👋 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! Quick question before we dive in:
What type of SF events would you most like to attend?
Let’s get to it.
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👋 This Week in SF 👋
🗓️ October 19: Open Source AI Week 2026 | Open Weight Debate Night. South Beach. 5 - 9 pm.
🗓️ October 19: THE SF DATABASE MEETUP: October. SoMa. 5:30 - 9 pm.
🗓️ October 20: GTM & Marketing Hackathon by Granola x Anthropic. SoMa. 5:30 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ October 20: OpenClaw & Friends Meetup w/ NVIDIA & Microsoft. Bayside Village. 6 - 9 pm.
🗓️ October 20: Founders Panel: The Agentic Stack. South Beach. 6:30 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ October 20: AI Executive Dinner. Los Altos. 7 - 9:30 pm.
🗓️ October 21: Open Source AI + Policy Happy Hour. South Beach. 5:30 - 9 pm.
🗓️ October 21: Support Is an Engineering Problem Now — Plain × Sentry. Financial District. 5:30 - 8 pm.
🗓️ October 21: Launch Party: Unveiling the World’s First Agentic Network(Claim 1 of the First 1,000 Personal Agents) #SFTechWeek. South Beach. 5:30 - 9 pm.
🗓️ October 21: Lessons from Open Source DevTools Founders w/ PostHog, Cline and more. Dogpatch. 6 - 9 pm.
🗓️ October 21: After Hours: Long Horizon Dinner. Pacific Heights. 6 - 9 pm.
🗓️ October 22: Boos in Biotech Happy Hour. San Carlos. 5 - 8 pm.
🗓️ October 22: Longevity Circles: After Hours. Financial District. 6 - 8 pm.
🗓️ October 22: Craft at Speed: Linear × Granola × Figma. SoMa. 6 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ October 22: Sales, Rebuilt: Founder Dinner with Ergo & Rho. Financial District. 6:30 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ October 23: Investing in Startups: Live Networking. Palo Alto. 2 - 3:30 pm.
🗓️ October 25: Dell x NVIDIA Hackathon. Mid-Market. 9 am - 7 pm.
👀 Events Coming Soon 👀
🗓️ October 26: Are We Running Too Many Agents? Financial District. 6 - 9 pm.
🗓️ October 27: SEV0 - The reliability conference (SF). Civic Center. 8:30 am - 6 pm.
🗓️ October 28: Scaling Intelligence —Modal x Gray Area Commissions — OPENING NIGHT. Dolores Heights.
🗓️ October 28: Robotics and Physical AI Hardware Founder Dinner with Rho @ Mission Robotics. 6:30 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ November 11: Stripe Startups Build Day San Francisco. South SF. 9:30 am - 4 pm.
Reply to this email to submit an event for consideration in the next edition.
Top 5 SF Startup Jobs
Senior Product Manager @ FleetWorks
Founding AI Engineer @ Middleware
Backend Engineer (AI-Native) @ Coris
Research Engineer, Multimodal Data @ Eventual
Founding Product Designer @ Moritz
👋 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 Akio Morita, Co-Founder of Sony. He was the 15th-generation heir to a 300-year-old sake-brewing family, and his father let him walk away. In 1946, he and Masaru Ibuka pooled about $500 in the ruins of postwar Tokyo to start the company that became Sony. When Bulova offered to buy 100,000 of his radios on the condition that they carry the Bulova name, he said no. By the time he died at 78, Sony was one of the most famous brands in the world.
Available now on all podcasting platforms including: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, YouTube and more.
Metabolize, a consumer health company developing metabolic health products, raised a $3.2M Seed round led by Astanor.
Stand, a provider of a property insurance and home resilience platform, raised a $70M Series C led by Saga Ventures.
Sirona Medical, Inc., a provider of a cloud-native and AI-native radiology software platform (RadOS), raised a $40M Series D led by Avidity Partners.
Harmonic Security, a workforce AI security platform provider, raised a $50M Series B led by Crosspoint Capital Partners.
Labelbox, a provider of an AI platform empowering reinforcement learning for frontier models and managed agents for enterprises, raised a $100M+ Series E led by Infinitum Partners.
Marklo, a provider of an agentic marketing platform for brands running on Shopify, raised a $5M Seed round led by Forerunner.
Altay Therapeutics, Inc., a biotechnology company developing novel small molecule inhibitors of transcription factors, raised a $37M Series A co-led by Sound Bioventures and HealthCap.
Zaria Systems, Inc., a provider of a real-time infrastructure platform for mark-to-market credit and structured finance, raised a $5.2M Seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Suki, a company which specializes in ambient clinical intelligence (ACI), raised a $90M Series E led by new investors Healthier Capital, Crosslink Capital, and Hercules Capital.
Albert, a provider of a chemistry-native AI operating system for R&D, raised a $55M Series B led by TCV.
Reach Security, a provider of an AI platform that operates security defenses at machine speed, raised a +$50M Series B led by Top Tier Capital Partners.
Collective X Health, a women’s health and performance intelligence platform, raised a $3.2M Pre-Seed round co-led by Council Capital and Anthemis Female Innovators Lab Fund.
Harbor, a provider of an enterprise AI agent risk platform, raised $10M in Seed round led by Base10 Partners, Abstract, and 8VC.
Causa Prima, an agent-to-agent platform that settles invoices between companies, raised a $20M Seed round led by Base10 Partners.
Loops, a developer of AI-powered e-commerce management tools, raised a $3.5M Seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Mistlabs, a developer of cross-platform ambient intelligence technologies, raised a $26M Pre-A led by Luminous Ventures and Huaqin Technology.
Primitive Labs, a provider of an AI research and product platform developing models of human behavior, received an undisclosed amount as investment from Sony Innovation Fund.
Sonilo, a developer of AI-synchronized audio and sound effect generation software, raised a $11M round led by B Capital.
Phinity Labs, a provider of an applied research lab for autonomous chip design, raised a $5.2M Seed round led by Uncork Capital.
TypeSafe AI, a provider of artificial intelligence software and machine-native deployment infrastructure, raised a $870M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz.
OptimizeGEO, a provider of a generative engine optimization (GEO) agentic platform, raised an undisclosed amount backed by Michael Kassan, Carolyn Everson, and more.
Oxide Computer Company, a provider of an on-premises cloud computing platform, raised a $445M Series D led by Eclipse.
Sabi, a provider of a non-invasive brain-AI interface designed for everyday wear, raised a $50M Seed round led by Khosla Ventures.
Featured Location
Left Door. An intimate, vintage-inspired cocktail lounge, serving martinis, creative cocktails, oysters, caviar, and refined small plates in a moody, elegant setting.
Fun Events
See you next week,
Justin