackles what infrastructure still needs to be built, with founders actually shipping that layer and investors deciding where to place bets.

Talks & panels

AI labs need proprietary datasets, but founders often don't know what theirs is actually worth. This session covers valuation, licensing, and legal considerations with founders who've sold data and operators pricing it.

Talks & panels

When your best engineer announces parental leave mid-commitment or a cofounder isn't working out, prompts won't help. Three fractional heads of people share concrete strategies on hiring, retention, and org design from scaling 50+ startups without breaking.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Consumer funding criteria shifted hard since 2021, and most founders are still pitching the old way. This panel cuts through the noise on what traction actually moves investors, which capital structure fits your brand, and how to run a process that doesn't waste six months in wrong rooms.

Mixer / networking

Giano Capital and 3i Members are hosting a strictly capped lunch for family offices and late-stage investors at The Battery's Library, focused on informal conversation rather than pitches. The hand-picked group will discuss what everyone's investing in across tech, with the people at your table doing all the talking.

Mixer / networking

A 90-minute lunch for Christian founders and executives to talk candidly about staying principled under pressure in tech leadership. No pitches or networking, just honest conversation with people navigating the same tensions between faith and the demands of the role.

Talks & panels

International founders scaling to the US face critical early decisions on incorporation, hiring, tax, and compliance that compound over time. This intimate session with legal and operational experts covers practical lessons from companies that've already navigated the expansion.

Mixer / networking

Founders pitch their story from the back of a McLaren while Airwallex films for distribution across their channels. Limited slots mean this is more exclusive than your typical Tech Week activation, but the exposure could be worth the ride.

Mixer / networking

A sightseeing tour of SF's classics in the iconic yellow GoCars, hosted by three YC-backed founder platforms. Limited spots, so grab one if you want to network while cruising past the Golden Gate and Lombard Street.

Talks & panels

Insiders from NVIDIA, Google, and Ericsson break down the tactical playbook for partnering with tech giants. If you're seeking strategic alignments or critical integrations to scale, this is concrete guidance from people who actually broker these deals.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

A focused panel on building across US and India markets, covering fundraising, dual structures, ESOPs, and cross-border compliance. Small room of founders who've lived it, plus legal practitioners with hard-won lessons.

Mixer / networking

The SF General Intelligence Lab is taking the community off-screen with a free hot strength class at Marina, mats provided. Solid way to build stamina before the rest of tech week kicks in.

Talks & panels

The compliance and telecom infrastructure side of AI voice deployments rarely gets attention, but it's what actually blocks production at scale. This AMA covers global regulations, the two maps problem, and what enterprises need to know before shipping internationally.

Mixer / networking

A casual lunch gathering for COLM attendees at a high-rise with city views, hosted by Foundation AI at the Hilton. Good spot to decompress from sessions and meet researchers and builders across academia and industry.

Talks & panels

Early-stage founders obsess over MVPs while the biggest companies quietly embed themselves in communities. This session argues your network shapes what you build, how you distribute it, and whether it survives.

Workshop / hands-on

You've built a working agent, but your pitch blends into six identical ones in a buyer's inbox. This workshop forces you to stress-test your go-to-market messaging live, identifying who actually buys, what moves them, and what proof sticks.

Talks & panels · Demo night

If you're building real-time video or media systems, this is where the MoQ protocol crowd actually gathers to show working code. Four hours of talks, demos, and the people shipping MoQ in production.

Workshop / hands-on

Revenue leaders selling into enterprise almost always excel at one motion while quietly hemorrhaging on another. This half-day masterclass diagnoses which one is costing you and gives you frameworks your team can actually use when you're not in the room.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Wistia's breaking down their 2026 video report with practical insights on where AI actually moves the needle for marketing teams. Swap notes with other leaders and leave with concrete ideas for what's worth testing versus what's hype.

Mixer / networking

Talks & panels

A developer-focused breakdown of how AI applications connect to external systems through MCP, APIs, and the emerging integration layer. Covers tool discovery, authentication, observability, and what standardization might come next for agent infrastructure.

Workshop / hands-on · Talks & panels

Most revenue teams crush one of three enterprise motions: win preference, earn approval, or expand accounts. This half-day masterclass with enterprise veterans helps you find which one is quietly bleeding money and fix it before the next deal stalls.

Talks & panels

The gap between AI-generated trading ideas and strategies that actually survive real markets is wider than most realize. AI Velocity Trading walks through their complete workflow for research, validation, and deployment, showing how AI accelerates what once took quant teams months to build.

Demo night · Talks & panels

Third Sphere crammed their entire hardware portfolio into one room, and you can actually touch working robots, test ride a Onewheel, and watch non-contact ultrasound scan battery cells. Nancy Pfund and Ramez Naam speak on the investments and curves that built climate tech, with founder-led demos throughout the warehouse.

Talks & panels

Eric Simons shares how Bolt.new scaled to a billion-dollar company, covering the messy early decisions and inflection points that actually mattered. Grab coffee and a founder clarity session afterward to reset your own trajectory.

Mixer / networking · Talks & panels

VCs pitch their thesis and check sizes directly to founders, flipping the usual dynamic. Three hundred founders apply per event, so approval matters, but the networking alone makes this worth the effort if you get in.

Workshop / hands-on

A practical webinar cutting through health compliance confusion for early-stage founders. Learn which rules actually apply to your product, where HIPAA fits, and how to spend your legal budget wisely without over-lawyering.

Talks & panels

International founders often miss the subtext in US business conversations. This session cuts through the noise with real examples of what investors and buyers actually mean, and how to navigate their indirect communication style.

Mixer / networking

Watch the Blue Angels from an 89-foot yacht while meeting curated AI founders and infrastructure leaders. Smoov matches you with 3-4 person conversations around agents, compute, and distribution before the event even starts.

Mixer / networking

Structured speed dating for operators: you meet founders, service providers, and ecosystem leaders across rapid rounds, and every conversation has to end with actual value like a referral, feedback, or partnership. Your profile stays discoverable in their community network long after the room empties.

Talks & panels · Demo night

Anthropic leadership and top investors discuss the state of AI startups, then founders building on Claude pitch live demos with audience-voted winners. Solid networking play for founders and investors serious about the Claude ecosystem.

Workshop / hands-on

This is a hands-on look at Transcendent Mobility's TM-B vehicle during SF TechWeek. You'll ride it yourself and talk directly with the team about pedal amplification, frame configuration, and acceleration features.

Talks & panels · Demo night

Watch expert builders live-code AI agents under pressure, Iron Chef style, using no-code tools and a mystery prompt. You'll see how they think, iterate, and ship in real-time with a panel that includes founders and developers actually shipping products.

Workshop / hands-on · Mixer / networking

Sirica Therapeutics is recruiting game developers and designers to build movement-focused experiences for autistic communities using VR, robotics, and immersive tech. Real internship and collaboration opportunities available for those wanting to apply their skills to purpose-driven projects.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

A panel of a16z, Braintrust, and Stripe creatives will roast startup brands on stage, scoring websites and explaining what makes some land while others fade. Submit your site for live feedback or come to learn brutal truths about brand positioning from people who actually ship.

Workshop / hands-on

A three-hour workshop where you build a Claude-powered content system connected to your actual brand assets, solving the consistency problem that breaks down the moment someone other than you creates output. Walk out with a working design system your team can use without re-explaining your brand each time.

Demo night

Stoneleap's showing off their AI-powered 3D game builder at the Swedish House with drinks, pizza, and hands-on demos. Low-key after-work vibe where you can actually try building something instead of sitting through slides.

Demo night · Mixer / networking

Worldcastr is unveiling predictive tools for understanding how cities and neighborhoods evolve, combining transparent forecasts with scenario planning for investors and developers. This curated afternoon covers physical development forecasting and the data infrastructure shaping urban change.

Mixer / networking

Dolores Park gathering for Latino builders using Claude, no pitches or slides, just Spanish-speaking engineers and founders sharing projects on the grass. Bring a laptop demo, food to share, and genuine interest in connecting with people building AI in your language.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Two panels breaking down robotics business fundamentals: how to actually sell physical AI systems and what investors are looking for before they write checks. Useful if you're considering the space as a founder, operator, or early backer.

Talks & panels · Demo night

Alumni Ventures and Zendesk are hosting a panel on AI's impact on go-to-market strategy, featuring operators, investors, and portfolio founder demos during SF Tech Week. Useful if you're building revenue tools or want to see what GTM founders are actually shipping right now.

Talks & panels

AI is exposing where enterprise systems were already broken, and the real edge goes to leaders redesigning work around high-agency talent. Founders Foundry and Solana are hosting a fireside chat with MIT researchers and operators on moving from scattered AI solutions to quantified workforce architecture.

Talks & panels

Three partners from Antler, Khosla, and Floodgate answer founder questions on pre-seed and seed fundraising in a no-fluff AMA format. Direct insight on what investors actually look for, common mistakes, and what moves you from first meeting to term sheet.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

A practical gathering for founders pitching ideas, people building early teams, and folks figuring out their next move. MirWork brings together the recruiting and entrepreneurship sides of the table in one room.

Mixer / networking

A Tokyo-based marketing company bringing their CEO and COO to SF for casual networking with founders, marketers, and AI folks. Good if you're exploring how AI fits into marketing workflows or want to connect across the Japan-SF startup scene.

Demo night

A platform for giving AI agents secure access to your systems with granular permissions and complete action logging. Every AI move gets recorded and auditable, so you maintain control while letting agents actually do useful work.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Two back-to-back conversations on AI's impact on work and interfaces, with Box's Aaron Levie and Wispr Flow's Tanay Kothari. Limited to Turing Frontier Fellows and a curated group of builders, investors, and operators during SF Tech Week.

Talks & panels

A half-day summit on building sustainable creator businesses with speakers from HubSpot, WordPress, and independent creators. Topics cover storytelling, fan engagement at scale, and using AI to stay productive.

Mixer / networking

40 seed-stage founders and VCs play three rapid rounds of Startup Mafia, where pitchers, idea stealers, and investors read each other under pressure. Watch sharp questioning and idea defense in action, or jump in as a player.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Lightning talks from neurotech founders building neural interfaces and platform tools, followed by direct access to a dozen startups working in health, computing, and beyond. Solid if you're scoping the industry as a contributor, investor, or founder.

Mixer / networking

Immigrant founders in AI can get practical support strengthening their professional profile through a new six-month cohort from AI Valley and MeritMap, kicking off with casual pickleball and community on the court. If you're exploring O-1A or EB-1A pathways, this is a chance to meet other founders navigating the same journey.

Talks & panels

Chris Slowe and Reddit moderators discuss building brands people actually care about, covering authentic storytelling, early advocates, and leveraging communities for growth without big budgets. Practical for founders looking to earn attention through genuine engagement rather than noise.

Workshop / hands-on

People are living in ChatGPT and Claude, and your next product gets discovered by showing up there. Build a real MCP app in two hours and ship something immediately useful inside the chat.

Mixer / networking

A sensory tasting anchored by an olive oil sommelier exploring how extra virgin oils connect to longevity and metabolic health. This is networking for founders and researchers working on human healthspan, grounded in actual flavor and science.

Talks & panels

A tech diplomacy panel exploring how innovation hubs across Georgia, Portugal, Italy, Azerbaijan, and the EU can deepen ties with Silicon Valley through startups and cross-border collaboration. Worth attending if you're building internationally or curious how regional ecosystems strengthen each other.

Mixer / networking

Western Alliance Bank, TriplePoint Capital, and Manatt are hosting a waterfront networking reception for startup finance leaders and founders during SF Tech Week. Drinks, light bites, and Bay views on the Embarcadero beat most of the other programming that week.

Talks & panels

Fieldguide and their VC partners are hosting a technical panel on agents built for high-stakes work in audit, defense, and logistics where mistakes actually matter. This is for engineers shipping real autonomy in regulated environments, not prototype demos.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Marketing leaders are moving past AI possibility into real implementation, and this panel explores what's actually working now versus what still matters most. Two conversations at Quantcast HQ cover the shift in capabilities and how organizations are putting AI into practice, with rooftop networking after.

Workshop / hands-on

This workshop skips the hype and gets into the real mechanics of running teams with both humans and agents, covering team design, accountability, and trust. You'll walk out with an actual toolkit to clarify ownership and start shifting your org structure.

Demo night

See 16-foot robotic angel and devil wings deployed live, handle finished feathers, and meet the builders behind this impossible workshop. This preview ends with presale spots for the Halloween and Winter build cohorts, claimed first-come.

Workshop / hands-on · Mixer / networking

Women builders shipping real work gather for short teaching, then hands-on build time together at Canopy. Skip the panels and networking theater for actual practice and community in the same room.

Mixer / networking

An experiential tasting led by an international olive oil sommelier exploring longevity through tea, superfoods, and Mediterranean living. Connect with founders and longevity researchers actively building in human health tech.

Mixer / networking

Lexi Ventures is hosting an unstructured pizza night for biotech founders and investors to actually talk without the pitch deck energy. Low-pressure networking during SFTechWeek if you want to meet people in the space casually.

Workshop / hands-on · Mixer / networking

Founder visibility workshop with free professional headshots, color analysis, and live press angle teardowns from real founders. Leave with a polished headshot, your color palette, and a media strategy you can actually execute.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

CTOs from Enhanced Radar and Sorcerer discuss the real work of scaling distributed hardware: prototypes, field tests, physical constraints, deployment. Bring what you're building and your hardest questions.

Mixer / networking

A low-pressure founder hangout where Jenga blocks come with real questions, snacks are plentiful, and fallen towers become pitch practice. Perfect if you want to meet people actually building something without the usual networking small talk.

Mixer / networking

Fast-paced blitz chess where rated players mix with casual learners, followed by drinks and a trophy ceremony. Even if you lose early, you get four games total to find your level and meet other founders across the SF tech scene.

Workshop / hands-on · Mixer / networking

Most AI agent projects skip security infrastructure until it's too late. This hands-on workshop covers token management, async authorization, and permissions enforcement so your agents actually ship production-ready.

Mixer / networking

Dimes and Bankr are hosting a happy hour during Tech Week where builders show projects and get feedback from both teams. Drinks, a limited hoodie drop, and raffle giveaways make this worth the trip to localhost:howard.

Demo night · Mixer / networking

Lumafield's showing off their industrial CT scanning tech with live demos at their SOMA HQ. Bring something interesting and you might get it scanned for free while networking over drinks.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

An intimate dialogue series reconvening researchers thinking through AI futures and human agency at scale. Worth attending if you want to engage seriously with superintelligence questions beyond hype.

Talks & panels

An interdisciplinary exploration of how biological and synthetic intelligence might understand each other without one becoming the other. Philosophers, engineers, and scientists discussing whether mutual intelligence is possible and what it looks like in practice.

Demo night · Mixer / networking

The R2S2R Arena opens as San Francisco's first dedicated space for testing physical AI at scale, bridging real robots, simulation, and deployment. Live demos and the debut of sim2world.ai benchmark show how research and industry teams can collaborate on robotics systems that actually work in factories.

Mixer / networking

A26 Ventures is in town during SF Tech Week backing early-stage founders with $25K checks. This is a straightforward happy hour to meet the team and other builders.

Talks & panels

Morgan Stanley and Kranz bring together VCs, PE investors, and LPs for a candid discussion on secondary market strategies for funds managing $250MM-$5B. Practical talk on liquidity timing, DPI optimization, and navigating GP-led and LP-led opportunities with operators who've moved billions in transactions.

Workshop / hands-on · Mixer / networking

Giga Energy is showing off the physical layer most AI builders never see: modular pods, power systems, and cooling that actually matter at scale. Tour the infrastructure, then network with the operators and founders thinking about compute from the ground up.

Mixer / networking

A no-nonsense happy hour during Tech Week for founders and investors focused on data and AI. Skip the pitches and hear honest takes on what's actually working from the people building it.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Africa's youngest population and mobile-first economy create conditions for AI adoption unlike anywhere else, making this essential context for founders thinking beyond legacy markets. Fireside chats with founders, VCs, and operators building in the space cover startup models, infrastructure, language tech, and regulation.

Mixer / networking

A casual outdoor gathering during SF Tech Week that gets you away from the desk and talking to people actually building the future. Limited spots, free treats from Smitten, and a chance to see what's coming next in tech that actually moves beyond screens.

Mixer / networking

A curated room for founders and product leaders actively shipping AI products to exchange hard-won lessons on strategy, pricing, and go-to-market. Good for testing your product thinking against people actually building in this space.

Demo night · Mixer / networking

AI4Purpose is demoing Starry Night, a sleep aid combining AI with sound and haptics to help you actually rest. Casual SoMa evening with founders and investors exploring how AI solves real problems beyond the hype.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Three founders and a beauty tech PM discuss how AI is reshaping longevity, fashion identity, and personalization in consumer tech. This is the rare panel that treats AI's impact on self-expression with actual nuance, not hype.

Talks & panels

South Asian women founders, operators, and investors share real stories about navigating tech while building impact and lifting others up. Honest conversations on leadership, growth, and what it takes to rise in the ecosystem.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

When AI handles the grunt work, finance teams face a better problem: deciding what actually matters and acting on it. Three finance leaders share how they've restructured their functions around AI-powered scenarios and judgment.

Workshop / hands-on · Talks & panels

The real question isn't whether to use AI, it's how to build a company where agents are embedded in your org chart and workflows run themselves. Workshop on agentic team frameworks, fireside on scaling failures nobody discusses, then cocktails where you can pressure-test your actual operating problems.

Workshop / hands-on · Talks & panels

Chris Sheng walks through why founders ship AI ideas in their heads but not in production, covering token burn, process documentation, and the exact reframing that makes agents actually execute. Bring a real use case and watch it get built live, leaving with something you can run that week.

Mixer / networking

Meet founders and marketers building company channels with video at Barebottle Salesforce Park. They're sharing research from n8n, Scale, and Vector on what actually drives attention and demand in tech.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Five early-stage companies distilled to three metrics each, zero pitch theater. You vote fund or fold, then watch actual VCs explain what swings their IC votes and where most founders get it wrong.

Mixer / networking

A curated pickleball lineup for seed through series A founders and their investors, designed for actual conversation between games. Three hours of movement and networking with people at the same stage, followed by light dinner.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

A live Oxford-style debate on whether robotics is underinvested or overheated, with four founders arguing the motion and the room voting before and after. Chaired by someone who's actually shipped at scale, followed by the drinks that matter.

Mixer / networking

A rare chance to actually disconnect with the people building AI in SF, minus the networking pitch and startup talk. Sauna, cold plunges, and the kind of conversation that happens when you're not thinking about shipping.

Mixer / networking

Red carpet rooftop with founders, funders, and angels overlooking the city skyline. Most of the evening is unstructured for actual conversations and deal-making over drinks and appetizers.

Workshop / hands-on · Talks & panels

Build a working voice concierge for your brand in an afternoon, no coding experience needed. You'll get live feedback from founders and walk out with a prototype that actually talks to customers.

Mixer / networking

The Basecamp Research team is hosting a casual happy hour during SF Tech Week. Swing by to grab a drink, meet the crew, and talk biotech or whatever else is on your mind.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Fintech builders discussing how AI and platform engineering reshape sustainable development, from agentic change management to self-improving systems backed by evals. Practical talks from CodeRabbit, Intuit, and Arize followed by networking with engineers shipping these patterns in production.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

This vertical intelligence network brings together founders, clinicians, and researchers to pressure-test whether AI can actually simulate cells well enough to predict therapies that work. A focused room debating the gap between models that predict and interventions that reach patients.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

VCs and space industry execs discuss what's actually getting funded in the sector right now and how to position your company for capital. Practical intel on funding trends paired with networking, held during SF Tech Week.

Mixer / networking

A members-only gathering for the Agentic AI Foundation's contributors, maintainers, and builders working across agent protocols, security, identity, and developer tooling. No talks, just drinks and direct conversation with the people shaping open agentic AI standards and interoperability.

Demo night · Mixer / networking

Live demos from Future of Work startups backed by Indeed's venture team, plus the investors and operators shaping the category. The kind of room where real introductions happen and founders actually connect with people who move the needle.

Talks & panels · Demo night

AWS and partners like Elastic, MongoDB, and HiddenLayer walk through production agentic AI from code to deployment with live demos and technical deep dives. Hit the booths after to quiz experts on real-world implementation patterns and AWS integration strategies.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Engineers from Adyen, Nebius, and APIMatic break down API integrations, documentation strategies, and deterministic context layers for production agents. This is the practical session on shipping agentic commerce at scale.

Hackathon

Teams imagine a specific day at work in 2036, then prototype one real artifact from that future. You're building the thing behind scenarios where AI has fundamentally reshaped how work actually happens.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

OpenTable's leadership shares how they're building AI into dining and hospitality at their new downtown office. Stick around for happy hour to network with engineers, PMs, and ML folks thinking about the space.

Workshop / hands-on

Build a production-ready GTM agent from template to security-approved ship at the Elasticsearch office with Mastra, Elastic, and Arcade. This hands-on night gets you past the architecture questions that actually block agent deployment in real companies.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Finance and product teams often disagree on AI investment bets, so this case study workout tackles ownership and accountability with live debate. You'll see how assumptions about ROI actually differ between functions, plus how AI is reshaping how companies evaluate these decisions.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Physical AI systems need to handle messy industrial environments, not pristine labs. Hear from Bedrock Robotics and Bright Machines about engineering tradeoffs and design decisions that keep autonomous systems performing when conditions shift.

Demo night · Mixer / networking

Ondu is unveiling smart rings built for safety and health tracking, from fall detection for seniors to cycle tracking for women. Fine art and wine at 111 Minna makes for an elegant first public look at their wearables.

Mixer / networking

The Datology team breaks down how data curation actually works over drinks at Golden Gate Tap Room. Solid chance to talk shop with people who care deeply about getting AI training data right.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Asana's hosting a founder reception where scaling companies connect with tools and expertise to remove growth barriers. Light bites, a fireside chat on scaling, live demos, and giveaways round out the night.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Happen Bank's design team shares how they keep human creativity central while building in an AI-accelerated world. A keynote from Max Losee plus casual conversation with other UX folks thinking through the same tensions.

Mixer / networking

Tier 1 capital meets funded founders on a rooftop with AI-powered matchmaking that surfaces real chemistry before you arrive. The 4:1 founder-to-investor ratio and pre-event pairing mean you're talking to people who actually fit your stage and thesis.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Healthtech founders, clinicians, and investors gathering to discuss what actually works when deploying AI into clinical workflows. Panel features folks from iQ Surgical, Stanford, and VA Health who've shipped real healthcare systems.

Mixer / networking

Workshop / hands-on · Mixer / networking

Closed-door working session where Seed and Series A founders bring live GTM problems and get hands-on help from exited founders and active VCs. Last year someone closed an enterprise deal before it ended, and this year it's smaller groups actually solving distribution, sales, and growth blocking progress.

Mixer / networking

Models fail on the long tail of real-world work that benchmarks never defined, but real users correcting agents generate the signal to close that gap. This dinner explores where agent failures actually matter and who's capturing preference data at scale.

Mixer / networking · Talks & panels

Founders Bay brings together AI founders, VCs, and builders for an intimate dinner during SF Tech Week with lightning talks and a panel on AI consolidation. The room you want to be in if you're fundraising or investing in what's next.

Talks & panels

A pragmatic look at legacy modernization decisions from teams that have actually faced this choice. Worth attending if you're deciding whether to refactor, migrate, or accept technical debt as a business cost.

Talks & panels

A rare conversation on embodied AI infrastructure through the lens of intimate hardware, exploring how the same operational backbone could run robotics or wearables companies. Useful for founders thinking about AI-native company architecture and the crossover patterns emerging across physical device ecosystems.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Live pitches from founders actively raising via RegCF, with direct access to early-stage startups across biotech, aerospace, and robotics. Kingscrowd curates deal flow worth hearing if you're actually deploying capital right now.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Mexican founders and technologists building AI-native products are gathering at the Mexico City Consulate to share learnings and bridge ecosystems between Mexico and Silicon Valley. Worth the trip if you're curious about how a different market is approaching AI from first principles.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

If your agents forget what they learned mid-task or burn money re-reading the same data, this one's for you. Technical talks from teams solving memory, state, and multimodal reasoning for long-running agents, no sales pitches.

Mixer / networking

COLM's official close, but the real conversations shift to drinks and views nearby with the researchers and collaborators you've met all week. This is where the benchmark builders and lab folks actually decompress together before leaving town.

Mixer / networking

Balerion Space Ventures and CBRE are hosting a low-key happy hour in FIDI with an open bar and room to actually talk to people. Worth the trip if you want networking that doesn't feel like networking.

Mixer / networking

Visa's rooftop overlooking Oracle Park hosts fintech founders and investors during SF Tech Week for sunset conversations on financial services trends. Capacity is extremely limited and requires pre-approval, so RSVP early and arrive by 5 PM to avoid 30-minute escort intervals.

Mixer / networking

Voxel is making the case that physical AI infrastructure deployed on shop floors and in warehouses is the next major enterprise category. This invite-only reception brings together institutional investors and industrial leaders to explore systems of reality and their unit economics.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Physical AI gets real this week: robots handling freight, world models learning physics, and the infrastructure powering it all from data centers to orbit. Omni Ventures and HPE are hosting panels with the founders and operators actually shipping this stuff.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Fourteen Latvian startups pitch, debate ecosystem advantages, and network with Bay Area angels and VCs during SFTechWeek. Stick around for the Baltic Tech Happy Hour if you want to keep the conversation going.

Mixer / networking

Investors and founders converge for direct conversation across the Bay's VC ecosystem during SFTechWeek. Limited capacity makes this worth locking in early if you're actively raising or deploying capital.

Mixer / networking · Talks & panels

Venture speed dating where founders pitch investors in 10-minute rounds followed by open networking. P2S.vc brings early-stage startups and their backers together for real conversations about pre-seed funding.

Demo night · Talks & panels

Founders shipping AI for phones, wearables, cars, and robots pitch live in front of judges from silicon companies and OEMs. Live demos and a panel from people actually building the device AI future.

Demo night

Live hardware demos show how robotics and physical AI are reshaping manufacturing, with drinks and tacos keeping the vibe social. This is demo culture at its best if you want to see what's actually shipping in industrial automation.

Mixer / networking

A blind matching speed networking night where playing cards pair you with founders, investors, and operators you wouldn't normally meet. Five-minute rounds reshuffle by number, suit, and color before opening up for longer conversations with people who actually clicked.

Mixer / networking

Luminar and Wilson Sonsini are hosting a curated dinner for LPs, GPs, and angels to meet AI and deep tech founders during Tech Week SF. Limited seats, Nordic deal flow network, and actual networking instead of panels.

Talks & panels

Steven Plappert walks through raising $20M across five rounds in a tough market: the calendar structure that kept him ahead of investors, tracking momentum, and the moments rounds almost fell apart. Logan Burchett, Forecastr's fractional CFO, shares the operational side nobody talks about when the CEO is full-time fundraising.

Talks & panels

Gamma and Atlassian are hosting a presentation night where people share obsessions and rabbit holes they could talk about for hours. If you're presenting, you'll need Gamma or Confluence Slides to pitch whatever niche interest captivates you.

Mixer / networking

A relaxed evening for deep tech and AI investors to reconnect and meet peers across stages and sectors during SF Tech Week. Hosted by Alumni Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Future Ventures, and Uncork Capital with drinks and light bites.

Workshop / hands-on · Talks & panels

Yujian Yao from Floot walks through what actually belongs in an MVP versus what kills momentum, with a live build showing how to get from idea to shipped fast. If you're stuck between overthinking version one and shipping half-baked, this cuts through the noise.

Mixer / networking

A private gathering for funded founders and active investors during SF Tech Week, built around actual conversations instead of panels or pitches. Limited attendance means thoughtful introductions and a chance to learn about new companies and upcoming rounds before the broader market knows.

Mixer / networking

No panels or pitches, just founders at every stage swapping notes over drinks and food during Tech Week. Hosted by Inkle, Razorpay, Efficient Capital Labs, and JLL.

Mixer / networking

A poker night built for actual conversation between founders and investors, with professionally dealt tables and no phone-checking between hands. Small and curated, this is Tech Week closing night done right: a few hours away from the usual pitch deck script.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Top VCs and founders debate whether the agent economy is actually happening, with perspectives from teams building in the space. If you're trying to figure out the hype versus reality, this panel delivers the candid takes worth hearing.

Mixer / networking

HUD's hosting a happy hour steps from COLM to talk agent eval infrastructure, benchmark design, and RL post-training work. Good spot to meet the team building this stuff and see if their open roles fit what you're working on.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

General Catalyst is backing early-stage AI health companies, and this pitch night at Stanford Faculty Club is where they're actively looking. Five minutes to show your work in front of investors who write checks.

Hackathon

Build quant models using frontier AI in live competition rounds, watching your predictions score on the leaderboard in real time. Five hours, $1,000 prize pool, no personal stakes required.

Demo night · Mixer / networking

Elve is demonstrating how their TWTAs deliver significantly more power efficiency for space and ground mmWave applications at lower cost. Live product demos, technical team access, and networking with industry colleagues makes this worth the trip if you're building wireless or satcom infrastructure.

Mixer / networking

A break from typical tech week panels, this happy hour gathers the actual fashion tech community: founders, investors, stylists, and creatives. Low-pressure drinks and conversation at a Union Square gallery beats another pitch deck.

Mixer / networking

A casual run with the Weave team through SF, followed by merch and giveaways at their new office. Bonus: runners get guaranteed entry to their launch party Friday night.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Products like Instinct and Muse raise the bar for personal agents that stay helpful across your day, but each decision carries real costs in latency and reliability. This panel and builder mixer explores how a specialized decision layer could make agents faster, cheaper, and more trustworthy at the frequency personal assistance actually demands.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Founders scaling fast often miss compliance and insurance until it's too late. This panel breaks down what risks actually matter, when to act, and how to build protection without grinding growth to a halt.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Gokul Rajaram evaluates startups the way he built Google AdSense and Facebook Ads: through product, not pitch decks. Hear directly from someone who's backed 300+ founders on what he's actually looking for when scoring your company.

Mixer / networking

Elo's bringing AI app builders to SPIN SF for ping pong, drinks, and unfiltered shop talk about monetization and AI chat ads. No pitches, just paddles and bragging rights on the line.

Workshop / hands-on · Mixer / networking

Goody's SF showroom lets you customize merch in real time during Tech Week, testing embroidery, puff print, and embossing methods before deciding what actually works for your brand. Walk out with a finished piece and clarity on swag that doesn't suck.

Talks & panels · Demo night

Lume Health is launching the first wearable cortisol monitor, and this event gets you early access while the team explains why tracking stress hormones actually matters for your biology. Skip the waitlist if you show up in person.

Workshop / hands-on · Mixer / networking

Josh spent two years shipping 50+ projects from his beach cafe, and now senior engineers show up when he cooks. This second Vibe Night dives into agentic workflows across Cursor, Claude, Copilot, and MCPs with live hackathon energy and actual dinner included.

Mixer / networking

Two teams hiring during SFTechWeek who want people that move fast and take ownership. Meet engineers, founders, and see what Beacon AI and Chariot are actually building.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Autodesk and Reer are gathering designers, engineers, and founders working where AI meets the physical world to discuss how the next decade reshapes making and design. It's a happy hour with panel speakers exploring what happens when AI moves beyond software into actual manufacturing and creation.

Mixer / networking

After Tech Week's relentless parade of panels and pitches, this rooftop hangout is where you actually decompress with builders and founders from across SF. Drinks, bites, music, and raffles with zero agenda attached.

Talks & panels · Research & papers

Voice AI research has moved beyond synthetic sound to real-time systems that listen, interrupt, and adapt, but evaluation gets messy when naturalness, latency, and task success conflict. This inaugural research club digs into the hard problems: turn-taking, multilingual performance, safety, and what actually breaks in production.

Mixer / networking

Enclosure brings together frontier AI and cybersecurity experts to discuss securing superintelligence weights, data centers, and infrastructure against sabotage and theft. Casual drinks and conversation, with a short Q&A on their Secure Acceleration strategy.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

A focused panel on what's actually moving the needle in EdTech, from K-12 to higher education, with founders and investors who measure learning outcomes rather than chase hype. An hour of networking afterward with the people building the next generation of education products.

Talks & panels · Demo night

Whipsaw and Vizcom walk through a physical product launch using real brand, industrial design, and visual assets from an actual project. Useful if you're shipping hardware or want to see how design and AI tooling work together end to end.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

MiniMax is diving into recursive self-improvement: autonomous experimentation, synthetic data, and verifiers that let AI systems iterate on themselves. Short talks from Fireworks and DigitalOcean researchers, plus open discussion on where this actually leads.

Mixer / networking

Engineering leaders shipping agents in production gather over dinner to swap notes on what breaks when demos meet real systems. No talks, no pitches, just the people actually dealing with agents at enterprise scale.

Mixer / networking

SF's biggest founder and operator mixer, where you'll actually meet people building things rather than just collecting business cards. Worth showing up early if you want real conversations before it gets packed.

Demo night

Small groups rotate through live founder demos across climate, robotics, and physical AI, with each founder making their case in five minutes. It's a science museum exhibit format for deep tech, where you actually understand what people are building and why it matters.

Talks & panels · Demo night

Stand's physics-informed AI simulates how fire and wind destroy structures, then agents recommend specific hardening and price insurance accordingly. Watch real wildfire simulations from California properties, hear from the founding team on production deployment, and explore the gap between demo and real-world physics AI.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Three speakers from Scalekit, Plain, and TinyFish walk through the hard parts: authorization, API calls, and failure modes when agents actually touch customer data. Skip the demos if you're shipping agents to production, because this is where you learn what breaks.

Talks & panels

Jason Ma talks deployment as the real competitive edge in robotics, where reliable operation on customer sites beats flashy demos. Learn how data from the field feeds back into models and what it actually takes to get from 80% to 99%+ reliability at scale.

Talks & panels

AI adoption fails when teams outpace their own leadership patterns. This session cuts through the tool hype to explore which organizational changes actually determine whether your company can handle AI at scale.

Mixer / networking

An upscale happy hour at Novela for enterprise agent builders during SF Tech Week. Ampersand, Sentient Foundation, and Rootly are keeping it small and useful for engineers actually shipping production systems.

Talks & panels

Founders and leaders talk about mental health that doesn't resolve, doesn't fit a roadmap, and still demands you show up for your team. Moderated by an occupational therapist who specializes in chronic strain, with speakers who've actually carried something heavy while building.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Deepika Bodapati (Commure's COO) and investor Varsha Rao discuss the decisions and relationships behind building a $7B healthcare AI company. A candid founder-investor conversation on capital, conviction, and what separates unicorn builders from everyone else.

Mixer / networking

SF tech and policy are inseparable right now, and this is the rare space where builders, policy folks, and political operatives actually talk to each other. Sway's hosting drinks and light bites to hash out what's actually happening with regulation, infrastructure, and power as midterms loom.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Peter Buckland from Isara and Scott James from Stanford share hard-won insights on team building, fundraising, and governance with founders and operators at Waterbar. Worth the trip for concrete patterns on scaling from people who've actually done it.

Mixer / networking

Talks & panels

Letta's hosting a discussion on how agents actually learn and retain information from their interactions. If you're building systems that need to improve over time, this is where the SF crew tackling that problem will be.

Talks & panels

Magnific explores how teams actually ship generative AI for creatives at scale, covering infrastructure, model architecture, and the engineering trade-offs that matter in production. Hear from Kling AI, MiniMax, Tripo AI, and Magnific on growing products when new models ship monthly.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Venture partners and HSBC's fund banking head break down 2026's deal trends, capital allocation patterns, and where AI-backed startups are getting funded. Essential context if you're fundraising, investing, or trying to understand what's actually shifting in the ecosystem.

Mixer / networking

A casual gathering for neurotech founders and builders to swap war stories, find collaborators, and show off what's in progress. Part of SF Tech Week's push to connect the brain tech ecosystem across founders, mentors, and potential partners.

Mixer / networking

Unit21 and FS Vector are gathering the compliance and risk crowd during SF Tech Week at a historic FiDi piano lounge with live music and an open bar. It's the rare venue where fraud, AML, and financial crime builders actually network without the usual conference awkwardness.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

People are already using chatbots as therapists and 2am friends, but these models have rarely been tested for mental health work. Vals AI is convening researchers, clinicians, and builders to discuss where AI helps or fails and who decides what good looks like when wellbeing is at stake.

Talks & panels

A CEO from Turbohome walks through financial tools reshaping home buying, covering mortgages and stock loans. Practical for builders interested in fintech infrastructure and how capital access is changing in real estate.

Talks & panels

A curated gathering of founders and operators dissecting what actually drives revenue in today's market: branding, AI-powered funnels, trust, positioning, and pipeline velocity. Invitation-only and intentionally small to keep signal high.

Mixer / networking

BioPioneers and VCVillage are bringing AI-bio founders, biotech entrepreneurs, and investors together for unstructured networking during SF Tech Week. No pitches, just meeting people actually building the future of computational biology and drug discovery.

Talks & panels

Technical practitioners from NVIDIA, OpenAI, and Fastino Labs discuss how to evaluate and ship open-weight models in production. Tactical conversation on what's actually viable now and where the space is heading.

Mixer / networking

A mixer for people writing and publishing tech narratives, featuring heads of comms and community from Corgi, MTS, and Zipline. Off-record conversations about taste, positioning, and what actually moves the needle in how startups get heard.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Cara's team walks through the engineering challenges of building and scaling vertical AI, then sticks around for drinks with founders and technologists. If you're shipping domain-specific AI products, this is worth the conversation.

Demo night

Eight Foundry residents will pitch their AI, SaaS, and deep tech products to a room of VCs and founders. A practical way to see what's actually shipping from the Bay's most productive hacker-house.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

VCs backing robotics right now meet ten selected founders building humanoids, automation, and robot infrastructure inside an actual working lab. The Raisable Robotics Series does the networking for you if you're serious about physical AI.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

SkyPilot and H Company cover the infrastructure stack for scaling frontier models: GPU fleet orchestration, RL optimization across training and rollout, and sandboxes for thousands of concurrent agent rollouts. Talks from SkyPilot's CTO and H Company researchers, plus networking with the people actually building this stuff.

Mixer / networking

A low-pressure breather during Tech Week where founders, operators, and investors actually talk instead of pitch. Cuyana's Fillmore space feels designed for this: champagne, good conversation, and the kind of networking that doesn't feel like networking.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Founders and operators discuss how they're actually integrating AI into their businesses, where the leverage sits, and what leadership looks like now. Panel from BuildForever and SuperMe followed by drinks and real networking.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

The 9th State of AI Report lands in SF with Nathan Benaich breaking down the year's biggest shifts, plus Jamie Shotton from Wayve on what's actually moving the needle. Worth showing up for the synthesis and the people in the room.

Mixer / networking

VCs and LATAM founders converging for direct conversation about cross-border opportunities and regional challenges. This is where local capital meets founders with real regional perspective and experience.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

LegalQuants is gathering lawyers building new legal markets rather than optimizing old ones. Meet the founders and learn what separates legal quants who find gaps from those stuck in legacy systems.

Talks & panels

Frontline look at embodied AI from people actually building it, covering open problems and where the field is headed. Worth attending if you want to understand what's technically hard versus hype in robotics and embodied systems.

Talks & panels · Workshop / hands-on

CX Engineer is becoming the job that bridges support and revenue, and most hiring managers are still figuring out what to look for. Delight.ai is hosting a fireside with revenue leaders, a workshop on AI readiness, and networking to help you either hire for this role or grow into it.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Twenty researchers and engineers diving into post-training, evals, and self-improving agents over dinner with Microsoft Research's Croby Roset. A rare candid conversation designed for actual participation, not passive listening.

Hackathon

Build something that breaks network lock-in by strengthening one connection at a time instead of migrating wholesale. Three hours to prototype custom messaging apps, alternate review systems, or tools that prioritize joy between two people over scale.

Mixer / networking

Rapid-fire pitches, drinks, and networking with the SF tech crowd during SFTechWeek. The Royale gets the startup crowd for 90 seconds of pitches and actual conversation without the usual conference awkwardness.

Mixer / networking

Finance leaders from SaaS and AI companies discussing how teams are actually deploying AI, plus the monetization and revenue ops shifts happening as a result. Off-the-record conversation with CFOs and controllers over dinner on the bay, no pitches required.

Mixer / networking

Five teams built analog activations at Harlan Records because they actually care about the format, spinning records on proper hi-fi while you meet founders you'll remember instead of just collecting contacts. Limited capacity makes this the one night of Tech Week worth showing up for.

Mixer / networking

Three leaders exploring how home shapes employee experience and the American dream, from Airbnb's Mark Levy to homeownership innovator Niles Lichtenstein and chef Brandon Jew. Thoughtful conversation over food, no pitches, just HR minds rethinking benefits for a new generation.

Mixer / networking

Fintech founders from seed through Series B meet dedicated VCs, angels, and family offices over quality food and real conversations. The mix of AI compliance specialists and investors actively deploying capital makes this part of SFTechWeek worth the room.

Talks & panels

Technical founders discussing how to scale engineering teams with coding agents, covering emerging capabilities like skills, memory, and routines. Essential for teams drowning in tickets and looking to actually optimize agent usage instead of just bolting it on.

Mixer / networking

For people who actually maintain pipelines and know what breaks when. Drinks in SOMA with platform engineers, SREs, and maintainers arguing about supply chain attacks, production patterns, and AI agents pushing to main.

Mixer / networking · Demo night

Marketing fundamentals are shifting toward AI search, creator partnerships, and community-led distribution. Readdy's hosting product demos and power user stories in Palo Alto with free pizza, perfect for marketers, creators, and founders exploring modern discovery channels.

Talks & panels

Watch a real marketing campaign get built live from brief to launch, with Uplane handling audience shaping, asset generation, and budget allocation in real time. The second half digs into what actually changes when a marketing team shifts to AI-first workflows and scales beyond the pilot phase.

Mixer / networking

A Tech Week party that treats networking like an actual social event instead of forced mingling. 500+ founders and operators, live music, and games in a space designed for real conversations to happen naturally.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

A fertility doctor, founder, and investor tackle the real timeline and tradeoffs for women juggling peak career and peak fertility. Leave with data on costs, options, and what actually matters for your next decision.

Mixer / networking

A low-key mixer for founders, investors, and researchers during SF Tech Week. Good for making real connections without the conference circuit noise.

Mixer / networking

An intimate dinner during SF Tech Week built for the conversations that usually happen in hallways. One long table, no agenda or pitches, just founders and builders actually talking shop over great food.

Mixer / networking

Deel's invitation-only gala on October 8 pairs a secret headline artist with immersive experiences and high-level conversations about what's next. If you're in the SF founder and investor scene, this is the night to see and be seen.

Mixer / networking

Mercor converts winddown data into frontier AI training material, creating recoverable value from defunct portfolios. Their happy hour walks you through how these partnerships work and who's already buying.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Infrastructure, ML, and app dev teams converge around observability at this practical night with speakers from Datadog, Daytona, and Cleric sharing real scaling patterns. Boba and snacks included while you hear how visibility changes everything when you're building across the stack.

Mixer / networking

A no-nonsense mixer for the people who own deployment and the messy reality of getting AI systems into production. Field notes and drinks with peers who actually ship it, not slides and pitches.

Demo night · Mixer / networking

Cherie AI's founder brings together women builders in tech for app demos and networking wrapped in a literal closet swap. The vibe hits that sweet spot between genuinely fun night out and actual community building around sustainable fashion commerce.

Mixer / networking

An invite-only dinner for VC fund CFOs and finance leadership to discuss strategy, portfolio dynamics, and the evolving role of the office of the CFO. The conversation-focused format mirrors a successful NYC edition and draws from top firms like BoxGroup and FJ Labs.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

The Beyond Tomorrow Podcast is recording a live debate during SF Tech Week with Ben Goertzel, Kai Zen Bickle, Joscha Bach, and Catherine McMillan moderating questions on AI's future. Expect substantive arguments from voices shaping the field, plus drinks and direct access to the speakers afterward.

Mixer / networking

Moonlake's doing a casual evening with the robotics crowd at a downtown speakeasy to celebrate their year building world models for robot deployment. Good venue, good people, no pitch required.

Mixer / networking

Calimero Network is hosting an evening for builders, researchers, and founders working on privacy-preserving infrastructure and decentralized systems. Expect conversations on zero-knowledge tech, confidential data, and practical tools for building without compromising user sovereignty.

Mixer / networking

Flex is hosting a curated dinner for GPs, venture investors, and ecosystem leaders during SF Tech Week. Application-only attendance means this skews toward substantive conversations over networking theater.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Four alumni networks convene to hear operators deploying AI agents in unsexy industries, tackling real challenges around accountability and what actually works in practice. Networking with fellow alumni builders follows the panel.

Workshop / hands-on

This session asks what stays human as AI reshapes how we work and decide together, using elemental lenses to explore the emotional conditions that help teams navigate change well. You'll practice strategy as a relational act, leaving with language and tools for keeping humanity at the center of systems design.

Mixer / networking

School and district leaders connect with edtech builders shipping new tools for classrooms. A smaller dinner format beats the typical conference if you're exploring how AI fits into actual learning environments.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Engineers and creatives collide over interactive generative AI, AR, and VR art installations at MoAD, plus a fireside chat on solo founders in the AI era. The mixer and after party sweeten an already packed evening of actual technology experience rather than theoretical discussion.

Mixer / networking

Cartesia is hosting a casual networking happy hour during SF Tech Week where builders, founders, and product leaders can grab food and drinks while talking shop. Low-pressure vibe if you want to meet people actually working on AI and voice systems in the Bay.

Mixer / networking

Forerunner Ventures and partners are hosting a reset evening at Alchemy Springs with journaling, sauna, cold plunge, and spa services. No pitches, just intentional space to disconnect during Tech Week.

Mixer / networking

Founders Bay is hosting a casual mixer at ERIA to connect founders, investors, and ecosystem builders over drinks and real conversations. Show up if you're fundraising, investing, or just want to meet people actually building things in the region.

Mixer / networking

A dinner bringing together founders and funders focused on AI security during SF Tech Week. Solid networking if you're building or backing defenses in the AI stack.

Mixer / networking

Founder-only night with no investors or panels, just people with technical, business, and product chops looking to find co-founders. Open mic pitches and industry stations make it easy to find collaborators actually thinking about your problems.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Safran's venture arm is hosting a panel on AI and autonomous systems in aerospace and defense, bringing French and American founders, investors, and industry leaders together during Tech Week. Useful if you're building in defense tech or want to understand how breakthroughs move from research into deployment across commercial and government markets.

Talks & panels

A panel on how AI is reshaping music, film, art, and gaming across creation, discovery, and monetization. The lineup includes music industry veterans, web3 founders, artists, and creators navigating identity rights and fan ownership models.

Mixer / networking

Dedalus Labs is hosting a founders-only dinner during SFTechWeek, designed for the people actually building AI companies. Intimate setting to talk shop with other founders working through the same scaling and product challenges.

Mixer / networking

Mecone's dinner tackles prediction markets and perpetual futures with the people building them. Small enough to actually talk shop about where financial infrastructure heads next.

Talks & panels

Erick Brimen discusses how Próspera is positioning itself as a regulatory haven for ambitious founders in biotech, longevity, and deep tech. Smart if you're curious about where frontier innovation might actually move next and how geography shapes venture outcomes.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Senior engineers and leaders share what actually changed in their enterprise AI workflows, what it cost, and what didn't work. Practical talks on context, memory, and integrating AI into existing processes, capped at 40 for real discussion.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

DX leaders from OpenAI, Stripe, Uber, and others are reckoning with how agents have rewritten the developer experience playbook. A small-group conversation about where the bottlenecks actually are and what works in the agentic age.

Workshop / hands-on

An experiential workshop using EEG neurofeedback and VR to train attention recovery, the skill that determines how fast you refocus after distraction. Practical for anyone whose work demands sustained focus without relying purely on willpower.

Talks & panels · Workshop / hands-on

Most hiring managers don't have a rubric for CX Engineer yet, a hybrid role that builds AI agents turning support conversations into revenue. This evening with delight.ai explores the shift through fireside chats with revenue leaders and an AI readiness workshop.

Mixer / networking

Token spend is quietly becoming the biggest cost lever in production AI, especially as agents and reasoning models proliferate beyond simple chat. This closed roundtable with CTOs and infrastructure leaders digs into where the spend actually goes and what's next for cost-conscious deployment.

Demo night · Mixer / networking

Game builders and educators set up learning experiences for you to play and evaluate in real time. A rare chance to see how the ed-tech and games worlds are colliding during SF Tech Week.

Mixer / networking

A low-key evening with founders, builders, and investors hosted by Backblaze and Flamethrower during SF Tech Week. No talks or pitches, just drinks and conversation at a favorite local spot.

Mixer / networking

Bolt.new's interactive carnival morphs into a live performance from Chantel Jeffries, hosted by Unicorner and Flite. Spots fill fast and capacity is real, so show up early if you want in.

Mixer / networking

International founders building consumer AI apps gather for an intimate dinner focused on scaling products globally and designing experiences that work across cultures. Limited seats keep conversations grounded in real challenges like finding users and collaborators in new markets.

Talks & panels

Policymakers and tech leaders debating which AI, fintech, and infrastructure bets Congress will actually fund versus restrict. Worth attending if you care how the next regulatory cycle shapes what gets built here.

Mixer / networking

Roadrunner's bringing tacos and a poker tournament for engineers and builders who want to play cards or just talk shop with people shipping real work. No poker experience needed, and board games keep the night loose if you'd rather skip the tournament.

Mixer / networking

Founders who fly gather on a Potrero Hill rooftop to swap war stories about aviation and building companies. This recurring dinner connects an unlikely crew of pilot-entrepreneurs who've learned that risk management looks similar at 30,000 feet and in the market.

Mixer / networking

A low-key poker night for CFOs and finance leaders from fast-growing tech companies across the Bay. Casual competition, drinks, and networking with people actually making capital decisions at your peer companies.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Keith Belanger walks through spec-driven data engineering in Snowflake, replacing ad-hoc prompts with repeatable workflows and measurable outcomes. Free evening with lightning talks, hiring shout-outs, and people actually building AI in the Bay Area.

Talks & panels

College admissions is changing fast as AI reshapes how students learn, apply, and prepare for careers that don't exist yet. This conversation gathers parents, counselors, and tech builders to figure out what families actually need to know now.

Mixer / networking

Mixer / networking

Security leaders playing cards and talking shop without the usual conference theater. A chance to actually get to know people in the space over poker and drinks.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

The largest AI x government gathering returns with a panel of operators actually shipping into cities and agencies. Meet founders, public sector leaders, and investors navigating the unique constraints of building durable AI for institutions that serve millions.

Mixer / networking

Founders and talent leaders gather on the bay to talk through how AI is reshaping recruiting workflows and hiring. Limited seats, so this is less panel and more candid shop talk with people actually shipping changes.

Workshop / hands-on

A 90-minute working session for managers caught between leadership demanding speed and teams needing clarity during AI rollouts and restructuring. You'll work through one real situation on your plate with peers who actually do your job, leaving with concrete language for this week and one concrete thing for your team.

Mixer / networking

A curated mixer for fintech founders and banking leaders focused on cross-border payments, stablecoins, and financial infrastructure. No pitches or panels, just conversations with people actually building the next generation of global money movement.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Three AI-native founders and operators break down what it actually takes to build and run companies where AI is foundational, not bolted on. Candid panel followed by seated dinner with investors and mid-to-senior leaders across product, strategy, and ops at growth companies.

Mixer / networking

Rooftop networking where founders and funders actually connect over cocktails and gourmet bites with skyline views. DJ, AI photobooth, and deal-scouting energy make this worth the limited space.

Talks & panels

A live roast of resumes, job posts, and hiring dysfunction from SF creators who actually get it. If you've been ghosted by recruiters or made a bad hire, this 90-minute show has your sense of humor.

Mixer / networking

Mission Bit marks a decade of free CS and AI education for Bay Area high schoolers with their 10th annual gala on October 8. If you care about building equitable access to tech careers, this is the event to support.

Mixer / networking

Padel night with founders, operators, and investors from PayPal and Entre during Tech Week. Good for meeting people actually building things while getting some exercise and drinks in.

Mixer / networking

Arceus is throwing a block party at The Ramp during SF Tech Week with founders and operators from across the startup ecosystem. Good music, drinks, and a chance to catch familiar faces in a low-pressure outdoor setting.

Mixer / networking

Bring one stuck question about your company or work and get feedback from multiple founders and investors during an oceanside walk. The optional swim is brisk but manageable, and plenty of people stay dry while networking.

Mixer / networking

500 Global's bringing Japanese founders through the J-StarX program to mingle with Bay Area venture investors over sushi during SF Tech Week, no pitches required. It's the kind of low-key room where you actually get to know people instead of working a room.

Talks & panels

Panels from Google, Microsoft, DeepL, Meta, and others on translation AI strategy, independence versus build-vs-buy, and speech-to-speech deployment. Rare access to operators and providers actually shipping translation systems at scale.

Mixer / networking

Speed dating for cofounders during tech week, but with actual matching logic instead of vibes-based chaos. Eight rapid conversations might land you your cofounder, or at minimum some people who genuinely get what you're building.

Demo night · Mixer / networking

AdaL demos a 24/7 agent handling real engineering work live, then the room opens into a mixer for builders, founders, and investors. Bring a laptop if you're shipping something worth showing.

Talks & panels

Real comedians and VC investors tear into live startup pitches in this Shark Tank meets roast show hybrid. If you want to see founders get publicly roasted while actually pitching for real money, this is peak San Francisco.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Polish startups pitching hard tech, staffing, and medtech to investors who actually know these spaces. Networking afterward if you want to meet founders building things beyond the usual SF playbook.

Mixer / networking

Go-karting with other founders gunning for Earlybird or early-stage funding, plus a Base44 demo and free food. Shuttles run from Corgi Cafe, teams compete for bragging rights, and you get unlimited races all night.

Mixer / networking

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Cathie Wood, Andre Iguodala, and Sarah Pinto discuss how AI reshapes wealth creation and why scarce assets gain value in an AI-driven world. A sharp conversation on who actually benefits from emerging technologies, plus networking with the SF tech ecosystem.

Mixer / networking

Madrona, Deepgram, Vinci4D, and Microforge are hosting a small, substantive happy hour during CoLM with researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic, MSL, and xAI. Expect conversations on AI safety, autoresearch, and multi-agent reasoning over drinks and dinner.

Talks & panels

A follow-up to last year's domain-specific foundation models conversation, now with early results from teams shipping AI infrastructure into energy operations. The focus is model-centered production: how persistent models reshape field decision-making and where the investment opportunity emerges.

Mixer / networking

No panels, no moderators, just founders and investors having unscripted conversations on a rooftop with a live pianist. Perfect if you're tired of the standard event format and want actual substance mixed with good vibes.

Mixer / networking

Cooley and Pygma are hosting the centerpiece mixer for Latino Tech Week, bringing founders, investors, and builders across LatAm and Latino tech into one room. No stage, no agenda, just the connections and conversations that actually stick.

Workshop / hands-on

Angular teams building AI agents are stuck without workflow visualization tools while the rest of the ecosystem has n8n, Dify, and LangGraph. This session builds a working editor live using ngDiagram, covering the patterns you actually need like routing, parallelization, and human-in-the-loop.

Mixer / networking · Talks & panels

Software transformed how we work online; the next wave will command physical systems. Meet the engineers and founders building across automotive, robotics, and manufacturing, with a conversation on why this shift matters now.

Mixer / networking

Parasail and Silicon Valley Bank are hosting a dinner focused on AI infrastructure realities: inference costs, compute economics, and production scaling challenges. This is the conversation happening behind closed doors at the companies actually shipping at scale.

Mixer / networking

PE operating partners and portfolio CEOs comparing notes on where AI actually moves the needle on EBITDA and what blocks real adoption inside their companies. Small, curated dinner focused on concrete wins rather than pitches.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Forward Deployed Engineers are part operator, part technical problem-solver embedded inside customer orgs. This is straight talk from people in the role about what actually matters and how to get there.

Talks & panels · Demo night

Desktop AI agents only matter if they work where you actually work. This room brings together the people building them and the designers, editors, writers, and operators whose workflows would genuinely transform if they shipped.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Data engineers and AI practitioners trading real war stories on open lakehouse architecture at scale, with live demos showing how teams actually run these systems. Bring your hardest questions about tradeoffs and context management, plus appetite for pizza and conversation.

Mixer / networking

Twenty women founders gathering with a Y Combinator CEO and executive coach to discuss the internal shifts required as you scale. Honest conversation about leadership evolution, identity, and what it takes to become the founder your next chapter demands.

Mixer / networking

Real talk about supply chain attacks, production patterns, and AI agents shipping code from the people actually on-call when pipelines break. Small group in SOMA, no slides, just drinks and arguments that matter to platform engineers and DevOps folks.

Mixer / networking

Stained glass, ceramics, and paintings share space with Han-Russo desserts and a tea tray synthesizer. Low-key vibe for artists, designers, and anyone curious about what happens when you put creative people in a room with good food.

Mixer / networking

WorkOS is throwing an after-hours wrap to San Francisco Tech Week with drinks and developers who actually build things. Low-key networking vibe if you want to decompress after a week of talks and pitches.

Mixer / networking

Lightyear founders take a break from their month-long sprint to learn mahjong and connect with other builders in the scene. Low-key way to meet ambitious people doing real work without the typical networking energy.

Mixer / networking

Murph Capital and VC Brags are hosting an invitation-only night for fund managers to network without the usual pitch circus. Expect film photography, swag, and a wall for humble bragging among your actual peers.

Mixer / networking

Snyk and WeAreDevelopers are running a no-slides happy hour with a security code challenge that gamifies vulnerability spotting, prizes included. Skip the talks and grab drinks with Bay Area builders while racing a Tetris-style security puzzle.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Hear from leaders at Google, Meta, Salesforce, and Glean on the hard problems of deploying agents safely in real products. This fireside chat and panel covers evaluations, guardrails, accountability, and earning user trust when agents interact with actual data and users.

Mixer / networking

Untapped Ventures is gathering Bay Area LPs and angels around one table for real conversation, no pitches. If you're in the city for Tech Week, this intimate dinner with their managing partner is worth blocking your calendar for.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Founders and investors in one room for live pitches and direct feedback from a team that drew 770+ to their last San Francisco event. Useful if you're building, raising, or hunting for co-founders and talent in the local scene.

Mixer / networking

A casual mixer for the nomadic crowd and SF locals who actually want to meet people worth traveling with. Pangea's built a community around this, so expect genuine connections instead of the typical networking room awkwardness.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Keith Belanger walks through Spec-Driven Data Engineering in Snowflake, moving teams from loose prompts to measurable outcomes and repeatable workflows. Expect a live demo with CoCo, lightning talks from the room, and actual networking with Bay Area builders working on AI and data problems.

Workshop / hands-on · Talks & panels

Most founders can't translate their vision into a story people actually remember and act on. Shalaka and Paul spend 90 minutes unpacking narrative structure, taste, and voice across leadership, hiring, and product, with real examples and a look at AI's role in the writing process.

Talks & panels

Brands are fighting for visibility in AI search results, and this panel breaks down how to measure it and convert that traffic to revenue. Hear from Fiverr's CBOand Rubrik's growth lead on what marketers actually need to optimize for in the agent era.

Demo night · Talks & panels

Six scientist-founded biotech startups pitch alongside investor panelists from Pamir Ventures and XEIA, covering everything from stem cell conditioning to tumor-targeting RNA. Investors can book 1:1s with founders after the panel.

Mixer / networking

Twenty CFOs and finance leaders from Series A+ companies discussing how AI reshapes the finance function, gross margins, and board conversations around unit economics. No slides or forced networking, just drinks and candid talk about what's actually changing in the P&L.

Mixer / networking

A deceptively simple guessing game where you and an anonymous AI agent compete to price Zürich rentals from real market listings. Spot the bot before the final round, or just enjoy 45 minutes of competitive housing market humiliation with Swiss chocolate on the line.

Mixer / networking

An intimate dinner for builders shipping multi-agent systems in production. Expect focused conversation on orchestration failure modes, guardrails, approvals, and what it actually takes to trust agents with real work.

Talks & panels

Exploring how AI that understands emotion, cognition, and context will differentiate the next generation of consumer products. Speakers span psychology, neuroscience, and founders actually building emotionally intelligent systems, with panels on measuring emotion and designing trustworthy human-AI interaction.

Mixer / networking

This private dinner brings researchers from OpenAI, DeepMind, xAI, and Meta together to discuss what personal agent evals actually mean beyond benchmark scores. A rare off-the-record conversation on simulated users, safety, and whether leaderboards measure anything that matters in production.

Mixer / networking

An intimate dinner for Bay Area talent and HR leaders at 54 Mint exploring how AI is reshaping recruitment workflows. Past attendees include heads of people from Warner Brothers, Klaviyo, Instacart, and ZoomInfo, so expect substantive conversation over candid peers.

Mixer / networking

Women executives trading candid takes on transforming HR, IT, and employee experience over drinks at Bar Sprezzatura. The intentionally small crowd makes this feel more like a strategic dinner than another tech week panel.

Mixer / networking

Industrial AI is quietly reshaping supply chain, logistics, and manufacturing, and this dinner brings together the founders actually doing it alongside investors and enterprise leaders deploying these systems. Two a16z speedrun companies, Sotant and ScaleDrive, are hosting to connect the people building the next wave of AI-native operations.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Creators and founders are converging, and this mixer brings them together with investors and tool builders who actually understand the space. Fireside chats from Capitalize VC, Velle, and Beacons AI will cut through the noise on building an audience-first business.

Talks & panels

Raw vision from founders building the stuff everyone said was impossible. Expect sharp pushback from investors and builders who actually care whether your idea works, not whether it fits the pitch deck template.

Talks & panels

Longevity tech measures everything except what you actually do on Tuesday night. This salon debates the real rituals across cultures, with curated guests sharing their protocols while the host unpacks what's myth versus lived experience in Korean aging.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Coval and Cartesia dig into building and evaluating voice AI agents, then hand things over to the room for drinks and debate. Skip the usual panel format if you want unfiltered takes from people actually shipping voice systems.

Workshop / hands-on

A hands-on workshop exploring how different animals perceive reality, guided by a former Stanford professor and AI researcher. You'll imagine a world through your pet's eyes and use AI to build an explorable 3D environment with your group.

Talks & panels

A salon-style conversation on taste: what it actually is, where yours comes from, and why its absence matters to companies and culture. Hosted in a beach house with food, drink, and people who think about these things.

Mixer / networking

Physical AI is moving fast, and this ASAN gathering during SF Tech Week connects founders, engineers, and investors actually building robots, autonomous vehicles, and hardware systems. Worth it if you want to see where the south asian builder community is pushing this space.

Mixer / networking

Investors and founders exploring Bitcoin's role in the next wave of capital markets gather for cocktails and San Francisco sunset views. A practical networking moment if you're thinking about where capital actually goes in crypto infrastructure and markets.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Elsa Touche roasts six founder pitches live while judges ask the hard investor questions. Three minutes, zero mercy, and four crowns on the line at a Castro venue with full bar and dinner.

Talks & panels · Demo night

America's hardware founders are reshaping the industrial base, and this meetup gathers them to talk reindustrialization, supply chain, and manufacturing futures. Open mic gives you two minutes to demo or pitch what you're building.

Talks & panels

Tunji Adeniyi-Jones showed at The Met and Venice before 33, and this intimate salon in a collector's home is your last chance to meet him before widespread recognition. Twenty seats, his work on the walls, direct conversation about how Yoruba mythology became his signature style.

Mixer / networking

A private dinner from Ventioneers Capital bringing together builders and the investors backing frontier AI work. Candid conversation over good food with the people actually writing checks in this space.

Mixer / networking

Endeavor's bringing its global founder network to SF during tech week, creating a rare room of people actually building the biggest companies in their markets. Short conversations and dinner with limited capacity makes this less about pitching and more about real peer exchange.

Mixer / networking

Twenty founders and leaders comparing notes on scaling, hiring, and GTM strategy in a closed room. Invitation-only and selective, which means the conversation will actually stay substantive.

Mixer / networking

SparkLabs is hosting an intimate dinner during SF Tech Week with founders and investors who've backed over 600 startups globally since 2013. Casual food, real conversations, and a chance to connect with people actually writing checks in this ecosystem.

Mixer / networking

Health tech founders and investors discussing the gap between AI's possibilities and healthcare's stubborn realities, from sales cycles to patient trust. A rare chance to connect with people actually navigating the constraints rather than pretending they don't exist.

Mixer / networking

The pace of AI work demands a counterbalance: a strength workout, nervous system reset, and intentional networking designed to recalibrate you. Taking care of your human operating system isn't optional when you're building the future.

Mixer / networking

Learn to make a seasonal cocktail from expert mixologists in a relaxed 60-minute session. All drinks are organic and vegan with mocktail options, so you can actually enjoy what you made.

Mixer / networking

A private sushi dinner designed for early-stage VCs to build genuine relationships beyond LinkedIn. Small group, whole evening to discover who you actually want to work with and grab dinner with again.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Elsa Touche roasts six founder pitches live while actual VCs ask the hard questions. Three minutes per pitch, zero mercy, four crowns on the line, and last year 233 people showed up to watch the carnage.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Salma Alkhoudi explores how anthropomorphic language around AI masks what's actually happening under the hood, moving past the familiar "reasoning" and "hallucination" metaphors. A rare chance to think critically about AI terminology with someone bridging linguistics, philosophy, and Arabic LLM development.

Mixer / networking

Founders with solid acquisition numbers but leaky retention metrics will get practical frameworks for habit loops, churn reduction, and NDR optimization from experienced operators. This intimate roundtable limits discussion to 15 founders for high-signal peer feedback on your specific retention challenges.

Mixer / networking

A casual poker night designed for frontier engineers and researchers who thrive in uncertainty. Perfect for the SF AI crowd that enjoys both strategic thinking and low-stakes socializing.

Mixer / networking · Talks & panels

Amodei and Altman are calling for labs to slow down, but what does that actually mean and should they? This structured debate club pairs you with another person to argue both sides of whether leading AI labs should unilaterally pace the frontier.

Mixer / networking

Inception is showcasing Mercury 2.5, their parallel-generation diffusion LLM hitting 1,100 tokens per second, at COLM's happy hour. Connect with the team and researchers exploring what comes after autoregressive language models.

Mixer / networking

Althra's bringing Vancouver's crew down for a house party vibe during tech week, no pitch decks required. Founders, investors, and operators actually talking instead of working the room.

Mixer / networking

Researchers building multimodal and physical AI systems trading notes over dinner during SF Tech Week. Sieve's bringing the crowd that actually works on the data infrastructure these models need to train at scale.

Mixer / networking

Axel's Jonathan Heit is hosting a SF Tech Week dinner with dumplings, travel trivia, and 40 people actually worth talking to. Wins a trip, stays for drinks.

Mixer / networking

This mixer explores how sensory experience intersects with tech through food, art, and fashion installations. Connect with founders and technologists while experiencing tangible visions of what human-centered AI might actually feel like.

Demo night · Mixer / networking

A night of carnival games where the house pays out in ChatGPT and Claude tokens instead of tickets. Build-stage teams can turn wins into fifty months of API credits, merch, or stage time to pitch.

Talks & panels

Starcloud trained an LLM in orbit last year and Google's launching TPUs on solar-powered satellites. This debate brings founders, engineers, and skeptics together to argue whether space-based compute is inevitable or economically absurd.

Mixer / networking

The best GTM people in the Bay having an actual conversation at the top of a penthouse, no stage required. If you're tired of panels and pitches, this is where the real operators are hanging.

Mixer / networking

Monaco and Sirius are hosting SF Tech Week's no buy-in poker tournament with a $10k prize pool and co-host Ben Bergman from Business Insider. Competitive poker, strong drinks, and limited seats make this worth blocking off your calendar now.

Workshop / hands-on · Mixer / networking

Smart materials and wearables stop being concept pieces here and become things you'd actually wear. Hands-on with the functional stuff, runway with designers shipping it, networking with the people building the Bay Area's fashion-tech infrastructure.

Mixer / networking

SF Tech Week goes nocturnal at Dawn Club with founders, builders, and the founders who've lost the plot entirely. DJ, drinks, and whatever happens when YC companies decide networking needs robot dogs.

Talks & panels

Multi-tenant GPU infrastructure breaks at the fabric, cluster, and compute layers, and this panel walks through what actually fails at each one. NVIDIA, Aviz Networks, GMI Cloud, and vCluster Labs cover the stack from bare metal to running workload.

Demo night · Mixer / networking

See what happens when you give agents actual purchasing power through Lane's payments infrastructure and Manufact's MCP servers. Bring work-in-progress and questions to chat with founders building the tools agents actually use.

Demo night · Mixer / networking

Watch robots actually running in Mytra's Brisbane lab instead of hearing about them later. The team building them will be there, plus a DJ once the real work wraps.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

Fieldguide's recruiting team sits down to talk hiring strategies and talent market conditions with peers building AI companies. A practical roundtable for founders and operators trying to figure out who to hire and how.

Mixer / networking

Fintech investors and founders building lending, payments, wealth, and infrastructure converge for unstructured networking during SF Tech Week. This is the rare room where actual check-writers show up to have real conversations over drinks.

Mixer / networking

A casual mixer for European founders and investors passing through the Bay, hosted by e2vc and Point Nine. Good for reconnecting with the diaspora and finding out what people are actually building back home.

Mixer / networking

Baltic founders and operators connecting with VCs and angels during SF Tech Week. Solid roster if you're building something and need to expand your investor circle or find co-founder energy from the diaspora.

Mixer / networking

A relaxed dinner for PE, banking, and deal folks during SF Tech Week to talk about AI's actual utility and industry shifts. No pitches, no obligation to perform, just useful people comparing notes over good food.

Talks & panels · Mixer / networking

A candid conversation about building real community and trust in crypto, fintech, and Web3 when skeptical audiences have learned to distrust the packaging. For founders tired of performative inclusion who actually want to discuss what credible ecosystem building requires.

Mixer / networking

Pre-matched designers and founders meet at Antler's SF office to find creative partners for early-stage companies. The curated speed dating format cuts through noise by pairing people based on actual skill fit and company needs upfront.

Mixer / networking

Largest happy hour of the week in the Mission with founders and builders using color-coded name tags to signal what you're looking for. Quick preview of the Find a Cofounder hackathon happening later, with real potential to meet cofounders or join something early.

Mixer / networking

RevOps, Sales, and Marketing leaders actually shutting work away for an evening at Fieldwork Brewery in Mission Rock. Five-minute talk, games, drinks, and out by 9:30 PM because you have a company to run tomorrow.

Mixer / networking

A private HIIT class at Equinox FiDi designed specifically for talent and HR folks navigating AI hiring. Sweat it out with peers tackling the same recruitment challenges, then debrief over post-workout conversation.

Mixer / networking

Niural AI and M13 are hosting an intimate dinner for founders and finance leaders to step back from Tech Week chaos and actually talk shop. Bring a real question or a story, leave with connections that might matter.

Mixer / networking

The crowd that spent all day at Sculpt gets drinks, a DJ, and Bay views at AtWater Tavern. FullEnrich and Hexa are hosting, and pedicabs are standing by if you need them.

Mixer / networking

Most GTM stacks excel at generating signals but stumble on execution. This dinner brings together practitioners wrestling with that exact gap to swap what's actually working over food at Casa Sofia.

Talks & panels

Covering cofounders, deals, and term sheets with founders who've negotiated at Instagram, Meta, and across venture. Gerta and Alex bring MIT-trained rigor and real startup experience to the patterns that actually matter.

Talks & panels

Watch how AI systems recommend companies and which brands actually get picked by ChatGPT in a live teardown. You'll walk away with a practical playbook for optimizing your content so AI recommends you instead of your competitors.

Mixer / networking

After a day of panels, this is where AI content creators actually unwind with a DJ, open bar, and their work playing on screens all night. Film whatever resonates, network without the pitch, and get properly welcomed to the SF scene.

Mixer / networking

A rare reprieve from screen obsession during tech week: phones get pouched at the door for genuine human connection dressed in 90s office wear. This is CatGPT's viral no-phones party, now landing in SF with a nostalgic dot-com-boom vibe complete with actual landlines.

Mixer / networking

RASA closes out SF Tech Week with international DJs and live performances at the Transamerica Pyramid's Sky Bar, built for unscripted collisions between founders, investors, and artists overlooking the city. No panels or pitches, just dancing and reconnecting at the nexus of sound and innovation.

Mixer / networking

Twenty-six founders under 26 building foundational technology, gathering for conversation over a meal with no pitches or posturing. This is the table that stays open year-round, where everyone commits to staying at the table.

Mixer / networking

A Gatsby-themed evening at The Chateau for HF0 founders and their circle, complete with oysters and live jazz. The kind of networking that happens when you skip the typical pitch format and just bring good people together.

Mixer / networking

E14 Fund is hosting a bar social for MIT and the broader AI research community during COLM, with authors of Software World and Context Language Models projects. Expect conversations on LLM reasoning, post-training, multimodal models, and AI agents with researchers, engineers, and founders tackling long-horizon problems.

Mixer / networking

The right people to decompress with after a day of GTM talks, no agenda or sales pitch required. Smartlead and three founders are keeping this intentionally small and casual, just drinks and conversation that might actually matter.

Talks & panels · Demo night

A curated night of the best AI films from around the world, handpicked by a council of top filmmakers and directors. Hear from the builders and artists behind the work on what's next in AI storytelling.