👋 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! We’re about 5 weeks out from the Ambition Summit, tickets go up in price in a few weeks, and I’m so excited for this to all come together after months of work. Apply to join here.
Let’s get to it.
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🌁 Upcoming Event We’re Hosting 🌁
🗓️ August 26: The SF Grind: VC Q&A. Mission District. 6 - 8 pm.
🗓️ August 28: The SF Grind: SF Startup Community Coffee Meetup. Financial District. 9 - 10 am.
🗓️ September 24: Ambition Summit. Los Angeles.
👋 This Week in SF 👋
🗓️ August 17: Moonlighting with Gemini + Exa. Financial District. 5:30 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ August 17: Academic Night. Mission District. 6 - 9 pm.
🗓️ August 18: SUPERNOVA 2026. Dogpatch.
🗓️ August 18: CorpGov Tech Summit SF. SF. 2 - 6 pm.
🗓️ August 18: SkyRL Meetup. SoMa. 6 - 7:30 pm.
🗓️ August 18: Low-Key Data Happy Hour. Union Square. 6 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ August 19: Reading Group (+🧋): Continual Learning Bench. SoMa. 5:15 - 7:45 pm.
🗓️ August 19: AI & The Wet Lab. South Beach. 5:30 - 7 pm.
🗓️ August 19: The Sf Database Meetup: August. Soma. 5:30 - 8 pm.
🗓️ August 19: GLITCHED - Women in Game Dev Meetup - Inspired Design and Informed Marketing. Mission District. 6 - 9 pm.
🗓️ August 19: The Reserve by Founder Social Club with HydraDB. Mission District. 6 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ August 20: Claude Code Workshop. SoMa. 1 - 5 pm.
🗓️ August 20: Grok Bot Founder Build Night feat. Harper (YC W25). North Beach. 4:30 - 7:30 pm.
🗓️ August 20: Summer Finance Gathering with Campfire x Invoice Butler x Taxwire x Rho x Veroa. Mission Bay. 5:30 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ August 20: Agents are changing the web with Parag Agrawal (founder, Parallel). Embarcadero. 6 - 8 pm.
🗓️ August 20: Hardware Pitch Night. Dolores Heights. 6 - 9 pm.
🗓️ August 20: Build a Dataset, Fine-Tune a Model: One Night on Nebius. Mid-Market. 6 - 9 pm.
🗓️ August 20: Claude Community SF: Science Demo Night. SoMa. 6:30 - 9:30 pm.
🗓️ August 20: AI Founders + Engineers Billliards Night. Mission District.. 7 - 10 pm.
🗓️ August 21: Friday Build & Bluff: Co-working + Poker at AGI, Inc. Mission District. 10:30 am - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ August 22: Mistral Vibe Hackathon. Belden Place. 8:30 am - 8 pm.
🗓️ August 22: AI Valley x Pet Zen Dog-a-thon. Presidio. 9 am - 9 pm.
🗓️ August 22: GIRL'S RUN + BRUNCH IN SF. Marina District. 10 - 11 am.
👀 Events Coming Soon 👀
🗓️ August 24: vLLM x NVIDIA Dynamo Meetup. Union Square. 6 - 9 pm.
🗓️ August 25: Physical AI: What's Working (and What Still Breaks). Financial District. 5:30 - 8 pm.
🗓️ August 25: Embodied AI Night: Founders, Builders, and Researchers. South Beach. 6 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ August 27: Step SF 2026: The AI & Tech Startup Festival. Dogpatch. 9 am - 8 pm.
🗓️ August 28: August Tech Rooftop Mixer. South Beach. 6 - 8:30 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.
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
Software Engineer, New Grad @ Eventual
Technical Recruiter @ Metriport
Founding Design Engineer @ Jinba
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.
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.
First episodes of Ambition:
Available now on all podcasting platforms including: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, YouTube and more.
Clarity Systems, a retail fraud detection company, raised a $4.4M Seed round backed by LMnT Ventures, Regeneration VC and more.
Databricks, a Data and AI company, raised a $5B round led by Coatue.
Pathway, a frontier AI research lab specializing in “post-transformer” model architectures, raised additional funding for a $30M Seed round backed by Id4 Ventures, TQ Ventures and more.
Gravity, a developer of an automated agent-to-agent advertising platform, raised a $30.5M Series A co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Committed Capital.
CodeRabbit, a provider of an AI-powered code review and agentic change management platform, raised a $143M Series C co-led by Atomico and Smash Capital.
Blacksmith, a provider of a cloud platform for validating code, raised a $45M Series B led by Peak XV Partners.
House of Student, a provider of a global student living technology platform and housing marketplace, raised a $2M Seed round co-led by Saltwater Sutra and Nirmitsu Inspirational Ventures.
River AI, a provider of a full-stack AI platform improving frontier open weight models via an API, raised a $1.1B round led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC.
Epicrispr Biotechnologies, a provider of a programmable epigenetic medicines platform, raised a $90M Series C led by Octagon Capital and Janus Henderson Investors.
Discovered Materials, a provider of an AI agent platform that discovers and accelerates the adoption of new materials for semiconductor chips, raised a $9M Seed round led by Lightspeed India Partners.
Featured Location
Terrene. Green, airy restaurant at 1 Hotel San Francisco, located on the Embarcadero waterfront overlooking the Bay Bridge and Ferry Building.
Fun Events
See you next week,
Justin