👋 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 enjoys Tech Week! (It’s always Tech Week in SF though, right?) I’m not hosting any events this year because of how all-consuming the Ambition Summit was (Check out the recap), but there are a lot to choose from this year!
Let’s get to it.
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👋 This Week in SF 👋
🗓️ October 5: Architecting AI-Native GTM - #SFTechWeek. Financial District. 4 - 7 pm.
🗓️ October 5: Demo Night @ WorkOS. Belden Place. 5:30 - 8 pm.
🗓️ October 5: Automate Your SF Tech Week with n8n. Mid-Market. 6 - 9 pm.
🗓️ October 6: -1 to Physical Intelligence with Sergey Levine. South Beach. 10:30 am -12 pm.
🗓️ October 6: The SOLO Founder Club. Dogpatch. 4 - 7 pm.
🗓️ October 6: Women in AI Consumer Tech Showcase (SF Tech Week!). Mid-Market. 4 - 7 pm.
🗓️ October 6: Google for Startups: Engineering 10x with Dr. Astro Teller and Google DeepMind #SFTechWeek. 9:30 am - 12 pm.
🗓️ October 7: init() by WorkOS. Civic Center. 8 am - 5 pm.
🗓️ October 7: Retail + CPG Tech Walk #SFTechWeek edition ☕🚶. Embarcadero. 8:30 - 10 am.
🗓️ October 7: Agentic Zero: The Agentic AI & Finance Summit #SFTechWeek. Nob Hill. 9 am - 5 pm.
🗓️ October 7: Open Source AI Stack: Models, Inference, and Agent Harness. Financial District. 5:30 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ October 7: Artificially Unintelligent Tech Comedy Show @ SF Tech Week. Lower Haight. 7 - 10 pm.
🗓️ October 8: State of AI Report 2026 - SF launch event. Dogpatch. 5:30 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ October 8: Developers after Dark. Embarcadero. 6 - 9 pm.
🗓️ October 9: SF Tech Week Agent Day. Menlo Park. 12 - 6 pm.
🗓️ October 9: Human Performance, Capital & Innovation. Financial District. 5 - 8 pm.
🗓️ October 11: Tech Week Hackathon. Mid-Market. 9 am - 7 pm.
🗓️ October 11: The AI-Native Talent Hunt with Codex - #SFTechWeek. SoMa. 10 am - 6 pm.
👀 Events Coming Soon 👀
🗓️ October 12: Company Brain Hackathon: Build an AI Agent That Knows Your Organization. Menlo Park. 1 - 5 pm.
🗓️ October 13: Agentic + AI Observability Meetup SF. Financial District. 5 - 8 pm.
🗓️ October 14: Fast Forward. Fort Mason. 10 am - 6 pm.
🗓️ October 15: Extraordinary Founders Dinner (hosted by Andrew Yeung). Belden Place. 6:30 - 9 pm.
🗓️ October 16: Open Together: AI Builders Unite. Dogpatch. 6 pm - 12 am.
🗓️ October 17: MITAI Conference 2026: Age of Agency. Mountain View. 8:15 am - 7 pm.
Reply to this email to submit an event for consideration in the next edition.
Top 5 SF Startup Jobs
Senior Software Engineer @ Monumint
UX Designer @ Andromeda Surgical
Product Lead @ Trellis AI
Jony Ive @ Entangl
Brand Designer @ Pump.co
👋 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 Charlie Munger. By 31, Charlie had been through a divorce and had just lost his nine-year-old son to leukemia. He went on to become Warren Buffett's partner and the man Buffett called the architect of Berkshire Hathaway, a struggling textile company they built into one of the most valuable companies in the world.
Available now on all podcasting platforms including: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, YouTube and more.
Photon, an artificial intelligence infrastructure and developer tooling startup, raised a $4.5M Seed round co-led by Gradient Ventures and A*.
PaleBlueDot AI, a provider of an infrastructure platform developing solutions for enterprise-scale deployment, raised a $200M Series C led by ComputeCore.
Parakeet Health, a healthcare AI company developing a conversational agentic platform, raised a $10M Series A led by Canvas Ventures.
Volantis, a semiconductor company building a new category of AI inference system, raised a $88M Series A co-led by Lachy Groom and Abstract Ventures.
Restate, a provider of a durable execution platform for modern applications and AI agents, raised a $20M Series A led by Singular.
GMI Cloud, a provider of GPU infrastructure and inference services, raised a $223M Series B led by ARCHIV.
Flow Engineering, a provider of an agentic platform for hardware development, raised a $50M Series B co-led by Antonio Gracias (Valor Equity Partners) and Gavin Baker (Atreides Management).
CScale, a developer of optical interconnect technology for AI scale-up systems, raised a $145M Series C co-led by Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, and Premji Invest.
Beltic, a provider of agent verification infrastructure, raised a $7.3M in Seed round led by Norwest.
R1 Therapeutics, Inc., a biopharmaceutical company focused on developing therapies for kidney disease, extended its Series A to $80.5M led by Samsara BioCapital.
Miter, a provider of an AI-powered workforce management platform, raised a $40M Series B led by Battery Ventures.
Ray Therapeutics, a biopharmaceutical company developing new optogenetic gene therapies to restore vision, received an $8M grant from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM).
Quotr, a provider of an AI-native construction estimation platform, raised a $4M Seed round led by Llama Ventures.
Dodge AI, a provider of an enterprise software maintenance and code refactoring platform, raised a $2.65M round led by Accel and Google’s venture arm.
Link Cell Therapies, an oncology cell therapy company utilizing its proprietary logic-gating technology to develop next-generation CAR-T therapeutics for solid tumors and hematologic malignancies, raised a $30M expansion of its Series A.
Dextr AI, an artificial intelligence and hospitality automation startup, raised a $6.7M Seed round led by Elevation Capital.
Feather, a hardware components and developer platform for humanoid robots, raised a $7.6M Pre-Seed round led by Gradient Ventures.
Outmarket AI, a provider of an AI platform for insurance, raised a $34.5M Series B led by SignalFire.
Instinct, a company building a personal agent for everyday life, raised an additional $1B in its Series C backed by Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital, and Coatue.
Mona, a provider of an AI platform that helps small businesses across the U.S. access capital and financial coaching, raised a $3.5M round led by Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners.
HiringCafe, a provider of an agentic job discovery platform, raised a $6.8M Pre-Seed round led by Spark Capital.
Featured Location
Dawn Club. An intimate, glamorous speakeasy hidden in a South of Market alley, known for world-class live jazz, exceptional spirits, and an elegant vintage atmosphere.
Fun Events
See you next week,
Justin