👋 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! The 12th episode of the Ambition Podcast went live yesterday, the show is growing every week, and I’d love for you to check it out! This has been a really fun project to work on, I’ve spent well over 400 hours on creating it, and I hope you enjoy it.
Let’s get to it.
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👋 This Week in SF 👋
🗓️ November 2: Fireworks: Deploy Buildathon with Microsoft & NVIDIA. SoMa. 9 am - 8 pm.
🗓️ November 3: Make SF Better: A Hack Night with Mistral AI. SoMa. 5 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ November 3: Networking Event - Latest Danish Life Science Innovations. Menlo Park. 5:30 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ November 4: Notion x Clover: Security Leaders Building for the AI Era. Union Square. 4 - 7 pm.
🗓️ November 4: Design Chat with Ian Silber, Fmr. Head of Product Design, OpenAI. South Beach. 4:30 - 6 pm.
🗓️ November 4: The Pragmatic Engineer Unplugged, presented by WorkOS. Civic Center. 5 - 7:30 pm.
🗓️ November 4: Driverless: What Waymo Can Teach Voice AI About Going to Production | Founder Dinner with Coval & Rho. Embarcadero. 6:30 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ November 4: Startup Pitch & Networking in San Francisco. Mid-Market. 7 - 10 pm.
🗓️ November 5: Korean AI Startup Demo Day. Mid-Market. 2 - 5 pm.
🗓️ November 5: SYSTEM UPDATE with The Pragmatic Engineer. SoMa. 5 - 8 pm.
🗓️ November 5: Even Day SF: Build for the Glasses of the Future with Even Realities. Mission Bay. 6 - 9 pm.
🗓️ November 6: Investing in Startups: Live Networking. Palo Alto. 2 - 3:30 pm.
🗓️ November 6: Geospatial Developers Meetup. Peacock Meadow. 4 - 6 pm.
🗓️ November 7: Founders Paintball - Shor x Corgi x Rho. Union Square. 10:30 am - 3 pm.
🗓️ November 7: Level Up Your Personal Website. San Mateo. 2 - 5 pm.
👀 Events Coming Soon 👀
🗓️ November 9: Build Day: OpenRouter x Meta. Embarcadero. 5:30 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ November 10: After Tokens. Rincon Point. 8 am - 5 pm.
🗓️ November 10: partner demo day.Embarcadero. 3 - 6 pm.
🗓️ November 11: Stripe Startups Build Day San Francisco. South SF. 9:30 am - 4 pm.
🗓️ November 14: She Builds: A Women in AI × Lovable Hackathon. Rincon Point. 10 am - 7 pm.
Reply to this email to submit an event for consideration in the next edition.
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Top 5 SF Startup Jobs
Software Engineer — Patient Products @ Legion Health
UX / Product Designer @ TrainLoop
Product Engineer @ Two Dots
Deployment Strategist @ Coval
Founding Recruiting Lead @ SilkChart
👋 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 J. Paul Getty. His father sent him into the Oklahoma oil fields as a three-dollar-a-day roustabout, and by the summer of 1916, not yet 24, he had made his first million and retired. In 1932, in the depths of the Depression, he started buying Tide Water stock at $2.50 a share, the first move in a two-decade fight for control. He then bet on a strip of desert between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait that took four years and tens of millions of dollars to produce a drop of oil, and in 1957 Fortune named him the richest American. He spent nearly $17 million building an art museum in Los Angeles, and never saw it.
Available now on all podcasting platforms including: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, YouTube and more.
Midstream Health, a provider of an autonomous financial operations platform for health systems, raised $20M Series A led by Valtruis.
Dren Bio, a biotechnology company developing first-in-class antibody therapeutics, raised a $350M round co-led by Juvia Group and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Mintive, an infrastructure provider for the agentic enterprise, raised a $7M round led by Cowboy Ventures.
Dream, a product and research company that automates the design and engineering developing built world models, raised a $17M Seed round backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), SV Angel and more.
TrashLab, a provider of an AI-native operating system for waste haulers, raised a $12M round led by Ventana.
Serval, a provider of an enterprise service management and automation platform, raised a $150M Series C led by Sequoia.
Wabi, a provider of a personal AI assistant, raised a $55M round led by IVP.
Collective, a provider of an AI-native financial operating system, raised a $40M Series B led by General Catalyst, QED, and Gradient Ventures and a $60M growth facility from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund.
Rocker, a provider of a context-aware AI assistant and corporate intelligence platform for enterprise teams, raised a $12.85M round led by Greycroft.
Fragment, a provider of an enterprise AI platform for direct procurement operations, raised $56M, including a Series A led by 8VC, and a Seed round co-led by General Catalyst and A*.
Broccoli, a provider of an AI platform for home-services businesses, raised a $52M Series A and Series B led by Khosla Ventures.
Plato, a provider of simulated workplaces for AI training and evaluation, raised a $16M Series A led by Nava Ventures.
Northstar Security, a provider of an agentic AI platform that connects security and IT data, raised a $7M Seed round led by Wing Venture Capital.
Bedrock Robotics, a provider of autonomous systems for heavy equipment, raised a $600M Series C co-led by CapitalG and Emergence Capital.
Manicule, a provider of an outcome-driven Agent Relations (AgentRel) engine, raised a $1.3M Seed round co-led by Y Combinator and Broom Ventures.
Infisical, a provider of a security infrastructure platform for developers, machines, and AI agents, raised a $40M Series B led by Elad Gil.
ClarityCare, a developer of a healthcare administrative and workflow automation platform, raised a $16.3M Series A led by Headline.
Hex Technologies, a developer of a collaborative data science and analytics platform, raised a $100M round led by Peak XV Partners.
Simplismart, an AI inference infrastructure company, raised a $14M Series B led by Dallas Venture Capital.
Hyperbolic, an AI infrastructure platform provider, raised a $30M round led by Walden Catalyst.
General Compute, a heterogeneous inference cloud provider, raised a $100M Series A co-led by Blackbird and Abstract.
Kivo Health, a provider of a virtual pulmonary rehabilitation and telehealth platform, raised a $10M Series A led by Allumia Ventures.
Hexagon Bio, a biopharmaceutical company providing new payload mechanisms for antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs), raised a $62M Series C led by The Column Group.
Colare, a provider of a simulation-based technical assessment platform for hardware talent screening, raised a $2.5M Pre-Seed round backed by Afore Capital, Garage Capital, and Acadian Ventures.
Flapping Airplanes, a developer of compute-efficient AI training software and chip optimization infrastructure, raised a $1B Series A led by Index Ventures and Lux Capital.
Star Therapeutics, a biotechnology company focused on the discovery and development of new therapies for diseases with unmet need, raised a $200M round co-led by OrbiMed and Janus Henderson Investors.
PreScalar, a provider of software and testing infrastructure for manufacturing, raised a $7M Seed round co-led by Dynamo Ventures and BMW I Ventures.
Nirva, a developer of wearable AI personal companions, raised a $25M round backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners and South Park Commons.
Featured Location
Ettan. A stylish Indian restaurant in Palo Alto, serving contemporary Indian cuisine with California influences, including flavorful curries, biryanis, tandoori dishes, fresh seafood, and creative vegetarian plates.
Fun Events
See you next week,
Justin