👋 I’m Justin. I run The SF Grind, The LA Grind, host the Ambition Podcast, 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! Every couple of weeks I post the numbers behind my newsletters on LinkedIn to attract sponsors. Today I figured I'd share them in each newsletter.
The SF Grind: 4,203 subscribers, 47.4% open rate. 45% are founders and 8% are investors.
The LA Grind: 10,981 subscribers, 49.4% open rate. 58% are founders and 7% are investors.
We also have multiple events happening every month in each city.
Want to sponsor? Reply to this email with who you're trying to reach, what you're promoting, and your rough budget. I'll get back to you with options.
Let’s get to it.
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🌁 Upcoming Event We’re Hosting 🌁
🗓️ July 28: The SF Grind: SF Startup Community Coffee Meetup. Financial District. 9 - 11 am.
🗓️ August 5: The SF Grind: SF Startup Community Trivia Night. Pacific Heights. 6:30 - 9 pm.
🗓️ August 26: The SF Grind: VC Q&A. Mission District. 6 - 8 pm.
🗓️ September 24: Ambition Summit. Los Angeles.
👋 This Week in SF 👋
🗓️ July 20: Cafe Cursor San Francisco: Startup Edition. Fisherman’s Wharf. 10 am - 6 pm.
🗓️ July 20: Startup Workflows Art Gallery with Portal & Persona. Financial District. 5:30 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ July 20: How to prompt like a designer. Lower Nob Hill. 6:30 - 9 pm.
🗓️ July 21: Foundry Live Demo Night. South Beach. 5 - 8 pm.
🗓️ July 21: merge(happy_hour) -> advancing_together. Financial District. 6 - 9 pm.
🗓️ July 21: OpenAI Build Week Community Meetup. Potrero Hill. 6 - 8 pm.
🗓️ July 22: Dwarkesh Unplugged, presented by WorkOS. Civic Center. 5 - 7:30 pm.
🗓️ July 22: Deep Tech Startups in the Age of AI by Fifty Years. Stanford. 5 - 7 pm.
🗓️ July 22: Omnigent & Multi-Agent Coding Meetup. Financial District. 5 - 8 pm.
🗓️ July 22: GTM Hackathon. Financial District. 5 - 10 pm.
🗓️ July 22: MotherDuck + DuckDB July Meetup. Financial District. 6 - 8 pm.
🗓️ July 22: Defense 001 - Ukraine for Founders. Atherton. 6:30 - 9:30 pm.
🗓️ July 23: OpenAI Builder Lounge SF with Parallel. Mission District. 5 - 8 pm.
🗓️ July 23: July Tech Rooftop Mixer. South Beach. 5:30 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ July 23: Hardware Pitch Night - Summertime Showcase!. Bernal Heights. 6 - 9 pm.
🗓️ July 23: Bringing SF to the World - Demo Night. Dolores Heights. 6 - 10 pm.
🗓️ July 24: Self-Evolving Agents Hackathon. SoMa. 9:30 am - 7:30 pm.
🗓️ July 24: community dinner: GTM. Pacific Heights. 6 - 7 pm.
🗓️ July 24: Mafia Night. SoMa. 6 - 9 pm.
🗓️ July 24: Trajectories: Epoch AI Mixer. SoMa. 7 - 10 pm.
🗓️ July 25: YC AI Startup School Afterparty. Potrero Hill. 6 - 10 pm.
👀 Events Coming Soon 👀
🗓️ July 29: Hardware Founder Dinner with Rho @ Gigascale Capital | Energy and Infrastructure. Rincon Point. 6:30 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ July 30: Best Work Of Your Life. South Beach. 4 - 6 pm.
🗓️ July 30: Startup Reality 202: AI in Industries — From Foundation Models to Vertical Moats. Financial District. 5:30 - 8 pm.
🗓️ July 30: Scaling revenue at Stripe and Vercel with Jeanne DeWitt Grosser (COO, Vercel). Northern Waterfront.
🗓️ August 1-2: Agentic AI Summit. Berkeley.
Reply to this email to submit an event for consideration in the next edition.
What happens when you put 150 ambitious founders, investors, and operators in one room for a full day?
We're about to find out.
On September 24th, Ambition 2026 takes over a private venue in Santa Monica. One day, one room, no filler panels. Speakers include Mehul Nariyawala (Matic), Dee Murthy (Ghost), and Jessica Chang (Upwards), with more announcements coming very soon (Been working on these for weeks and we’re very close).
This isn't a massive conference you wander through with a lanyard. It's curated, it's capped at 150, and attendees have already signed up from across the US and as far as Australia.
VIP tickets include an intimate dinner the night before, featuring Tyler Denk, CEO of beehiiv, and as many great people as I can talk into showing up.
Top 5 SF Startup Jobs
Senior Full Stack Engineer @ Sphere
Design and Marketing Associate @ Corgi Insurance
Head of Engineering @ Lamar Health
Founding Product Engineer @ Asteroid
👋 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.
I started the Ambition Podcast a few weeks ago, spending 100+ hours on the project already. It’s 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.
First episodes of Ambition:
Available now on all podcasting platforms including:
Pulse Security, a cybersecurity company providing an AI-driven operational management platform, raised a $8M Seed round led by Foundation Capital.
Aina, an AI-native consumer hardware startup, raised a $5.5M Seed round led by Redstart Labs and 360 ONE Asset.
Flex, a developer of a private banking and treasury management platform for multi-entity enterprises, raised a $70M Series B1 led by Halo Fund.
EverSettled, a developer of an AI-driven estate settlement and probate automation platform, raised a $5M in Seed round led by Emergence Capital.
Fireworks, a provider of a platform for specialized intelligence enabling companies to train and serve custom models, raised a $1.5B Series D led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures, and TCV.
Whale, aN enterprise AI company building the AI operating system for enterprise operations, raised a $40M Series C3 led by CMB International and SMBC Asia Rising Fund.
Sable, an AI employee company built to lead customer interactions end-to-end, raised a $45M round led by Sequoia Capital and 8VC.
Rime, a provider of an enterprise voice AI platform, raised a 24M Series A led by M13.
Pure, a provider of a social, compliant-first, financial infrastructure platform for peer-to-peer games, raised a $8M Seed round led by Hidden Capital.
Chai Discovery, a company engineering AI models to discover new molecules, raised a $400M Series C led by Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital and Dimension.
Feathery, a provider of an AI operating and decisioning system for financial services, raised a $30M Series A backed by Portage Ventures, Index Ventures and more.
Pact Labs, the development and infrastructure-building arm of PACT, responsible for designing and deploying the technical systems that power the PACT protocol and its consumer products, raised a $7M Series A led by Tether and participation from Blockchange Ventures and Lasagna.
Featured Location
The Treasury. An upscale restaurant set inside a historic former bank, featuring grand architecture, soaring ceilings, craft cocktails, and modern American cuisine.
Fun Events
See you next week,
Justin