

👋 I’m Justin. I run The SF Grind, The LA Grind, 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 announced my new podcast last week, Ambition, a show about history’s most ambitious people and the lessons you can learn from them. The first episode was on S.I. Newhouse, who built the multi-billion-dollar Advance Publications empire, but not many people knew who he was. This week, the second episode, about the Wright Brothers, comes out. Between launching the show and producing these first two episodes I’ve spent 80+ hours. I’m trying to make something great, that’ll eventually impact millions of people, and I hope you’ll check it out!
This newsletter, as well as the many events I’m hosting, will continue, I’ve just shifted a bit how I spend my time (and am somehow “working” even more).
Let’s get to it.

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🌁 Upcoming Event We’re Hosting 🌁
🗓️ July 9: The SF Grind: SF Startup Community Coffee Meetup. Financial District. 9 - 11 am.
🗓️ July 15: The SF Grind: Founder, Investor, & Operator Mixer. Mission District. 6:30 - 8:30 pm.
👋 This Week in SF 👋
🗓️ July 7: HackwithBay 3.0. Financial District. 9:30 am - 6:30 pm.
🗓️ July 7: Punk Software Hack Night: Build Tools That Work for You. Civic Center. 5:30 - 9 pm.
🗓️ July 8: O1 Strategy and Fireside. Embarcadero. 6 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ July 8: VCN #40: Hardpoint — Build an Agent That Withstands Red-Teaming. Mid-Market. 7 - 10 pm.
🗓️ July 9: The GTM Summit for Founders, Investors, and Creators by Founder Social Club and Anwar Enterprises. Financial District. 5 - 8 pm.
🗓️ July 9: On-Device Night | Founders Building Local Agents by AGI, Inc. Distrito Financiero. 5:30 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ July 9: From Overwhelm to Focus in Times of Rapid Change: An Interactive Workshop for Managing Time, Tasks, and Priorities. Mid-Market. 6 - 8 pm.
🗓️ July 10: Community dinner with eleven labs. Pacific Heights. 5 - 7 pm.
🗓️ July 11: AI Agents in Real-World Business Execution. Mid-Market. 11 am - 6 pm.
👀 Events Coming Soon 👀
🗓️ July 14: Claude Code for Intermediates. Mid-Market. 5 - 9:30 pm.
🗓️ July 14: Rippling x Corgi Founder Live Pitch Night ft Redpoint Ventures & Battery Ventures. Belden Place. 6 - 9 pm.
🗓️ July 14: Show & Tell: AI for GTM @Notion with Baseten, Cognition and Samsara. Union Square. 6 - 9 pm.
🗓️ July 15: Claude Code & Coffee @ Corgi Cafe. Belden Place. 1 - 4 pm.
🗓️ July 15: ITCH - Businesses share what needs to be built. SoMa. 6 - 8 pm.
🗓️ July 17: Loop Engineering Hackathon. SoMa. 9:30 am - 7:30 pm.
🗓️ July 29: Hardware Founder Dinner with Rho @ Gigascale Capital | Energy and Infrastructure. Rincon Point. 6:30 - 8:30 pm.
Reply to this email to submit an event for consideration in the next edition.

Top 5 SF Startup Jobs
UI/UX Product Designer @ Domu Technology Inc.
Visual & Micro-Interaction Designer @ Wefunder
Forward Deployed Engineer @ Layerup
Technical Recruiter @ Metriport
Growth Lead @ Reflex
👋 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.

Ambition is a podcast 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: what they built, how they thought, the struggles they overcame, and the tactics, strategies, and principles underneath it all.
Available now on all podcasting platforms including:

Integral Privacy Technologies, a developer of automated data privacy engineering and decentralized telemetry protection software, raised a $25M round backed by Venrex, The General Partnership and more.
Together AI, a provider of an AI Native Cloud enabling users to run open source AI models at scale, raised a $800M Series C led by Aramco Ventures.
CarbonSix, Inc., a Physical AI company focused on the manufacturing sector, raised a $40M Series A co-led by DSC Investment and LB Investment.
TwelveLabs, a video intelligence company, raised a $100M Series B co-led by NEA and NAVER Ventures.
Materna Medical, a novel OBGYN platform company, closed a $5M B3 round led by InnovaHealth Partners.
Proception.AI, a developer of dexterous robotic hands and tactile data pipelines for humanoid robots, raised a $11M in Seed round led by First Round Capital.
Queue, a company building a fully autonomous robotic pharmacy, raised a $12.6M Seed round led by AlleyCorp.
Build, a developer of an AI-native infrastructure and automated real estate development platform, raised a $8.5M Seed round led by Index Ventures.
SuperPlane, a developer of an open-source automation engine and AI-first engineering control plane, raised a $2.6M in Pre-Seed round led by Credo Ventures.
Baz Technologies, a developer of an autonomous codebase management and agentic coding verification platform, raised a $9M extended Seed round co-led by Battery Ventures and Boldstart Ventures.
Omen AI, a continuous fluid analysis company, raised a $31M in Series A led by Nava Ventures.
8090 Labs, a developer of an AI-enabled software manufacturing factory, raised a $135M Series A led by Salesforce Ventures.
GenerativeX, Inc., an agentic AI startup, raised a $4M in Series A led by Nissay Capital.
Open Vision Engineering, Inc., developer of Pocket, a dedicated AI-native conversational capture device, raised a $11M round backed by Accel, Y Combinator and more.
Straiker, a developer of an artificial intelligence security and autonomous agent protection platform, raised a $64M Series A led by Marathon Management Partners, Citi Ventures, Illuminate Financial, and Workday Ventures.
Vanna Health, a developer of a value-based health technology platform for serious mental illness (SMI) care, raised a $17M round co-led by a national healthcare insurance company and AlleyCorp.
Jarvie AI, a provider of an AI assistant designed for group chats, raised a $8.3M Seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, Base10 Partners, and Lightspeed.
Ground, a developer of an on-chain wealth management and decentralized finance (DeFi) API layer, raised a $3.6M Pre-Seed round co-led by Bain Capital Crypto and ParaFi.
Aseon Labs, a developer of automated pods for robotaxi fleet maintenance and charging infrastructure, raised a $10M Seed round led by Crane Venture Partners.
Quantifind, a developer of an AI-native risk intelligence and automated financial crime detection platform, raised a $200M round led by Summit Partners.
Lycia Therapeutics, a developer of extracellular protein degradation and lysosomal targeting chimera (LYTAC) therapeutics, raised a $75M Series D co-led by Janus Henderson Investors and Balyasny Asset Management.
Groq, a developer of high-speed artificial intelligence inference hardware and serverless cloud infrastructure, raised a $650M round led by Disruptive and Infinitum.


Featured Location
Wayfare Tavern. Elegant, lively, upscale American food with an old-English tavern feel. Great for a celebratory dinner and excellent service.
Fun Events
See you next week,
Justin



