Insider's Guide to SF Tech Week 2026, Day by Day

Updated October 2, 2026.

SF Tech Week 2026 runs Monday, October 5 through Sunday, October 11, and the official calendar lists 1,832 events. About 88 percent of them need host approval before you can walk in. We read every listing and pulled the registration page for every event we considered. Then we built one route through the week for two kinds of people. Founders who want investors in the room. And angels and VCs who want to see deals before everyone else does. The anchors are the Fireworks and a16z kickoff on Monday, MATCH HOUSE on Wednesday, the Claude Founder Salon on Thursday, the a16z speedrun AI Faire on Friday, and the official afterparty that closes the week. Everything in between is picked so you're never in two places at once and can get to the next room on foot or in a short ride.

So here's the thing about Tech Week. It isn't a conference. It's 1,800 rooms spread across one city, most of them panels and happy hours, and the hosts decide who gets in. Allen Smith, a managing partner at Musa Capital, put it this way in September: "Nobody 'attends' Tech Week, you pick your rooms, and the quality of your two weeks is decided by which ones." The good news? The rooms that matter are a short list, and they cluster. The catch... the best ones fill up before the week starts. So apply TODAY. Not Monday.

Who's writing this? We're The Pitch, the podcast where founders pitch real investors for real money. On Monday we're taping a live episode at The Pearl in Dogpatch, and yes, it's on this list. We'll say so again when we get there. Everything else here we picked the way we'd pick for a friend flying in: who's hosting, who's in the room, how you get in, and what people said about it last year. The official SF Tech Week calendar has the other 1,800.

How to read this guide

Each day is one route, in order, with the walk or the ride between stops. Under every event you'll find the same four lines: who hosts it, who's in the room, how to get in, and who it's best for. Then the scoop.

A few events sit in the same time slot in the same neighborhood. We mark those as a fork and tell you which way we'd go. Founders raising a round get one answer. Investors sourcing deals get the other. Events marked Plan B are the fallback if your application doesn't clear.

"Apply" means the host approves you from your Partiful or Luma profile. Fill yours in before you hit the button: real name, company, role, a link. Blank profiles get skipped. "RSVP" means you're in when you click. All times are Pacific. Counts like "476 on the list" are what the registration page showed on October 2.

One more thing. On September 29, Sarah Romanko, a vice president at Geek Ventures, posted her own list of SF Tech Week picks on LinkedIn. Nine of them are on this route. We didn't coordinate. That's just what the good rooms look like from the investor side.

Monday, October 5, 2026: SoMa to Dogpatch to a rooftop in Mission Bay

Monday is the easy day. Everyone has landed, nobody's hungover yet, and the two best rooms are a 12-minute walk apart.

9:00 AM: Welcome Breakfast with Deel, Ramp, AWS and SOMA Capital (SoMa)

Host: Deel, Ramp, AWS, SOMA Capital and Sunshine Lake VC. Address shared on approval.
Who is in the room: "Founders, builders, and investors," per the host. 476 on the list.
Get in: Apply on Partiful. Free. No end time posted, so plan to leave by 10:30.
Best for: Founders and investors who want to start the week in a big room.

Start here. It's the only big, open Monday-morning room in SoMa that's done this before. Live music, hot coffee, and a raffle for a pair of AirPods Max. It's a party with eggs. Will you close a round here? No. But you'll find out who else flew in, and on Monday morning that's the whole point.

What attendees said last year: This is the third straight year Deel's events team has run a Monday breakfast. In 2024 it was a SaaS founders breakfast with Greenhouse and Alpha Partners, limited to founders, CEOs and investors, and it ended on a waitlist. In 2025 it was a CFO brunch with a16z and Carta. This year it's a welcome party with Ramp, AWS and two seed funds. Same host, bigger tent. Nobody has written up the room, so we can't tell you what the eggs were like.

12:00 PM: Zero Day: Physical AI + Security Seed Pitch and Live Demo (DG717, 717 Market St, SoMa)

Host: DG Incubation and Open Network Lab, the seed arms of Japan's Digital Garage, with Elev X, Tenki Cloud and AppWorks.
Who is in the room: Three named investors on the panel and the live-mentoring bench: Kosuke Yusa (GP, DG Incubation), Nikos Liodakis (Partner, Transpose Platform) and Edgar Chiu (Managing Partner, SparkLabs Taiwan). About five founders pitching with live demos.
Get in: Apply on Partiful. Free. "Closed room, 150 people." Founders building in physical AI, robotics or security can still apply to pitch through the Google Form on the page. Bring a one-pager and a working demo, three minutes on the clock.
Best for: Physical AI, robotics and security founders. Investors in those sectors.

Leave the breakfast by 10:30 and you've got time to walk to Market Street, find a coffee, and answer the emails you ignored on the plane. Doors at noon. The panel starts at 12:40. And the host promises "no VC-speak, no hype," which is a bold promise for a VC panel. The demo pitches with live mentoring run from 1:20 to 2:20. Then there's a Japanese sushi tasting at 2:20. And here's where you have to make a call. The Pitch LIVE opens its doors at 3:30 in Dogpatch. So leave by 2:45. You'll miss some sushi. The pitches are done by then anyway.

The inside scoop: First edition, so nobody's been. What you're getting is a corporate VC with a Tokyo checkbook, a room capped at 150, and three investors who take meetings. On a Monday, that's rarer than it sounds.

Plan B for founders outside those sectors: the OnlyExit Investor Founder Mixer, 12:30 to 2:30, no panel and no deck, with 755 on the list. It's run by a Seattle hacker house and reality show, and the address only goes to approved guests.

3:00 PM: Founders' Coffee (Dogpatch)

Host: Y·US Ventures and Bridgit.
Who is in the room: 437 going. It runs 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM as a drop-in.
Get in: Open RSVP on Partiful. Free. "No pitches, no talks, no agenda."
Best for: Anyone who arrives in Dogpatch early and wants a chair.

From DG717, take the T Third from Market Street to 20th Street. About 20 minutes, or 15 in a car. That puts you in Dogpatch around 3:00 with half an hour before our doors open. The coffee's covered. The hosts say "pop in for 20 minutes or pull up a chair all day," and you'll be sitting next to people who are also killing time before The Pearl. Use it as a waiting room. Don't plan your week around it.

3:30 PM doors: The Pitch LIVE at SF Tech Week (The Pearl, 601 19th St, Dogpatch)

Host: Us. The Pitch, presented by Engine.
Who is in the room: Three investors on the panel: Eric Bahn of Hustle Fund, Charles Hudson of Precursor Ventures and Arielle Zuckerberg of Long Journey Ventures. Three founders pitching them for real money. Then a founder mixer.
Get in: Tickets are $25 general admission on the event page. No application. Doors at 3:30, taping at 4:00, mixer after, out by 7:00.
Best for: Founders who want to watch three real pitches go all the way to a yes or a no, then talk to the people who gave them. Investors who want to see how Eric, Charles and Arielle decide.

Okay, this one's ours, so take the next paragraph with that in mind.

For nine years our show has worked the same way. A founder walks into a room with investors, pitches, and walks out with commitments or without them. We record all of it. On Monday we're doing that live in front of you at The Pearl. The three founders on stage were booked weeks ago through the show's normal process. So no, you can't grab the mic. But you can sit ten feet from a seed investor while they decide. Then stay for the mixer, where the whole room is founders and the panel is still there. You won't find it on the official calendar. It's ours, and tickets are on our site. And if you want to pitch on the show someday... apply here.

What attendees said last year: We've taped live shows before, but this is our first at Tech Week, so there's no last year to quote. Ask us on Tuesday.

7:15 PM: Fireworks x a16z Official Tech Week Kickoff (rooftop, Mission Bay)

Host: Fireworks AI and a16z, with Vercel, ElevenLabs and Stripe. "Exact address shared upon RSVP."
Who is in the room: "Founders, engineers, investors, and operators." 1,028 on the list, the biggest list of the week.
Get in: Apply on Partiful. Free. Runs 6:00 to 10:00 PM. Bring a layer. It's a rooftop in October.
Best for: Everyone. It's the official opener.

Here's the walk. The Pearl lets out at 7:00. Mission Bay is up Third Street, 12 minutes on foot, no cab. You'll arrive around 7:15 with almost three hours of party left. Live music, open air, skyline views. Tracy Massaro, who runs partnerships at a16z, described it on LinkedIn as "Open-air, live music, a few surprises, and a tightly curated room." She's the one approving the list. So take the word curated seriously, and apply now.

What attendees said last year: Nothing. Turns out nobody could get in. The 2024 and 2025 kickoffs were invite-only, held in SoMa next to a16z's office on Townsend Street. This is the first year the opener takes applications. Which is why 1,028 people are already on it. For scale, IBM Ventures said its 2025 cocktail event with a16z speedrun "drew more than 1,700 people to the waitlist." The a16z brand does that.

Plan B, 7:30 PM: The Founders & Funders Showcase (Finix, 760 Market St, Union Square)

Host: Musa Capital, Collide Capital and 726 Capital, on the Finix rooftop.
Who is in the room: "200+ founders and investors," five selected companies presenting, GPs and LPs. 752 on the list.
Get in: Apply on Partiful. Free for Musa Labs members. "Limited guest registration" for everyone else. Runs 6:00 to 9:00 PM.
Best for: Fintech and enterprise founders, underrepresented founders, and investors who want a smaller rooftop than the one with a thousand people on it.

If the kickoff doesn't approve you, this is the other rooftop. From Dogpatch it's 20 minutes by car or the T to Union Square. So you'd land around 7:30. Collide closed a $95M second fund in April. Allen Smith of Musa says the firm built seven events for this Tech Week and calls this one the opener. The catch? The five-company showcase has no published start time. So a late arrival may walk in on the "no panels, no pitch lines, just density" part. Which is fine. That's the part you came for anyway.

If you only do one thing today: the kickoff. Apply before you finish reading this.

Tuesday, October 6, 2026: SoMa, Dogpatch, then everything happens Downtown at once

Tuesday is the best day of the week for founders who are raising. It's also the day with the worst collisions. Three good rooms open between 4:00 and 6:30 within a few blocks of each other. You'll have to pick. We'll help.

9:30 AM, founder fork: Early-Stage B2B Tech Founders & Funders Breakfast (SoMa)

Host: Forum Ventures, sponsored by Punch Financial. Address shared on approval.
Who is in the room: Pre-seed through Series A B2B founders and "investors actively backing early-stage B2B founders." A "curated, balanced mix," per the host.
Get in: Apply on Partiful. Free. Runs to 11:30. No plus-ones. "Application DOES NOT guarantee attendance."
Best for: B2B founders who want investor conversations, not talks.

Forum runs this breakfast in every Tech Week city, and the SF edition fills. Last year's room had 287 on the list. The year before, it closed at capacity. The whole pitch is a balanced room. The host caps the list "to maintain the quality of interactions." Translation: the list is short on purpose.

What attendees said last year: The host's own recap from the Toronto edition in May says it all: "we put founders to the test and asked them to distill what they're building into five words. Some crushed it. Some could not get close." Have your five words ready.

9:30 AM, builder fork: Google for Startups: Engineering 10x with Dr. Astro Teller and Google DeepMind (SoMa)

Host: Google for Startups. Venue "overlooking the skyline," not yet announced.
Who is in the room: Astro Teller, who runs X, Google's moonshot lab, Derek Andersen of Bevy and Startup Grind, Paige Bailey of Google DeepMind, plus founders from Pupper and Surge AI. Early-stage founders, CTOs and builders.
Get in: Apply on Partiful. Free. Runs to noon. "Use your referral code from your Google point of contact or partner to ensure that you can get streamlined acceptance."
Best for: Technical founders. Not a deal room.

We'd take the breakfast. Pick this instead only if you're building something hard and want to hear the Captain of Moonshots talk about it. No investors are named. And read that access line again. A referral code from Google gets you "streamlined acceptance." Everyone else goes to the back of the review pile. So apply early.

The inside scoop: New format this year. Google's 2025 Tech Week event was an evening with Sequoia at The Stadium. This is a two-day hub with an "Expert Lounge to stress-test your architecture with engineers." Day two on Wednesday is with NVIDIA.

12:00 PM: Founder Lunch Club with Fin and Stripe (Dogpatch)

Host: Fin, Intercom's AI agent brand, and Stripe. Address shared on approval.
Who is in the room: 69 on the list. "We're keeping it small by design." No speakers, no agenda.
Get in: Apply on Partiful. Free. About two hours, based on the sister editions.
Best for: Founders who want a quiet table with other founders.

The breakfast ends at 11:30. Dogpatch is 15 to 20 minutes from SoMa by car or the T. That's lunch. The hosts run this in every Tech Week city (Boston had 81 on the list in May). And the point is the opposite of everything else on Tuesday: "eat, chat, chill, share notes, and re-energize before getting back to the Tech Week chaos." Stripe people will be at the table. That's as close to an investor as this lunch gets.

The inside scoop: No prior SF edition, and the hosts don't publish recaps. If you don't get in, the fallback is a block from the breakfast. Claude Founder House, Anthropic's three-day base camp at Terra Gallery, 511 Harrison St, runs a "Raising your next round" panel at 1:30 PM with investors from Lightspeed, Sequoia and ICONIQ. But applications closed before we published, so this only works if you already applied. Anthropic is streaming it at 11:00 AM for everyone else.

4:00 PM, founder fork: Meet SF's Early Stage Founders and Investors (Downtown)

Host: Bling Capital, Costanoa Ventures, Bullpen Capital, SF1, Defy Partners and NextView Ventures. Address shared on approval.
Who is in the room: Pre-seed and seed founders and the six funds hosting. 325 on the list.
Get in: Apply on Partiful. Free. Runs to 7:00 PM.
Best for: Pre-seed and seed founders who want six funds in one room with a drink in hand.

Back from Dogpatch by 4:00. Six seed funds hosting a cocktail party is the simplest kind of good room. The people with the checkbooks sent the invite, so they'll be there. No panel, no stage. This ran last year too, on the Monday, in Rincon Hill.

The inside scoop: No one wrote up the 2025 edition. Which tells you something about cocktail parties. So the scoop is the host list. Read it, pick the two funds that match your stage and sector, and find their partners before the room fills at 5:30.

5:00 PM, founder fork: The Brave New World of Startup Fundraising (One Embarcadero Center, 32nd floor)

Host: Foundersuite and Nixon Peabody. Nathan Beckord of Foundersuite moderates.
Who is in the room: Itamar Novick (Recursive Ventures), Bella Garcia-Camargo (Conviction Partners), Clayton Petty (Gradient VC) and Clayton Bryan (Currents VC). The title promises Hustle Fund too, but those four are the names on the page. 376 on the list.
Get in: Apply on Partiful. Free. "SPACE IS LIMITED." Guest list announced before the event. Foundersuite customers get priority.
Best for: Founders raising seed in the next six months who want to hear how 2026 rounds close, from the people closing them.

This is the other side of the fork. It's a block from the cocktail party, so you can't do both. The cocktail party is where you meet the funds. This one's where you find out what they're going to ask you. Four investors, one moderator who hosts a podcast about raising money, lite bites, and the Bay out the window.

What attendees said last year: The host's number is the scoop: "last year we had over 600+ startups apply for 150 spots." Simen Torp Ruud, a venture analyst at Fundingstack, repeated it on LinkedIn in September: "That's the room we're building again on October 6th." One in four got in! Apply now. And if you use Foundersuite, say so.

6:30 PM: AWS x NVIDIA AI Pitch Competition (Downtown)

Host: AWS Startups and NVIDIA Inception, with ClearScale opening. Address shared on approval.
Who is in the room: Six AI startups pitching. Judges from AWS, NVIDIA "and top local VC firms," unnamed. "Investors, founders, and leaders in AI/ML and deep tech."
Get in: RSVP on Partiful. Free. "A confirmed RSVP is required to attend," and the sister listing says RSVPs are reviewed weekly. Founders can still apply to pitch through the form on the page. First prize is up to $125k in AWS credits.
Best for: Investors who want to see six vetted AI startups in an hour. Founders who want to see what a winning pitch looks like.

Whichever fork you took, leave at 6:15. Both rooms are minutes from this one. Six startups, rapid-fire, a panel, a deliberation, a winner. The series has run in Vancouver, New York, Austin and at NVIDIA's GTC. And the credits are real: GlüxKind took the $125k top prize in Vancouver in 2025.

What attendees said last year: From the GTC edition in March, the Tynapse team wrote that after their pitch "a Pear VC partner who had been on the judging panel came up to us directly" to ask whether the seed round was still open. That's what happens when the judges are investors. Nobody has written up an SF edition, because this is the first one.

Plan B, 5:00 PM: SF Pitch Night by the AI Collective (9Zero, 350 California St, FiDi)

Host: The AI Collective, with Base44 and 9Zero Capital.
Who is in the room: Six "institutionally backed" AI startups, meaning they've already raised from a fund, pitching to a VC and operator panel. "Over 250+" expected. 480 on the list.
Get in: Apply on Partiful. Free. Runs 5:00 to 9:00 PM. Physical ID required. No plus-ones. The list is enforced.
Best for: Investors. Pre-seed founders can watch but can't pitch.

If AWS doesn't confirm you, this is the same idea two blocks away with a longer runway. The AI Collective calls it "the largest investor-forward event AI Collective has ever produced." Pitches, moderated investor questions, live voting, then structured networking. Arrive late if you took a fork. The networking runs to 9:00.

What attendees said last year: Tim Szalay, founder of ABYA Genomics, on LinkedIn last November: "Some of our most important intros came from people I met randomly at 9pm demo nights. Such as The AI Collective." The AI Collective ran a pitch night at Tech Week last year too, with Startup Grind, and the series runs monthly in SF the rest of the year.

Plan B, 6:00 PM: Founders & Funders VC Reverse Pitch (address on approval)

Host: Founders & Funders. Investors pitching this edition: Geek Ventures, Team Ignite Ventures and MS&AD Ventures.
Who is in the room: Seed and Series A founders who are raising, and the VCs pitching them.
Get in: Apply on Partiful. Free. Runs to 8:00 PM. The host says it gets "300+ founder and investor applications per event" and approves "only a fraction."
Best for: Founders who want investors to explain their thesis, check size and what they look for, out loud, before the founder says a word.

The format flips the room. Eight to ten VCs stand up and pitch the founders. Then everyone walks up and talks. There's a second SF edition on Thursday afternoon. But Thursday is full, so take this one.

What attendees said last year: Brandon Lee, a payments founder in Atlanta, after September's edition there: "I just watched a room full of investors pitch founders instead of the other way around." And: "Format like this works because it removes the awkward power dynamic of a traditional pitch." Kimmy Paluch, a general partner at Beta Boom, from the Boston stage this week: "Love this format of turning the tables on us VCs."

If you only do one thing today: the Foundersuite panel if you're raising this quarter, the six-fund cocktail party if you're raising next year.

Wednesday, October 7, 2026: the busiest day, spent mostly in one building

Wednesday has 459 events on the calendar, the most of any day. We're sending you to four, and one of them is five hours long.

9:00 AM, founder fork: Unprompted: Founders Building the Next Thing People Do for Fun (FiDi)

Host: Fenwick & West, the exclusive legal sponsor of Tech Week. Address shared on approval.
Who is in the room: Vanessa Larco of Premise VC, formerly a partner at NEA, moderating Lucky Zhang (Sekai), Sophia Xing (Plot Party), Coco Chen (Dream Voyage) and Ryan So (Coverstar). 146 on the list.
Get in: RSVP on Partiful. "Space is limited." Runs to 11:00. Official listing.
Best for: Consumer founders. Larco has been saying 2026 is the year of the consumer since January, and this is her panel.

A 9:00 start, four consumer founders with real products, and a consumer VC asking the questions. It ends at 11:00. That leaves you an hour for a 20-minute walk to Harrison Street and the main event.

The inside scoop: Fenwick ran three panels at Tech Week last year, on AI law, inference and AI for science. This is the first one about fun. New theme, same room style: named founders, drinks, and a law firm picking up the tab.

10:00 AM, investor fork: Investor Brunch at MATCH HOUSE (Downtown)

Host: MATCH HOUSE, Boop and FirstGlance. Address shared on approval.
Who is in the room: "VC, angels, family offices, and LP's." Investors only. 56 on the list, 4 of 60 spots left.
Get in: Request an invite on Partiful. "Invite and approval only." Runs to noon.
Best for: Investors who want to meet the other investors before the founders show up.

Founders will be declined, so don't bother. Investors, request now. Four seats won't last the weekend. It ends at noon, right when MATCH HOUSE opens its doors.

12:00 PM: MATCH HOUSE San Francisco (715 Harrison St, SoMa)

Host: MATCH HOUSE, Boop and FirstGlance, with HubSpot for Startups, Deel, MongoDB, Alchemist and Leader Bank among the partners.
Who is in the room: "Founders, investors, and operators," hand-picked and matched by stage and thesis before the day starts. The host's 2026 season so far: 400+ founders and 200+ investors across four cities.
Get in: Apply on Partiful. Free. Runs to 5:00 PM. If you want to enter the AI and HealthTech pitch competition, say so when you register.
Best for: Founders and investors who'd rather have five pre-matched conversations than fifty random ones.

This is the day's anchor, and it's new to SF. Doors at noon. Panels at 1:00. At 2:00 two things start at once. The pitch competition takes the stage. And MATCH HOUR begins, where the Boop app pairs you one-on-one with the people you were matched with when you applied. Happy hour at 4:00. The host's line is "Just the right people in the room, matched into conversations that actually go somewhere." And for once, the host has numbers.

What attendees said last year: MATCH HOUSE launched in December 2025, so last year doesn't exist, but 2026 does. Austin in March drew 1,400 applications and more than 500 people. New York in June took over the Mr. Purple rooftop with, per Lane Spurlock of PlayHouse Ventures, "400+ founders, VCs, operators." Across the season the host reports 3,600+ applications, about 1,000 attendees checked in, 2,000+ matches made, and "15 of 18 surveyed attendees made a connection they're following up on." Eighteen people is a small survey. Still. Nikolai Pyke runs Capsignal and went to the New York one. Security gave him the wrong lanyard, so he spent the day wearing "Investor" instead of "Founder." His review: "Turns out that it's a great strategy when you are looking for startups who are raising. A lot of inbound that day." Wear your real lanyard. But note what it tells you about who's in the room.

12:30 PM, international founder fork: Immigrant Founder Pitch (Georgian Innovation Hub, 135 Main St, 8th floor)

Host: Startup Grind, with Unshackled Ventures, One Way Ventures, Geek Ventures and Dnipro.VC. Deel supporting.
Who is in the room: Four judges who only back immigrant founders: Manan Mehta (Unshackled), Eugene Malobrodsky (One Way), Alexander Zemlyak (Geek Ventures) and Nick Bilogorskiy (Dnipro.VC). 225 seats.
Get in: RSVP on Partiful. Free. Runs to 3:00 PM. To pitch, RSVP first, then apply through the form on the page. "Each pitch is strictly 2 minutes."
Best for: Immigrant founders raising now. This overlaps MATCH HOUSE, so it's one or the other.

Two minutes, four judges, one-way feedback, and "follow-up meetings arranged post-session." That last line is the reason to pick this over the anchor, if you qualify. Four funds that back immigrant founders, in one room, for two and a half hours.

The inside scoop: First time in this format. Alexander Zemlyak of Geek Ventures, on LinkedIn in September: "If you're an immigrant founder raising right now, apply to pitch or come say hi." His colleague Sarah Romanko put it on her own Tech Week list too. Take this fork and you're done at 3:00, with three hours before the mixer. If you got approved for both, walk to Harrison Street for the MATCH HOUSE happy hour at 4:00.

6:00 PM: Pre-Seed VC + Founder Mixer (Embarcadero)

Host: Underdog Labs, a pre-seed fund, with Capital F. Sponsored by Citizens Private Bank. Address shared on approval.
Who is in the room: "PRE-SEED FOUNDERS (+ aspiring founders)" and VCs. 406 on the list, the biggest Wednesday room on this route.
Get in: RSVP on Partiful. Runs to 9:00 PM. The host tells you to prepare an elevator pitch.
Best for: Pre-seed founders. Investors who want volume.

MATCH HOUSE ends at 5:00. The Embarcadero is a 20-minute walk from Harrison Street, so you'll arrive at 6:00 on the nose. This is the loud room. Four hundred people! A pre-seed fund hosting, a bank sponsoring, and everyone's been told to bring a pitch. If you're an investor, you'll be pitched. That's the deal.

The inside scoop: No prior edition, and no recap. Investors who want a quieter room should take the swap: the Slash, Goodwater Capital and Collide Capital happy hour at Slash HQ in SoMa, same hours, 134 on the list, "zero panels," plus-ones welcome. Slash's own copy is the best description of Wednesday we read all week: "By Wednesday of Tech Week you'll have shaken 200 hands and remembered 6 names." And: "Doors close when the ice runs out."

8:00 PM: Poker After Dark (Downtown)

Host: Boardy and Dragonfruit Ventures, with Fuse AI, General Legal and Chatbase. Address shared on approval.
Who is in the room: "Top founders, investors, and people you want to meet." 134 on the list. Two floors: a lounge and a separate poker floor, so you don't have to play.
Get in: RSVP on Partiful. Free. No end time. "We'll be going late."
Best for: Anyone still standing at 8:00 who wants a smaller room than the mixer.

Leave the mixer at 8:00 and it's a 10-minute ride downtown. Here's the twist. When you register, Boardy calls you. Boardy is an AI superconnector that makes phone calls. The call is the door screen. It'll ask what you do and who you want to meet... and then it approves you or it doesn't. Some people will find that odd. We find it honest. At least you know what the list is for.

What attendees said last year: Boardy threw the 2025 version at Harlan Records. Teresa Gilman, founder of BrainStack, on LinkedIn a week later: "Boardy sponsored a super fun night at Harlan Records for SF Tech Week." Her emphasis, not ours.

If you only do one thing today: MATCH HOUSE. Say you want to pitch when you apply, even if you're not sure.

Thursday, October 8, 2026: FiDi, Rincon Hill, and a cab to the Marina

Thursday is content day. The best speakers of the week are on stage between 9:00 AM and 4:00 PM within a 15-minute walk of each other. And the night ends with Cathie Wood. No car until 6:30.

8:30 AM, raising fork: The Raise Ready Breakfast (SoMa)

Host: Crunchbase, Carta, Morrison Foerster and Alumni Ventures. Address shared on approval.
Who is in the room: "Founders preparing to raise." No speakers named.
Get in: Apply on Partiful. Free. Runs to 10:00.
Best for: Founders who want a raise-prep session with breakfast.

A first edition with three vendors and a fund as hosts. So expect a soft sales layer with the eggs. But it's the only morning room on Thursday that's about running a raise, and it ends at 10:00 with an hour to walk to FiDi. Investors can sleep in.

9:00 AM, B2B fork: CxO Roundtable: How Enterprise Really Buys AI (Jackson Square)

Host: a16z speedrun. Address shared on approval.
Who is in the room: Nivi Baral, CTO of 2K, and Dr. May Wang, CTO of IoT at Palo Alto Networks, with Macy Mills of speedrun moderating. "Built for early-stage technical founders." 48 on the list.
Get in: Apply on Partiful. Runs to 11:30.
Best for: B2B founders selling into enterprises. Not investors.

We'd take the breakfast if you're raising this quarter. Pick this instead if you sell to CTOs and want two of them to tell you how they buy. It's a 48-person roundtable, so you'll get to ask. It overlaps the next event by 30 minutes. Jackson Square to FiDi is a 10-minute walk, so you'll miss the opening keynote and nothing else.

11:00 AM: The Search for Durable Advantage in AI (FiDi)

Host: Rain Capital, Acrew Capital and J.P. Morgan. Address shared on approval.
Who is in the room: Anu Triveti, Head of AI at Oracle, and Sasa Zdjelar, Chief Security Officer at NVIDIA, with Chenxi Wang of Rain moderating. Then a founder panel: Snehal Antani (Horizon3), Keith Stewart (Humanix), Girish Chandrasekar (Straiker) and Aaron Brown (Vecna AI), moderated by Stephanie Cherrin of J.P. Morgan.
Get in: Apply on Partiful. Runs to 2:00 PM, lunch included by the look of it.
Best for: Founders and investors who want the week's best-stocked stage. It skews security and infrastructure, because Rain is a security fund.

The question on the invitation is the one every investor is asking this year: "If the model itself is no longer the moat, what is." Two big-company executives. Four founders who've raised real money. A bank co-host. Three hours. Leave at 1:45, because the Salon is a 15-minute walk south.

The inside scoop: First edition. Rain's September newsletter lists the candidate moats they'll argue about: "proprietary data, workflow ownership, infrastructure, distribution, and trust." Pick yours before you walk in.

1:45 PM: Claude Founder Salon (Terra Gallery, 511 Harrison St, Rincon Hill)

Host: Anthropic. It's the closing afternoon of Claude Founder House.
Who is in the room: Mike Krieger, Head of Anthropic Labs, in conversation with David Rosenthal of Acquired at 2:00. A panel at 3:00. A founder showcase with an audience vote at 4:00. Happy hour at 4:45. The investors Anthropic lists for the House include Lauren Reeder (Sequoia), Sebastian Duesterhoeft (Lightspeed), Murali Joshi and Anu Bharadwaj (ICONIQ) and Sameer Dholakia (Bessemer).
Get in: Request to join on Luma. Approval required. Founders who want a showcase slot add "a short demo video (2 minutes max, any link works)" when they register. "We'll reach out directly if you're selected to present."
Best for: Founders building on Claude who want to demo to Sequoia and Lightspeed. Investors who want to see what's being built on Claude this quarter.

You'll arrive about 2:00 from FiDi, in time for the fireside. The afternoon builds to 4:00... when founders demo and the room votes. That's the slot you came for, whether you're on stage or in the seats. One warning. The Founder House itself closed applications before we published, and the Salon Luma page is the only door still open. So request it today.

What attendees said last year: No SF Salon last year, just an invite-only Anthropic salon downtown. But the Founder House format toured Europe this year, and the London edition last month drew write-ups. Caroline O'Reilly, who runs engineering at VCola.ai: "Make yourself memorable to VCs with unique insights on your product & team, pitches are now coming in fast & furious." Quin Wills, founder of Ochre Bio, said his favorite comment of the day was that the best moat a company can build is "the trust of their partners, collaborators, customers etc." Same moat question as the morning, different building.

5:00 PM: Fenwick x Databricks x a16z Founders & Investors Happy Hour (FiDi)

Host: Fenwick, Databricks and a16z. Address shared on approval.
Who is in the room: "Founders, investors, and industry professionals in data and AI." 218 on the list. "No stages, no scripted pitches."
Get in: Apply on Partiful. Runs 4:00 to 6:00 PM.
Best for: Data and AI founders. Investors in the same.

Leave the Salon after the vote, around 4:45, and walk 15 minutes back north. You'll get an hour in the room, and an hour is enough when the hosts are a16z and Databricks. The New York edition of this happy hour in June listed Lightspeed, NEA, Insight, General Atlantic and SignalFire among the investors. SF names nobody. Expect the same tier.

The inside scoop: Fintech founders can swap this for the FinTech Golden Hour on Visa's rooftop over Oracle Park with Fin Capital and J.P. Morgan, 5:00 to 7:00. The catch is building security. Visa needs 48 hours' notice, so the real deadline is Tuesday. And you'd have to leave by 6:45 for the Marina.

7:15 PM: Who Will Own the Future? with ARK Invest (Marina)

Host: ARK Invest and Mastry. Address shared on approval.
Who is in the room: Cathie Wood, Andre Iguodala, the four-time NBA champion who co-founded Mastry, and Sarah Pinto, who runs Robinhood Ventures.
Get in: Apply on Partiful. Runs 6:00 to 10:00 PM. "Arrive by 7:15 PM, late entry may be limited." Smart casual.
Best for: Anyone who wants to hear Cathie Wood think out loud about AI and scarce assets. Is it a deal room? No. Is it a good room? Yes!

Leave FiDi by 6:30. It's a 20-minute cab to the Marina, and the door closes at 7:15. This is the biggest name on the week's calendar. ARK's founder, an NBA champion who's now an investor, and the head of Robinhood's venture arm, on what AI does to markets and why "scarce assets and experiences such as sports may become increasingly valuable."

The inside scoop: ARK didn't do Tech Week last year. On LinkedIn this week the firm said it "reserved a very limited number of seats for our followers," and to request one you tell them why you want to come and where you follow ARK. So that's the application. Answer it like a person.

Plan B, 6:00 PM: Pitch Roast Live (Mission)

Host: Noah Obstfeld, with TriNet, Atlassian for Startups and LeadDelta.
Who is in the room: Four founders, three comedians, VCs on the panel, and 400 seats, 243 of them open.
Get in: RSVP on Partiful. $15. Runs to 9:00 PM. Founders can apply to be roasted through the form on the page.
Best for: Anyone who didn't get into ARK and wants to laugh at a pitch competition instead of sitting through one.

A Shark Tank and comedy roast crossover. Founders pitch, comedians roast them, VCs weigh in, the audience votes. It's the only Thursday night room on this route with open RSVP and seats still showing. And it's 15 minutes from FiDi by cab.

What attendees said last year: Jared Lerner pitched Nappr at the New York show in April and won. His review: "Normal pitch competitions: slides, metrics, polite clapping and VCs decide. Pitch Roast Live: get roasted by comedians, the host wears heels, eats habanero peppers and gets a whipped cream pie to the face." And: "10/10 would pitch while chaos unfolds again."

If you only do one thing today: the Salon at 4:00, when the founders demo and the room votes.

Friday, October 9, 2026: SoMa to Jackson Square, then up the hill

Friday is demo day. Twenty founders pitch in the morning, dozens demo in the afternoon, ten more pitch to investors only, and the official afterparty closes the week. Also, the Blue Angels fly over the Bay from noon to 4:00. You'll hear them.

9:00 AM: Pitch or NGMI: 20 Startups, 2 Minutes, One Winner (Mind the Bridge Innovation Center, 450 Townsend St, SoMa)

Host: Mind the Bridge, Boxsy, FLUIX AI and Oppos.
Who is in the room: Twenty founders applying AI to the physical world: industrial, climate, infrastructure, construction, energy, robotics. Judges are "active venture investors," unnamed. "100+ attendees expected."
Get in: RSVP on Partiful. Free. Runs to 11:30. Founders apply to pitch on the same page. No deadline posted, and there are 20 slots.
Best for: Physical-world AI founders. Investors who like hardware before lunch.

Twenty pitches at two minutes each is 40 minutes of pitching inside a two-and-a-half-hour morning. So the rest is coffee and judges. The host's own line: "Twenty founders take the stage. Each gets two minutes to demo what they've built, earn investor conviction, and compete for prizes." Prizes unnamed as of this writing.

What attendees said last year: Same hosts, different format. Last year's Friday morning was "Bagels & Breakthroughs," a VC panel and brunch that targeted 50 to 75 founders and ended with 188 on the list. Three to one! This year they added a pitch competition and a bigger venue. Apply accordingly.

12:30 PM: a16z speedrun AI Faire (Jackson Square)

Host: a16z speedrun, with Stripe and Mercury. Address shared on approval.
Who is in the room: "Dozens of founders" from the speedrun cohorts demoing live AI tools. The stated audience is "executives and operators looking to adopt new technology at their companies." Plus investors, who last year were assigned the 3:00 to 5:00 window.
Get in: Apply on Partiful. Free. Runs 10:30 AM to 5:00 PM. "Entry times will be staggered," and you pick a preferred window when you apply. Your confirmation email sets when you can walk in.
Best for: Investors and operators who want to see 30-plus speedrun companies in an afternoon. Founders who want to see the bar.

NGMI ends at 11:30. Jackson Square is a 15-minute ride from Townsend Street, with time for lunch on the way. The Faire is a science fair for AI startups. No stage, no programming... just tables, demos and founders who got into speedrun. Ask for the earliest entry window you can. If you're an investor, expect the afternoon slot, and plan EWOR around it.

What attendees said last year: The 2025 Faire was at a16z's office on Townsend, and speedrun's own recap says "over 30 companies from the SR005 cohort had yet another chance to demo their products for buyers from top tech companies." The August 2026 edition got the best reviews of anything we researched. Pranay Sadani, co-founder of Zorbe, who demoed: "You get sixty seconds to pitch what you built." And to the hosts: "You built the science fair we all wanted to be at." Jennifer Bennett, a startup advisor who walked the floor: "B2B AI solutions are everywhere, especially in SF. Consumer AI? There's still so many untapped opportunities." Fredrick Owino, a product manager at PreMan, which demoed: "customers weren't just curious about the tech, they wanted to know the ROI, and how fast they'd see it." And from the Demo Day that feeds the Faire, Ruben Dominguez of The VC Corner: "There was no breathing space between pitches. When one founder left the stage, another was already walking up."

3:30 PM, investors only: EWOR Demo Day (Jackson Square)

Host: EWOR, the European founder fellowship, now with an SF team of Charles Ferguson, Katie Madding and Gigi Brett. Address shared on approval.
Who is in the room: Ten EWOR founders pitching. "INVESTORS ONLY," with partners and angels prioritized. 250 seats. Happy hour after.
Get in: Apply on Partiful. Approval required. Runs to 5:30 PM.
Best for: Angels and VCs. Founders stay at the Faire.

Walk over from the Faire at 3:15. It's the same neighborhood. EWOR says it accepts about 1 in 1,000 applicants and invests up to $600k per founder on acceptance. Founders who joined this year raised $10M on average, by the host's count. This is its first in-person demo day in the United States. Ten companies, two hours, and a bar.

The inside scoop: Every prior EWOR demo day was on Zoom. The host says those drew firms like Sequoia, a16z, Accel and Lightspeed to the call. In person, with 250 seats, the room will be smaller and the founders closer. The tech press called ten founders pitching a few hundred investors "a modest event by San Francisco standards." Modest is good. It means you can actually talk to them.

5:00 PM, investor fork: The Golden Hour: LPs, GPs and Family Offices (Salesforce Tower, 46th floor)

Host: Golden Bay Ventures, a late-stage secondaries firm founded this year.
Who is in the room: GPs, fund managers, LPs, family offices and allocators. 157 on the list and 3 spots showing on October 2.
Get in: Apply on Partiful. "Attendance subject to approval." Runs to 9:00 PM.
Best for: Fund managers raising from LPs, and LPs who want to meet them 46 floors up.

EWOR ends at 5:30. Salesforce Tower is a 15-minute walk, so you'll arrive about 6:00. Quick translation. GPs run the funds. LPs are the people and institutions whose money is in them. Family offices are wealthy families with a checkbook and a staff. The host sells secondaries, which is buying shares in late-stage startups from people who want out early, so expect to hear about secondaries. But the room is the point. It's the only place all week where those three groups meet, and it was nearly full ten days out.

5:00 PM, founder fork: Human Performance, Capital & Innovation (The Commonwealth Club, 110 The Embarcadero)

Host: MelanInScience, BLCK VC San Francisco and NSBE Bay Area Professionals.
Who is in the room: "Investors, founders, scientists, athletes, and strategic leaders." Lineup not announced as of October 2.
Get in: RSVP on Luma. Free. Runs to 8:00 PM.
Best for: Founders in sports tech, health and longevity. Anyone who wants a free room with a view and a 15-minute walk from the Faire.

The founders' side of the fork, down the Embarcadero from Jackson Square. Topics are venture allocation in sports tech, athlete founders and performance data. BLCK VC has trained more than 150 check writers through its Black Venture Institute. So the investor side of this room is real, even before the speakers are posted. It ends at 8:00, right when the party starts.

8:00 PM: a16z x Unicorner x Notion: The Official Afterparty (Lower Nob Hill)

Host: Unicorner, a16z and Notion. Address shared on approval.
Who is in the room: Founders, investors and operators who got approved. DJs teased, not named.
Get in: Apply on Partiful. "Spots are extremely limited, and registrations are subject to approval." 21 and over, government ID at the door, no plus-ones. "Cocktail attire highly encouraged."
Best for: Everyone who made it to Friday.

Ten-minute ride up the hill from either fork. Investors at the Golden Hour leave early or arrive at 8:30. Founders from the Commonwealth Club arrive on time. Tracy Massaro of a16z: "we close it out at the a16z x Unicorner x Notion Official Afterparty, on one of my favorite rooftops in SF. Cocktail attire, approved guests only." Pack a jacket that works on a rooftop.

What attendees said last year: The 2025 afterparty was on the Wednesday at Temple, the SoMa nightclub, with D.O.D headlining and Bolt and Cerebral Valley co-hosting. This year it moved to Friday, picked up a16z and Notion as hosts, and got the "official" label. It also added a dress code and a no-plus-ones rule. Which tells you which direction the list is going. Apply this weekend.

If you only do one thing today: the Faire. Ask for the early window.

Saturday, October 10, 2026: Hayes Valley, the Mission, and robots on Market Street

The calendar thins out on Saturday, and the quality goes up. Two of the three rooms below are the only ones of their kind all week.

11:00 AM: Behind the Angel Check: A Fireside Chaat (Hayes Valley)

Host: Brown Girl Angels, Brown Girls Money Moves and the Get the Check podcast. Address shared on approval.
Who is in the room: Jaya Gupta, a partner at Foundation Capital, in a fireside with Bhargavi Varma, founder of Brown Girl Angels, moderated by Anika of Get the Check. Angels, would-be angels and founders.
Get in: Apply on Partiful. Runs to 1:00 PM. Business casual. RSVP closes the morning of.
Best for: Anyone who wants to know how an angel goes "from pitch to conviction." Especially new angels.

Chai at 11:00, fireside at 11:45, questions at 12:15, more chai and chaat at 12:30. There's a food pun in there somewhere. The topic is the inside of an angel check: "Balancing your gut with the numbers," and how a Foundation Capital partner decides. Founders are welcome too. The content is how checks get written. Which is useful on both sides of the table.

What attendees said last year: Brown Girl Angels runs this chai-and-chaat format in several cities. Rupa Popat, founder of Arāya Ventures, who co-hosted the London edition in June: "Chai, chaat, and an honest conversation about angel investing." And: "Access to knowledge, networks and rooms that look like this is what closes the gap." The London hosts described the room as "Twenty women in one room for the kind of honest conversation about angel investing you rarely get at a bigger event." Expect something close to that size.

1:00 PM: Frontier in Action: Physical AI Demo Day (Mission)

Host: fig studio, with NXTVC San Francisco, 500 Global, Sixty Degree, Spatial Frontier Club and Mission Robotics. Address shared on approval.
Who is in the room: Ten startups demoing working hardware across humanoid and mobile robotics, world models, embodied agents and field autonomy. A VC panel at 1:55. "VCs, CVCs, and angels" invited by name. 121 on the list.
Get in: Apply on Partiful. Runs to 5:00 PM. No ticket price on the page.
Best for: Robotics founders and the investors who fund hardware.

Hayes Valley to the Mission is a 10-minute ride. The first 40 minutes are open networking, so arriving at 1:20 loses nothing. Keynote at 1:40, VC panel at 1:55, ten showcases from 2:35 to 4:15, reception until 5:00. Nobody else on the Saturday calendar puts ten founders with working robots in front of a room that invites angels and CVCs (corporate venture arms) by name. And 500 Global is co-hosting.

The inside scoop: First edition, from a coalition of small physical-AI communities. The startup list isn't published yet. Women-led and mixed-equity teams have an alternative in the same slot. Astia's Blue Angels watch party runs 2:00 to 5:00 on a Russian Hill rooftop, hosted by Astia's CEO Sharon Vosmek with Osborne Clarke and Lowenstein Sandler. 76 of 100 spots taken. Astia ran it in 2024 with 69 going. The air show runs noon to 4:00 and the Blue Angels close it.

5:30 PM: The Robot Contest + Afterparty (Frontier Tower, 995 Market St, Mid-Market)

Host: Daidai Labs, a data company for physical AI.
Who is in the room: Founders putting robots on stage. Judges: Bryce Neil (Y Combinator W26), Tony Y. Chan (Stanford Robotics Center advisor and investor), Dhruv Didi (Frontier Tower's robotics floor) and Anto Patrex (CosmicBrain AI). 205 on the list.
Get in: RSVP on Partiful. Free. "Limited capacity." Doors 5:30, contest 6:00, dinner 7:00, "dancing with robots" 7:30 to 9:00.
Best for: Anyone who went to the demo day and wants to see what the robots do after hours.

Leave the reception at 5:00. The Mission to Sixth and Market is 10 minutes by car or 15 on BART. $3,500 in prizes, split between a jury prize and an audience prize. So your vote counts. Frontier Tower is the 16-floor "vertical village" for frontier-tech founders. Last October its basement hosted... humanoid robot boxing. So yeah, this is the building for it.

The inside scoop: First edition from Daidai. The venue's track record is the scoop. The SF Examiner described last year's robot fight there this way: "one landed a punch and sent the other toppling to the mat to the roar of a crowd." Expect a crowd.

If you only do one thing today: the demo day. Stay for the reception.

Sunday, October 11, 2026: build something, or eat something

Sunday splits by what you do with your hands.

9:00 AM, builders: SpeedHacks: The Official speedrun Hackathon (Jackson Square)

Host: a16z speedrun and speedrun Alpha. Address shared on approval.
Who is in the room: Technical builders, 12 hours, teams formed on the spot if you come alone. Finalists demo to speedrun investors and portfolio companies.
Get in: Apply on Partiful. Runs to 9:00 PM.
Best for: Builders who want the most direct funding path on the whole calendar.

Here's the prize, in the host's words: "The winning team will earn a guaranteed interview with the speedrun + Alpha investment team." speedrun writes checks up to $1M. Alpha goes up to $250k. A guaranteed interview is not a check. But it's the shortest line from a Sunday to a term sheet we found in 1,832 listings. The brief: "build something that removes a meaningful bottleneck in how people work, learn, or access services."

10:00 AM, builders: Shopping 3.0: The AI Commerce Hackathon with Arcade (Union Square)

Host: Arcade, sponsored by Forerunner Ventures. Address shared on approval.
Who is in the room: Judges Kirsten Green of Forerunner, Mariam Naficy, founder of Minted and CEO of Arcade, and Ash Herr of TIAT. "Developers, designers, and artists all welcome." 65 confirmed, 35 of 100 spots left.
Get in: Apply on Partiful. Runs to 6:00 PM. $10,000 first prize, $5,000 second.
Best for: Consumer and commerce builders. It fully overlaps SpeedHacks, so pick one.

The other hackathon. Shorter day, cash prizes, and Kirsten Green judging. If you build for consumers, that's the better room. You ship on Arcade's product-generation APIs, available outside the company for the first time. Done by 6:00.

2:00 PM, everyone else: VC/Founders BBQ (Showplace Square)

Host: Carlos Chavez, co-founder and CEO of Braven, and Jaime Bastidas. Address on registration.
Who is in the room: Founders who live here, founders in town for the week, and "investors from VC funds." 43 going.
Get in: Join the waitlist on Luma. Free. Full as of October 2. Runs to 6:00 PM.
Best for: Anyone whose week was all asks.

The host's copy is the reason it's here: "If you're visiting, your week is probably full of meetings with an ask attached. This is the one without. If you're an investor, nobody is going to pitch you." BBQ provided, no agenda. And it's already full with a waitlist, which means it's real. Join the waitlist now. Approval-gated events over-approve, then the no-shows clear it. If you're up early, the last Blue Angels show of Fleet Week runs noon to 4:00 over the Bay, between the bridge and Alcatraz. Then head to Showplace Square.

The inside scoop: No prior edition we could find. If the waitlist doesn't clear, the International Reception at the European Startup Embassy in Mission Bay runs 6:00 to 9:00, free, approval required, 29 going. No investors named. Food, drinks, and a room full of people who also flew in.

If you only do one thing today: the BBQ, if the waitlist clears. SpeedHacks if it doesn't and you can code.

How to actually get into SF Tech Week events

Most of what you'll hear about Tech Week is true. It's a lot. But the mechanics of getting in are simple, and most people skip them.

Apply this weekend. Hosts review in batches, and the biggest rooms close their lists days before the event. Monday's kickoff already has more than a thousand people on it, and the Wednesday investor brunch had four seats left when we checked.
Finish your profile. Partiful and Luma show the host your name, your photo, your company and whatever link you add. That's the whole application. A founder with a one-line description and a live website gets approved. A blank avatar with no company does not.
Say who you are in the note. Most Apply pages have a question or two. Answer them like a person: what you're building, what stage, what you want from the room. Investors should say the fund and the check size. ARK asks you outright why you want to come.
Waitlists clear. Approval-gated events over-approve and then see no-shows. If you're waitlisted on something you care about, keep it and check the morning of.
Book your meetings now. The one thing every Tech Week veteran says is the same: the events are the excuse, the meetings are the point. Message the investors you want to meet before the week starts and suggest a room you'll both be in. This route gives you the rooms.
Stay in one neighborhood per day. SoMa, FiDi, Jackson Square and the Embarcadero are all ten to twenty minutes apart on foot. Dogpatch and Mission Bay are next to each other. The Marina and the Mission are a ride. We built the days around that.
"Featured" on the official calendar means the organizers picked it, not that it's bigger. Seventy-one of the 1,832 listings carry the flag. Several rooms on this route do. Some of our best picks don't.

If you're an angel or a VC sourcing deals

Most Tech Week rooms are built to get founders in front of you. A few are built for you. In order of the week:

Monday: Zero Day at DG717 says "and VCs" on the door and seats 150. Then The Pitch LIVE, where you can watch Eric Bahn, Charles Hudson and Arielle Zuckerberg decide on three founders in real time, and meet the founders after. Then the kickoff.
Tuesday: The six-fund cocktail party is your peers hosting. The AWS and NVIDIA competition and the AI Collective pitch night are six vetted startups each, in an hour. Take both if you can stand two pitch nights.
Wednesday: The investor brunch is investors only, and MATCH HOUSE pre-matches you with founders by thesis before you arrive. It's the one Wednesday room where the matching happens before you walk in. The Slash happy hour in the evening is the quieter swap.
Thursday: The Salon's 4:00 showcase is founders building on Claude, voted on by the room, with Sequoia, Lightspeed and ICONIQ partners in the seats. The Fenwick and Databricks happy hour after is data and AI investors talking to each other.
Friday: This is your day. The Faire is 30-plus speedrun companies demoing, and last year investors got the 3:00 to 5:00 window. EWOR is ten pre-vetted founders for investors only. The Golden Hour is the one LP and family-office room all week.
Saturday: The Fireside Chaat is a Foundation Capital partner on how she decides. The demo day is ten hardware startups and a VC panel. The Robot Contest gives the audience half the prize money.
Sunday: The BBQ promises "nobody is going to pitch you." Go anyway. That's where the good founders are by Sunday.

One thing we've noticed in nine years of watching investors in our pitch room. The ones who find the deals show up early and talk to the founders before anything goes live. Everybody gets the stage. The hour before it is where the handshakes happen, at least from where we sit.

FAQ

When is SF Tech Week 2026?

Monday, October 5 through Sunday, October 11, 2026. Events start Monday morning, and the last official events, including the SpeedHacks hackathon, are on Sunday. Wednesday is the busiest day, with 459 listings.

What events are happening at SF Tech Week 2026?

1,832 of them, from breakfasts to hackathons. The ones on this route are the rooms where investors are hosting or judging and founders are pitching or demoing: the Fireworks and a16z kickoff, The Pitch LIVE, the Forum Ventures breakfast, the Foundersuite fundraising panel, the AWS and NVIDIA pitch competition, MATCH HOUSE, the Immigrant Founder Pitch, the Claude Founder Salon, the ARK Invest fireside, Pitch or NGMI, the a16z speedrun AI Faire, EWOR Demo Day, the official afterparty, the physical AI demo day, the Robot Contest and the SpeedHacks hackathon, among others. The full calendar is at tech-week.com/calendar/sf.

Is SF Tech Week free?

Mostly. Nearly all of the 1,832 events are free to attend, but about 88 percent require the host to approve your application first. A handful sell tickets. The Pitch LIVE is one of those: general admission is $25. Pitch Roast Live is $15.

How many events are at SF Tech Week 2026?

The official calendar listed 1,832 events as of October 2, 2026. About 1,600 require host approval, 227 are open RSVP, and 71 carry the organizers' "Featured" flag. As of September 30, 19 were sold out and 20 had waitlists.

How do I get into invite-only SF Tech Week events?

You usually can't, and you don't need to. Hundreds of the approval-gated events approve most real founders and investors who apply with a complete profile. The truly invite-only ones, like cohort dinners and portfolio-only nights, aren't on this list for that reason. Apply early, finish your profile, answer the host's questions, and keep your waitlist spots.

Which day of SF Tech Week is best?

Wednesday has the most events, but Tuesday and Thursday have the best rooms for founders and investors on this route. If you can only fly in for two days, make them Monday night through Wednesday. If you're an investor, make one of them Friday.

Is SF Tech Week worth it?

If you pre-book meetings and pick rooms where the people you need will be, yes. If you plan to wander between panels and happy hours, the people who went last year will tell you no. This guide exists to make it the first kind of week.

Can I pitch at The Pitch LIVE?

Not at this one. The three founders on stage are booked in advance through the show's normal process. If you want to pitch on The Pitch, apply here. Anyone can buy a ticket to watch and stay for the founder mixer.

Where can I see the whole SF Tech Week calendar?

The official calendar is at tech-week.com/calendar/sf. Filter by day and by "Featured," then come back here for the route.

That's the week. Seven days, one route, no double-booking. We'll be at The Pearl on Monday afternoon with three founders, three investors and a room full of you. Come say hi! Tickets are here, and the rest of our live pitch events are on the events page.

We'll update this page every morning of Tech Week as lists close and waitlists clear. Check the date at the top.