👋 I’m Justin. I run The SF Grind, The LA Grind, host the Ambition Podcast and the Ambition Summit, and scout for Headline. I live in LA but spend a lot of time in San Francisco meeting founders, hosting gatherings, and enjoying the wonderful city.
Happy Monday! Hope everyone enjoyed SF Tech Week! I’m getting ready for LA Tech Week now, hosting an event today and attending a few others. Let the craziness begin!
Let’s get to it.
Have you double-checked that your patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, and license agreements are truly secure? A quick mistake can cost millions later.
HPL Law’s IP Check-Up makes sure:
Ownership is in your current company’s name
Every assignment is signed and recorded with the right agency
Renewal and maintenance fees are paid on time and calendared for the future
You have one clean dashboard that shows what you own, the correct numbers, where the evidence lives, and who is on the hook for updates
Skip the guesswork. Know exactly where your creative assets stand before your next fundraise, product launch, or M&A convo.
Need a pro to walk you through it?
Email Anooj Patel at [email protected] today and protect what you have in mind.
Reply to this email if you want to sponsor this newsletter.
👋 This Week in SF 👋
🗓️ October 12: Company Brain Hackathon: Build an AI Agent That Knows Your Organization. Menlo Park. 1 - 5 pm.
🗓️ October 12: Claude for Games. Civic Center. 5 - 9 pm.
🗓️ October 13: Open Intelligence Summit. Central Waterfront. 11:30 am - 6:30 pm.
🗓️ October 13: Mahjong Party for AI Builders. Dogpatch. 5 - 8 pm.
🗓️ October 13: Roast My Deck - the AI picks apart your deck live. Then the investors do. Civic Center. 5:30 - 9:30 pm.
🗓️ October 14: Fast Forward. Fort Mason. 10 am - 6 pm.
🗓️ October 14: The Trillion Dollar Teams — In conversation with Vinod Khosla. South Beach. 4 - 6 pm.
🗓️ October 14: Picture Day, Grown Up: Headshots for Women in Growth. Financial District. 5 - 8 pm.
🗓️ October 14: Marketing Engineer Meetup SF. SoMa. 6 - 9 pm.
🗓️ October 14: Junto Founder Dinner (hosted by Andrew Yeung and friends). Japantown. 6:30 - 9 pm.
🗓️ October 15: Fireside Chat with Tony Zhao, Sunday Robotics. South Beach. 5:30 - 7 pm.
🗓️ October 15: Founder Mixer. Palo Alto. 5:30 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ October 15: CoreWeave x NVIDIA Dynamo Meetup. Mission District. 6 - 9 pm.
🗓️ October 15: Extraordinary Founders Dinner (hosted by Andrew Yeung). Belden Place. 6:30 - 9 pm.
🗓️ October 15: Vercel Ship 26 Afterparty. Marina District. 7 - 10 pm.
🗓️ October 16: Open Together: AI Builders Unite. Dogpatch. 6 pm - 12 am.
🗓️ October 16: AI Innovators Forum. Los Altos. 6 - 8 pm.
🗓️ October 17: MITAI Conference 2026: Age of Agency. Mountain View. 8:15 am - 7 pm.
🗓️ October 17: Lynkable: The Partnership Pipeline. Mid-Market. 5 - 10 pm.
👀 Events Coming Soon 👀
🗓️ October 19: Open Source AI Week 2026 | Open Weight Debate Night. South Beach. 5 - 9 pm.
🗓️ October 20: AI Executive Dinner. Los Altos. 7 - 9:30 pm.
🗓️ October 25: Dell x NVIDIA Hackathon. Mid-Market. 9 am - 7 pm.
🗓️ October 27: SEV0 - The reliability conference (SF). Civic Center. 8:30 am - 6 pm.
Reply to this email to submit an event for consideration in the next edition.
Top 5 SF Startup Jobs
Software Engineer @ Middesk
Founding Head of Product @ Uno Wallet
Technical Recruiter @ Metriport
Founding Designer @ Aside
Applications Engineer @ Polymath Robotics
👋 Hiring? Reply to this email to feature your job in this newsletter.
Other Opportunities
Know a founder or investor in SF who is raising capital or searching for a co-founder? Reply to this email with more details that I could share with the 4,000+ subscribers of this newsletter.
The Ambition Podcast is a show about the world's most ambitious people from history, and the lessons you can take from their lives and use in your own work and life.
Each episode is deeply researched, built around the definitive biography of one person (or in some cases, two), with dozens of hours spent reading, synthesizing, and pulling out what actually matters.
The latest episode is on Kobe Bryant. Kobe started his workouts at 5 am to fit in an extra session a day, took up tap dancing to strengthen his ankles, and read the referees’ handbook to learn where the officials couldn’t see. That obsession carried him through 20 seasons with the Lakers and five championships. It’s a bit of a departure from the people we’ve covered so far and that’s intentional. I think it’s helpful to learn from people in different fields to take what we can apply in our own lives.
Available now on all podcasting platforms including: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, YouTube and more.
Catalyst, an artificial intelligence and retail financial technology startup, raised a $30M Series A led by Sequoia Capital.
Hone, a provider of autonomous AI systems for enterprise outcomes, raised a $60M round led by Benchmark and co-led by Index Ventures.
Zeroset, a provider of an enterprise AI memory and state platform, raised a $5.2M Pre-Seed round co-led by Gradient and 2048 Ventures.
Arena, a provider of an AI evaluation platform and leaderboard for real-world model and agent capabilities, raised a $200M Series B co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures.
Hone, a provider of autonomous AI systems for enterprise outcomes, raised a $60M round led by Benchmark and co-led by Index Ventures.
Zeroset, a provider of an enterprise AI memory and state platform, raised a $5.2M Pre-Seed round co-led by Gradient and 2048 Ventures.
Voltus, a provider of a distributed energy resource (DER) technology platform and virtual power plant operator, raised a $225M Series D led by Generation Investment Management, Activate Capital and Vitol.
Hilt, a data security and insider-threat prevention startup, raised a $4.2M Seed round led by Array Ventures.
Peppermint, a provider of an AI-powered financial operations platform for clinical research teams, raised a $4.7M Seed round led by Moxxie.
Atomic Machines, a provider of an AI-native, all-digital manufacturing system that builds micro-machines directly from code, raised a $250M round backed by OneIM, Gigafund and others.
Agentiq Sports, Inc., a fintech platform allowing fans to indirectly invest in professional athletes’ careers, raised a $4M round led by defy.vc.
Healthleap, a provider of a clinical AI platform that screens patients for conditions that often go undiagnosed, raised a $38M Seed round and Series A backed by Sequoia Capital, First Round Capital, and Hummingbird Ventures.
Ampersand, a provider of integration infrastructure for enterprise agents, raised a $15M Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners.
Eden AI Labs, a provider of a personal AI agent platform, raised a $1.5M round led by Gaea Ventures.
General Medicine, a provider of a nationwide healthcare store platform, raised a $120M Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).
Vitalize, a provider of an AI-native healthcare labor and capacity management platform, raised a $31M Series A led by Oak HC/FT.
Tensor Machines, a developer of AI hardware tools and physics-based models, raised a $1.5M Pre-Seed round led by Omni VC.
Vinci, a provider of an AI-native computational platform for hardware engineering, raised a $250M Series B co-led by Advent, Temasek and Xora.
Multiply Labs, a robotic automation and biomanufacturing technology startup, raised a $75M Series B led by NantWorks.
Reactor, a provider of a developer platform for real-time generative video and world models, raised an undisclosed amount led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, WndrCo, and others.
Factory, a provider of an autonomous software development platform, received an undisclosed amount as investment from Menlo Ventures.
SafeWorld, a provider of safety testing and simulation software for physical AI and robotics, raised a $12.2M Seed round backed by Shine Capital, a16z Speedrun and others.
Bright Machines, a provider of a software-defined manufacturing platform for AI and data center infrastructure, received an undisclosed amount as strategic investment from Teradyne, Inc.
Namespace Labs, a cloud computing and developer infrastructure startup, raised a $42M Series B was led by Scale Venture Partners.
Clockwork.io, a provider of fault-tolerance software for AI training, reinforcement learning, and inference workloads, raised a $31M round co-led by Premji Invest, Wing Venture Capital, and Seligman Ventures.
Valon, a provider of an AI-native operating system for regulated finance, raised a $150M Series D backed by Ribbit Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.
Halluminate, an AI data research lab and financial reinforcement learning infrastructure startup, raised a $30M Series A was led by Oak HC/FT.
Supabase, a provider of an agentic infrastructure and open source Postgres development platform, raised a $150M round led by GIC.
Featured Location
Merchant Roots. An intimate, experimental restaurant known for imaginative tasting menus built around creative themes, artistic presentations, and an immersive dining experience.
Fun Events
See you next week,
Justin