Events
Rally events, and the rest of AI SF
Builders Night, BSOTA, Speaker Series, and what else is on around the city.
Monday, August 24
5 PM - 7:30 PM
Five AI infrastructure and developer tool startups get live product reviews from Aditya Rohit and AJ, with demos streamed across social and enterprise buyers in the room. Brutal feedback, high energy, and networking with founders and ecosystem partners.
5 PM - 8 PM
Learn how fast-growing SaaS and AI startups actually build GTM stacks that scale without operational chaos. Covers AI-powered prospecting, essential tech, and connecting data across product and sales.
5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
5:30 PM - 8 PM
Digital health's cash pay model hits a ceiling at insurance. This fireside brings together operators running GLP-1s at scale and the team building agents for benefit verification and prior auth to show what actually works moving patients to covered lives.
6 PM - 9 PM
6 PM - 9 PM
Trossen's showroom hosts Stereolabs for an evening on robot vision and spatial perception, with hardware on the floor and engineers from both teams. Bring your team and stay as long as you want with food and drinks included.
7:30 PM - 12 AM
Tuesday, August 25
5 PM - 6 PM
Weekly breakfast for people shipping production agents, no panels or pitches, just hallway conversations with founders and engineers three months ahead of you. Invite-only seats with YC founders and people from Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, and Walmart who are solving the same scaling problems you're about to hit.
5 PM - 8 PM
Corey Quinn and Philip Kiely are hosting a casual loft happy hour to talk compute without the panel format. Grab a spot before it fills, space is limited and drinks are covered.
5 PM - 8 PM
Most enterprises are running 3-10x more AI agents than they realize, creating a sprawling attack surface that's hard to govern. This session covers discovering shadow agents, securing their actions on enterprise data, and responsibly scaling AI adoption with live demos from the teams building observability layers for production agentic systems.
5 PM - 8:30 PM
5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
A meetup for people selling GPUs, hardware, storage, and cloud to AI builders, born from GTC conversations. Useful for comparing notes on infrastructure trends and meeting others in the same sales space.
5:30 PM - 8 PM
Real teams don't use AI one person at a time, and this demo night proves it by showing workflows that actually require multiple people. Three focused demos on team coordination, agent orchestration, and shared context will give you concrete patterns to steal for your own setup.
6 PM - 8 PM
Three teams shipping AI past the prototype stage will share what's actually working in production, from execution engines to reproducible environments to inference infrastructure. This is for builders tired of theoretical AI talks and ready to learn from people who've solved real problems.
6 PM - 8:30 PM
6 PM - 9 PM
Hear from n8n founder Jan Oberhauser in a fireside chat while learning how to combine n8n with Claude Code and Lovable for faster builds. SF's automation community is gathering to network, see live demos, and get answers directly from the product team.
6 PM - 9 PM
An informal gathering at Trossen Robotics' Mission District showroom for people building with ROS. Good for connecting with the Bay Area robotics crowd and seeing hardware in person.
6 PM - 9 PM
Three founders running content engines at scale discuss turning launches and customer calls into distributed advocacy programs without burning out your team. They'll cover exec programs that stick, AI's actual role in the workflow, and connecting posts back to pipeline.
6 PM - 9 PM
6:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Wednesday, August 26
4:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Xlab Robotics is opening a deployment-focused house inspired by Willow Garage's original mission, connecting builders, researchers, and industry leaders to accelerate robotics from prototype to production. The space aims to fill gaps between adjacent teams and ship faster, with conversations led by founders who shaped the field.
5 PM - 8 PM
5 PM - 9 PM
Live code review competition where you spot bugs with Qodo and compete for a Mac mini at GitHub HQ. Engineers from Qodo, GitHub, Port, and OpenAI will judge your PR submissions on clean structure, logic, and edge cases.
5:15 PM - 8 PM
A dinner series at a gallery exploring whether advancing AI brings us closer to or further from the sacred, with the CEO of Bible Chat and founder of Bay Area Center for Faith. Come with genuine questions about faith, intelligence, and what it means to be human.
5:30 PM - 8 PM
Press Club walks through their cold-email playbook for getting Forbes and WSJ coverage without paying agency fees. Learn how they consistently hit 10% response rates by targeting 200+ journalists directly, with real patterns from successful founder launches.
5:30 PM - 8 PM
Stale data and slow retrieval are killing your agent's decisions in production. This meetup brings together engineers shipping real systems to dissect how tools like Neo4j, Retriever AI, and Entire solve the context problem.
5:30 PM - 8 PM
Daytona's exploring runtime infrastructure for long-running agents, with a confirmed talk on forkable sandboxes that let you pause, branch, and sample continuations from machine state. Worth attending if you're building systems where agents need persistent state across sessions.
5:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Slack is becoming the dominant interface for embedded agents, and this demo night shows why with real implementations from CopilotKit, Mastra, Cognition, and WorkOS. If you're building agent experiences, seeing how teams are shipping to channels beats reading docs.
6 PM - 7:30 PM
Early-stage AI founders get scored on their tech's credibility and defensibility, then top startups pitch directly to VCs and angels. It's a structured way to sharpen your fundraising story if you're actually ready to raise.
6 PM - 8:30 PM
A post-conference mixer for founders and engineers obsessed with owning their inference stack. Expect lightning talks on open weights as a competitive moat, live demos from DigitalOcean and NVIDIA, and serious conversations with people who sweat every token.
6 PM - 9 PM
Trossen's hardware team is in SF for August, and their startups night with Avea brings robotics builders and physical AI folks to the same room with actual systems to touch. Free food, open floor time, and the kind of conversations that happen when engineers get hands-on with real hardware.
6 PM - 9 PM
Founders hitting the $500K-$10M ARR inflection point will hear from operators who've scaled beyond themselves: real channel selection, budget ranges, and pricing strategy when margins are tight and switching costs are low. This is the follow-up to a packed first session, built on specifics rather than playbook platitudes.
8:30 AM - 5 PM
TailscaleUp brings engineering and security leaders together to discuss secure connectivity at scale, with speakers from GitHub, AWS, and Grafana Labs. The agenda covers infrastructure, services, and device networking across modern teams.
9:30 AM - 11 AM
Hans Robertson scaled Verkada from four employees to a $5.8 billion company while previously taking Meraki to a $1.2 billion Cisco exit. This fireside covers what he learned building and operating two unicorns in cloud infrastructure.
Thursday, August 27
5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Product leaders building with AI loops will hear from teams actively shipping agentic systems about orchestration, observation, and optimization patterns. The community share at the end means you'll also leave with real hiring intel and what others are actually seeing in the field.
5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Live demos from Anthropic, Vercel, and Supabase on shipping agents and full-stack apps, plus trivia for prizes and pizza. This one's worth the trip if you want to see how context-aware agents actually handle system-wide changes and how to deploy production-ready infrastructure in minutes.
5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Ode's hosting a practitioners-only coffeehouse 58 floors up with Anthropic folks, real demos, and engineer-to-engineer problem-solving over coffee. Invite-only event focused on applied gen AI work, debugging disasters, and actual solutions from people shipping products.
5:30 PM - 8:30 PM
6 PM - 8 PM
The old B2B demand gen playbook is broken: cold outreach underperforms, CPLs climb, and buyers expect value before talking to sales. This invite-only dinner gathers demand gen leaders to discuss 2026 scaling challenges and see how coordinated paid and owned channels actually work in practice.
6 PM - 8 PM
Hiring globally for AI teams means navigating visa complexity, timezone coordination, and compliance at speed. This panel covers what actually works from leaders in recruiting, HR tech, and legal.
6 PM - 9 PM
Infrastructure engineers shipping RAG systems discuss the real constraints: latency, data ownership, and when distributed retrieval actually breaks your inference pipeline. Talks from people who've already hit these problems in production, followed by open Q&A.
6 PM - 9 PM
Three robotics companies opening their networks in one room for the evening. Trossen's SF showroom becomes the place to meet engineers, founders, and customers across Proprio and Avea while food and drinks keep things casual.
6:30 PM - 8:30 PM
6:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Thirty founders and engineers building wearables, healthtech, and neurotech swap real war stories over dinner with no pitches or posturing. Limited seats, curated crew, actual signal connections.
Friday, August 28
9 AM - 7 PM
A one-day hackathon in Japantown tackling real problems: reading crises, loneliness, climate action, and beyond. Build with ClickHouse and Postgres, get help from partner engineers all day, and compete for cash prizes and cloud credits.
Saturday, August 29
2 PM - 5 PM
The reading club turns its focus to Booster T2, an open humanoid platform reshaping what's possible in embodied AI. Expect a keynote from Booster Robotics followed by roundtable discussion on spotlight papers with researchers from DeepMind, Tesla, and leading Bay Area robotics teams.
9 AM - 6 PM
You build a real agent in a day using an open harness that handles tool calls, sandboxing, and human approvals so you skip the plumbing. Best projects win NVIDIA hardware, and OpenAI covers your experimental credits.
9 AM - 7 PM
Two days building robots for actual Himalayan deployment: onboard inference without cloud, locomotion on ice, hardware that survives extreme altitude. Winner gets flown to the mountains with their creation.
9:30 AM - 3:30 PM
A three-hour e-mountain biking ride through South Bay with eight seed to Series A AI founders and investors, followed by lunch. Physical endurance meets founder networking in the scrappy founder community that actually gets outside.
Monday, August 31
A monthly working night at Mission Robotics for solo robotics builders who trained policies at home and need actual labmates. Two hours of focused bench time, debugging help from people who've hit your exact problems, and a space designed for hardware work.
A weekly coworking session where builders show up with projects and leave with real momentum through focused work and genuine support. The appeal is simple: consistency, accountability, and the energy of creating alongside people who actually care about shipping.
Tuesday, September 1
3:30 PM - 9 PM
A multi-track deep dive on securing multi-agent systems with speakers from Databricks, OpenAI, and Cursor walking through real meta-harness architectures, sandboxing patterns, and observability. Essential if you're deploying autonomous agents and need practical governance models that actually prevent runaway execution.
5 PM - 8 PM
Raj Badarinath, a four-time CMO exit, runs a hands-on GTM workshop cutting through the noise on positioning, customer signals, and competitive claims. Free in-person event at Hacker Dojo with founder networking before and after.
Wednesday, September 2
10 AM - 5 PM
A single-track conference on engineering principles, abstractions, and where LLMs still struggle, curated by Convex with speakers like John Maeda and Meagan Rose Gamache. No sponsored talks, no sales pitches, just merit-based engineering discourse from 10am-5pm PT on September 2nd.
2 PM - 5 PM
Vercel ditched Salesforce Service Cloud for Plain, and Plain is built on Next.js and Vercel. This fireside chat cuts through vendor marketing to show how developer-first companies actually choose their tools.
5 PM - 7 PM
Post-conference wind-down with speakers and the Convex team, heavy on the good conversations and lighter fare. Shows up for the people who actually want to talk shop after a full day of talks.
6 PM - 8:45 PM
Robotics and AI founders trading war stories over drinks, with CTOs and product leads from Bedrock, Covariant, Serve, and Zendar sharing what's actually shipping. Get there early if you want a seat for the talks.
Thursday, September 3
5:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Eight pre-Series A AI teams demo unreleased work to a packed crowd voting on winners in real time. This is where SF's builders show what ships next, backed by live Q&A that doesn't pull punches.
8 AM - 9:30 AM
A casual breakfast gathering for folks actively building AI agents inside companies, hosted in SOMA with tacos and coffee. No agenda or pitches, just conversations and impromptu demos with product leaders and engineers doing the same work.
Friday, September 4
1 PM - 5 PM
Designers, marketers, and founders can finally build without coding at Builder Pub's first Non-Tech Buildathon. You'll go from zero to working prototype in one afternoon using AI, no experience required.
Saturday, September 5
10 AM - 8 PM
Build playable worlds and 3D assets from scratch using World Labs, Tripo, mint.gg, and Convex in a single day. Three tracks span gaming, physical AI, and creative 3D, with $3k in credits per winning team.
2 PM - 5 PM
Chenyang Ma from Applied Intuition keynotes on morphology-sensing-learning co-design, arguing robot development shouldn't treat hardware as fixed. If you're thinking seriously about embodied AI, this reading group brings researchers from DeepMind, Boston Dynamics, and Bay Area startups into substantive technical discussion.
Tuesday, September 8
5 PM - 9 PM
Lightsage's sixth edition brings API companies and agent builders together to see how platforms like Twilio and Docusign are optimizing for Claude Code and similar agents. Four-minute demos display real agent experience patterns, followed by networking with founders, investors, and technical teams already shipping agent-ready APIs.
6 PM - 9 PM
A no-nonsense demo night for dev tools and infrastructure builders showing actual working products. Expect databases, agents, observability, and orchestration from people shipping real systems, with genuine feedback from engineers who use this stuff.
Wednesday, September 9
4:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Learn how to wire customer context from Zendesk, Datadog, Granola, and Asana into a production-ready query layer. This hands-on workshop walks you through per-user scoped access, credential isolation, and token management patterns you'll need for shipping multi-tenant agents.
5 PM - 7 PM
The Junction strips away forced networking theater for a self-directed circuit where founders hit stations built around raising, hiring, and GTM. Live music, good food, and open bar make this feel less conference booth and more actual gathering.
5 PM - 7 PM
RC car racing tournament that mirrors production debugging: spot failure patterns before they repeat. Between races, see Arize's Signal agent SRE in action, which surfaces recurring failures in production traces and prioritizes what to investigate next.
5:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Robotics researchers and hardware builders scrutinizing concrete work on policies, sim-to-real, and evaluation methodology with frontier lab teams. Dinner, brief talks, and extended critique designed to surface assumptions and failure modes that matter.
Thursday, September 10
6 PM - 9:30 PM
A Texas Hold'em tournament with founders and revenue leaders from SF's AI scene, professional dealers, and a Four Seasons spa day on the line. Beginners welcome, the house walks you through it, and space is limited.
6:30 PM - 9:30 PM
Physical AI builders showing off working demos alongside talks from founders like Andromeda's Grace. Open mic format means you can pitch your prototype or see what others are shipping in robotics.
Saturday, September 12
2 PM - 5 PM
Deep technical work on world models and embodied AI from researchers at Boston Dynamics, DeepMind, NVIDIA, and leading robotics startups. The format mixes keynote presentations with open-floor roundtables on spotlight papers, making it useful for builders actually working on these problems.
2 PM - 7 PM
The whole AI stack is still unsettled, and this room gathers the researchers and founders actually moving it. Expect unresolved technical debates across compute, inference, and agent infrastructure, with conversations designed to start past the handshakes.
Sunday, September 13
2 PM - 6:30 PM
Alibaba.com and guests from Google, Stripe, Microsoft, and Figma discuss how AI moves beyond generating outputs to taking action in real commerce workflows. The focus is on designing for trust and control while integrating agents across discovery, matching, sourcing, and fulfillment.
Past events
Weekly deep work session where builders show up with a project and leave with more momentum. Quiet focused time, occasional breakthroughs, and a share-back circle where people ask for what they need.
A weekly coworking session where builders show up with a project and leave with real momentum from working alongside others. Quiet deep work, brief opening circle, and a share-back where you make asks and offer what you know.
A weekly co-working session where builders show up with projects and leave with momentum through focused deep work and supportive share-backs. Perfect if building alone feels isolating and you need the energy of working alongside people actually making things.
Weekly coworking for builders across software, hardware, business, and creative projects. Two hours of focused work alongside others, plus a share-back where you learn what stuck people and what shipped.
Twice-monthly working sessions where builders using Claude Code, Cursor, and custom agents show real setups and workflows, then spend the night comparing approaches and solving problems together. This is where isolated experimentation becomes shared knowledge.
Anthropic researchers found evidence that language models might have something like conscious access, using global workspace theory as their lens. David Valdman walks through the interpretability paper and what it reveals about how information flows inside LLMs.
A weekly coworking session built for side-by-side building, not networking. You'll show up with a project, sprint in focused silence, then share what you made or got stuck on with people who get it.
Most builders using Claude Code, Cursor, or custom agents are still figuring out workflows alone—BSOTA gets you in a room with others doing the same work. You'll see live walkthroughs of real setups and spend the rest of the night comparing notes and debugging approaches with people who actually use these tools daily. Bring your laptop and a project you're stuck on.
A weekly coworking session where builders show up with projects and leave with real momentum through focused work and peer support. The quiet deep work sprint is interrupted only by genuine moments of discovery, making it one of the few spaces where building alongside others actually feels less lonely.
A weekly coworking session built for the lonely part of building, where you show up with a project and leave with momentum from working alongside others. Quiet deep work sprints with a share-back to learn from what everyone's making.
Most builders using Claude Code, Cursor, or custom agents are figuring out workflows in isolation—BSOTA fixes that. You'll see live walkthroughs of real setups from active users, then spend the rest of the night working alongside other builders who are deep in the same problems. Bring your laptop and a project you're stuck on.
A weekly coworking session where builders show up with projects and work side by side through focused sprints and share-backs. The antidote to solo building: momentum, accountability, and the particular energy of making things real alongside others.
Every Monday, builders bring a project and work in focused silence alongside others doing the same. You'll get 90 minutes of deep work time, then a structured share-back where people show progress, get unstuck, and offer real help. It's accountability without pressure — just the momentum that comes from building in the room with people who get it.
Most builders using Claude Code, Cursor, or custom agents are still figuring out workflows alone—this session gets you in a room with others doing the same work. You'll see live walkthroughs of actual setups and spend the rest of the night comparing notes with people solving similar problems. Designed for regular users who want to level up by learning what's actually working for other builders.
Most networking events end when people leave. Keep in Touch adds structure to what breaks: matching you with relevant people upfront, then using Signal the next morning to actually follow up.
Monday co-working for AI builders. Two hours of focused build time with a share-back round to close.
Bi-weekly community event for builders working with agentic coding tools, with techniques going back to a shared repo at github.com/bsota/collective. RSVPs are open.
The first wave of AI rebuilt the digital 15% of the economy. The next wave runs on the other 85%: manufacturing, energy, infrastructure. Atharva Atre (Niantic Spatial) walks through the five technical layers it runs on, from simulated training environments to spatial intelligence.
Monday co-working for AI builders. Two hours of focused build time with a share-back round to close.
Builders Night
Monday · 2026-05-11 · 6:30 PM - 9:00 PMMonday co-working for AI builders. Two hours of focused build time with a share-back round to close.
Most AI benchmarks ask whether a model is smart. HumaneBench asks whether it's actually good for the person using it. The team tested how models hold up when users are stressed or vulnerable, and found that 67% of the time the model stops looking out for the user. Talk on the methodology, then a working session on what a benchmark like this would look like for your own product. Best for builders who want to ship AI that doesn't quietly fail the users who need it most.
Spend a Saturday going from tokenization to training a working language model from scratch. You'll write the core architecture, understand the math behind attention mechanisms, and leave with code you actually understand. Best for engineers who want to stop treating LLMs as black boxes.
A deep dive into the design decisions that shape agent architectures, from tool use patterns to memory systems to orchestration strategies.
Monday co-working for AI builders. Two hours of focused build time with a share-back round to close.
Monday co-working for AI builders. Two hours of focused build time with a share-back round to close.
Monday co-working for AI builders. Two hours of focused build time with a share-back round to close.
A Rally SF hackathon. Why can't the most technical community on Earth coordinate dinner?
Monday co-working for AI builders. Two hours of focused build time with a share-back round to close.
Monday co-working for AI builders. Two hours of focused build time with a share-back round to close.
BSOTA #2. Hands-on session exploring agentic workflows and collaborative AI building.
This session explores AI alignment through Anthropic's Constitutional AI framework. We'll dig into the 84-page constitution that guides Claude's behavior, the difference between rules and dispositions, and how Constitutional AI compares to RLHF. Co-facilitated by Anup Gosavi and Emily Hough-Kovacs. Pre-read: "Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback" (Bai et al., 2022).
Monday co-working for AI builders. Two hours of focused build time with a share-back round to close.
Monday co-working for AI builders. Two hours of focused build time with a share-back round to close.
Justin Lebar (ex-NVIDIA, Google TPU) broke down GPU architecture fundamentals and what they mean for the economics of AI inference. Standing room only.
Weekly co-working session for AI builders. Laptops out, projects in progress, peers to get unstuck with.
Our inaugural BSOTA session. Everett Kleven led the group through shared vocabulary, live demos, and breakout discussions on agentic computing workflows with Claude Code. 93 RSVPs, 40 attended.
We surveyed practical approaches to long-context LLMs including RoPE scaling, sparse attention, and state-space alternatives, then mapped the real engineering tradeoffs: when expanding context windows makes sense versus when retrieval-augmented generation still wins. The takeaway: accepting tokens isn't the same as using them well.
We examined how linear directions in a model's activation space correspond to specific character traits like sycophancy, hallucination propensity, and moral reasoning. The group discussed what personality means for language models and the implications for alignment, safety, and developer tools. Paper: "Persona Vectors" (Chen et al., 2025).
Our first session explored the foundational paper behind modern generative AI. We broke down how diffusion models gradually add noise to data and learn to reverse the process, why this approach outperformed GANs and VAEs, and the connections to Latent Diffusion and Consistency Models. Paper: "Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models" (Ho et al., 2020).
Our inaugural session explored DeepSeek-R1 — how reinforcement learning for reasoning, GRPO, and distillation are reshaping what open-source models can do.
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