What SF Tech Week Taught Me About Where Founders Actually Gather
In-person is back, but the rooms that mattered most to me at SF Tech Week were not the big conference halls. They were small, community-run, and built around one idea: founders helping founders.
I spent the week with our team at two of those rooms, a Founders on Tap workshop at SHACK15 and the Antler x Every Founder Lounge in South Beach. I came home to Seattle with a notebook full of conversations and one clear takeaway. The most valuable moments in a founder's journey don't happen in meetings. They happen over coffee, at sunset, mid-sentence.
Founders come to raise. They stay for everything else.
Selina Li and Lyvia Chapman are each building a company. Selina runs Bubble Lab (YC W26), an operations platform for community and event teams. Lyvia is building Folio Clips, an AI editor that turns a camera roll into ready-to-post reels. Somewhere in between, they started Founders on Tap: small, practical workshops led by founders, for founders, now running in San Francisco and, since September, New York.
On Tuesday, founders made the walk past the Ferry Building to SHACK15 for honest conversation and a sunset over the Bay that stopped more than one conversation mid-sentence. I heard the same story again and again. Founders come to San Francisco to raise money, and they stay for everything else: their first hires, their co-founders, the design partners willing to try something early, and a community that extends trust quickly and makes introductions even faster.
That last part is the real infrastructure of this city. Selina and Lyvia have built a room the founders want to come back to, and that is harder than it looks.
Unhurried time is the product
On Thursday we co-hosted the Founder Lounge with Antler. The format was simple on purpose: unlimited coffee and breakfast, a quiet place to get real work done, and chats with our CEO and co-founder Rajeev Behera alongside operators, investors and founders on what to build first, what to put off, and what they wish they'd known sooner.
We also set up a free headshot station with photographer Bénédicte Lassalle. It sounds like a small thing. It wasn't. A founder's photo often trails a few job titles behind, and with a fundraiser coming up, a current headshot is one less thing on the list. It was also the easiest icebreaker of the week. People waiting for their turn started talking about what they were building.
The agenda gave people a reason to come. The unhurried time is what made them stay.
The thread I didn't expect
Many of the rooms I found myself in this year are led by women creating space for other women. And in every one, the same thread runs through the conversation: women talking about the women who lifted them up to get where they are.
You don't always hear that in business. I'm honestly not sure whether it's a broader shift or just my corner of the world. Either way, it shapes how I think about community. The best ones aren't built on transactions. They're built on people who remember who opened a door for them, and then go open one for someone else.
What this means for how we show up
Every milestone a founder celebrates in a room like this starts something behind the scenes. A new co-founder means incorporating the company. A design partner means invoices and clean books. A first hire means payroll, benefits and HR.
For a marketer, that's the insight worth holding onto. Founders don't go looking for a back office in the abstract. They need one at a specific moment, and that moment usually happens in a community before it ever shows up in a search bar. So the question isn't how to get founders into our funnel. It's how to be a genuinely useful presence in the rooms where those moments happen.
Three things I'm taking into next quarter:
- Partner with the people who already have founders' trust. Antler, Founders on Tap and SHACK15 built these rooms long before we arrived. Our job is to support them, not take them over.
- Give something useful, not a pitch. A headshot, a good breakfast, a quiet space, a panel that answers real questions. Value first earns the conversation later.
- Show up consistently. One event is a moment. A series is a relationship. The founders who met us this week should see us at the next one, and the one after that.
That's the work Every is built for: banking, payroll, HR, benefits, bookkeeping and taxes in one place, so the back office keeps pace with the company and founders keep their evenings for rooms like these.
Thank you, and see you at the next one
Thank you to Selina and Lyvia for building a community founders want to return to, and to Antler for being a great partner. Thank you to Alina Knobloch, Kaila J. Lim and Ryan Green for capturing the week on film, and to teammates, Nataliya Petriv and Jackie Pruter for every conversation they started.
Most of all, thank you to every founder who showed up, shared a lesson and made an introduction. If you're building in San Francisco and want to talk about demand gen, marketing data or your back office, my door is open. Let's talk at every.io.
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We’re especially valuable for teams who want to move fast without hiring a full finance or HR team—giving founders more time to build, and fewer distractions from admin and compliance
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We guide you every step of the way, from incorporation to setting up automated payroll to handling your taxes—so you can focus on growing your business. Our goal is to make sure you're fully operational and confident in your back office in under a week.
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