👋 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! I just finished reading the 600-page biography on Steve Jobs for the next episode of Ambition. The thing I can't stop thinking about: Focus. It comes up repeatedly (And is something I need to apply in my own business). Full episode out this week. It might be the best one yet!
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 12: The SF Grind: Founder, Investor, & Operator Mixer. Pacific Heights. 6:30 - 8:30 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 27: Corgi Coffee Co-op: DIY Coffee for Founders. Belden Place. 11 am - 2:30 pm.
🗓️ July 27: Pebblebed's Builders Late Night Café. Mission District. 7:30 pm - 12 am.
🗓️ July 28: Claude Code for Beginners. Mid-Market. 5 - 9:30 pm.
🗓️ July 28: Durable Multimodal AI Meetup with HeyGen, Vapi, and Modal. Financial District. 5:30. - 8 pm.
🗓️ July 28: Intelligence in the Open — Edition 01: Reasoning, Evaluation & Long-Horizon Agents. Financial District. 6 - 9 pm.
🗓️ July 28: Physical AI over Coffee. Stanford. 6 - 8 pm.
🗓️ July 29: Can We Close the Sim2Real Gap? Mission District. 5:30 - 9 pm.
🗓️ July 29: Accelerator Arcade Night. 6:30 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ July 29: Hardware Founder Dinner with Rho @ Gigascale Capital | Energy and Infrastructure. Rincon Point. 6:30 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ July 29: VCN #45: Bench. Mid-Market. 7 - 10 pm.
🗓️ July 30: Built Different: Auth0 x Stripe Hackathon. Financial District. 12 - 7:30 pm.
🗓️ July 30: OpenAI Codex Community Meetup-San Francisco #8. Stonestown. 5 - 8 pm.
🗓️ July 30: Qualcomm x ZETIC x Liquid AI: Edge AI Builders Meetup. Union Square. 5 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ July 30: Builder Night. Union Square. 5:30 - 8:30 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. 6 - 8 pm.
🗓️ July 31: BGI Labs: Building What Comes Next. Mid-Market. 11 am - 2 pm.
🗓️ July 31: Hack VC AI Meetup. Mid-Market. 1 - 6 pm.
🗓️ August 1: Applied Intelligence Hackathon. Mid-Market. 8 am - 9 pm.
🗓️ August 1-2: Agentic AI Summit. Berkeley.
👀 Events Coming Soon 👀
🗓️ August 3: Memory Meets Motion: Hackathon. Mid-Market. 8 am - 6 pm.
🗓️ August 4: Built on Baseten | AI Demo Night. Northern Waterfront. 6 - 8 pm.
🗓️ August 5: Privy Home: IRL SF. Dogpatch. 11 am - 6 pm.
🗓️ August 5: Inflection #002 — Health: AI's last problem w/ Omri Drory. South Beach. 5:30 - 8 pm.
🗓️ August 6: Extraordinary Founders Dinner (hosted by Andrew Yeung). Fillmore District. 6 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ August 6: 136th SF Hardware Meetup @ Studio 45 | Demo Night. Dolores Heights. 6:30 - 9:30 pm.
🗓️ August 7: Community Dinner. Pacific Heights. 5 - 7 pm.
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), Jessica Chang (Upwards), and Shamin Walsh (BAM Ventures), 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 with some of the speakers and as many great people as I can talk into showing up.
Top 5 SF Startup Jobs
Developer Experience Engineer @ Recall.ai
Product Manager @ Clipboard
Contract Product Designer @ Wayline
Staff Full Stack Engineer @ Sully.ai
Visual Designer @ Numen
👋 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:
AegisAI, a provider of an email security platform empowered by autonomous AI defense agents, raised a $36M Series A led by Battery Ventures.
Prosper Medical, a provider of an AI-powered concierge primary care platform, raised a $16M round led by FUSE.
Paper, a provider of a design platform for agentic AI, raised a $34M Series A led by Accel and Iconiq.
Abstract, a company which specializes in composable security operations, raised a $25M round co-led by Cheyenne Ventures and AVP.
Coverwatch, a insurtech startup that provides an AI-native solution for evaluating risk, closing coverage gaps, and lowering premiums, raised a $4.5M Pre-Seed round led by CoFound and Restive.
Cast Insights, a provider of a real-time spoken intelligence platform, raised a $4.5M Pre-Seed round led by Abstract Ventures.
Cheiron, a provider of an operating system for drug programs, raised a $8M in Seed round led by Menlo Ventures.
Transcripta Bio, an AI-powered drug discovery company focused on neurological and neuromuscular diseases, raised a $24M round backed by Mayo Clinic, Omnimed and more.
Neon Commerce, Inc., a fintech startup specializing in direct-to-consumer (DTC) commerce for games, raised a $13M Series A backed by KRAFTON, a16z and Renegade Partners.
Glow, a company developing AI-powered security solutions for workspace, raised a $180M round led by Sequoia, Cyberstarts, Greenoaks, and Redpoint Ventures.
Candid Health, a company developing an autonomous revenue cycle automation platform for healthcare providers, raised a $120M Series D led by Sixth Street Growth.
SkyPilot, a provide of an AI compute platform that helps AI teams manage their AI compute, raised a $20M Seed round led by Lux Capital.
MyDecisive, a provider of an AI DevOps solution service, raised a $12M round. Backers were not disclosed.
Gritt, a company building an intelligent system combining robotics and AI, raised a $26M Series A led by Obvious Ventures.
Assort Health, a provider of an AI agents platform for patient journey, raised a $120M in Series C led by Menlo Ventures.
Infinity, an AI infrastructure research company building a software layer that makes AI chips inference-ready, raised a $15M Seed round backed by Touring Capital, Principal VC and more.
Natural, a company developing payments infrastructure for AI agents, raised a $30M Series A led by Kirsten Green.
Trellis Bioscience, a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing native human monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) to treat intractable infectious diseases, raised a $9M Series C led by New Science Ventures and Easton Capital.
Runta, a developer of runtime execution layers and sandboxing infrastructure for artificial intelligence agents, raised a $20M Seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Emergent, a provider of an AI software creation platform, raised a $130M Series C led by Creaegis, MNI Ventures, Claypond Capital and Sentinel Global.
Reo.Dev, a provider of an AI-native GTM platform built for companies selling to engineering and technical teams, raised a $11.3M Series A led by Elevation Capital.
Featured Location
Miller & Lux. An upscale steakhouse at Chase Center, known for its luxurious interiors, premium steaks, classic cocktails, and refined modern atmosphere.
Fun Events
See you next week,
Justin