SF Bay Area Tech Events: May 15–16

Your Friday morning pickup — what's worth showing up to tonight and tomorrow across the Bay.

Two full-day events are wrapping up this afternoon. If you're around the Peninsula or Stanford, both are still running as you read this.

A practitioner-focused day on applying AI across ESG functions, organized by IICSR Group (a sustainability and corporate responsibility research organization) and sponsored by The Agentic. 1 The agenda runs from an AI & Sustainability panel (10–11 AM) through hands-on blueprint workshops (1:30–2:30 PM) and closes with a climate-tech investor discussion (3–4 PM). 1 Thirteen speakers confirmed from SAP, You.com, Capgemini, Wipro, and several climate-tech startups. 1 Knowledge partners include Founders Bay, Optivide, Medallion XLN, and Women in Cleantech & Sustainability. Target audience is CSOs, CTOs, ESG leaders, and climate-tech founders — not a general audience event.

Stanford's annual student showcase on tech ethics, now in its 2026 edition. 2 The lunch keynote at 12:15 PM features Chloé Bakalar, AI Ethics Lead at OpenAI (OpenAI's internal ethics function lead). 2 Afternoon sessions include student lightning talks (1:15 PM), poster presentations (2:15 PM), and breakout discussions over boba (4:15 PM). 2 Free admission, no ticket needed — just show up. Paid parking is available at Stanford. Good fit if you want a lower-key afternoon alternative to the hackathon chaos Saturday will bring.

Saturday is the stronger day this week. Six events spread across SF and Sunnyvale, ranging from sold-out hackathons to a free launch party at Salesforce Park.

Registration is closed, but worth knowing what's happening. 3 The focus is Notion's new Developer Platform — primitives for syncing data sources, giving agents tools, and triggering workflows. 3 Seventeen judges confirmed, including names from Anthropic (Alfred Xing, Alice Zhao, Anthony Morris, Charmaine Lee), Vercel (Andrew Qu, Lakshmi Subbramanian), Conviction (Mike Vernal), Radical Ventures (Jules Qiu), and Neo (Pavla Bobosikova). 3 Day 1 runs building from 10:45 AM; Day 2 closes with awards at 3 PM Sunday.

The premise here is explicit: no local prototypes, no demos. Production-ready agents that access live data, deploy to the cloud, and manage real state. 4 Organized by AI Builders (an AI community active across Singapore, Tokyo, and the SF Bay Area), Beta Fund (Palo Alto early-stage VC), and Llama Ventures (AI-native VC). 4 Ten partner stacks offer free credits on the day: AgentField, Actionbook, Bright Data, Evermind/EverOS, Nosana, Qwen Cloud, Qoder, TokenRouter, Zeabur, and Z.ai. 4 Schedule: check-in and networking 10 AM, tech stack workshops 10:45 AM, team formation 11:30 AM, submission deadline and live demos 4:30 PM, winners announced 5:30 PM. Host approval is required to register — apply early.

STEMPeers (a STEM professional networking community) is hosting a fireside chat with Bay Area founders who transitioned from PhD research to running companies. 5 ⚠ Speaker names and ticket price are not listed on the Eventbrite page as of May 15 — check the listing directly before registering.

Lopus (lopus.ai) is launching at Salesforce Park — an operational data platform that unifies sales, marketing, and product data into a single live business model for founders and growth leaders. 6 Outdoor event: tents, food, drinks, smoothies from Corgi Cafe, exclusive merch for the first 50 through the door, and a live news crew on site. 6 150+ founders and operators expected. About 51 spots remain as of May 15.

A no-code AI workflow session: bring a laptop and one repetitive task you want to automate, leave with a working AI teammate configured in plain English. 7 The session covers a framework for identifying automatable tasks, then walks you through building the actual automation. 7 Aimed at founders, PMs, engineers, and designers. Light refreshments provided. All 50 spots were still open as of May 15 morning.

An evening side event running alongside the American Psychiatric Association (APA) Annual Meeting. 8 Two panels: one on AI in precision psychiatric care led by Dominik Middelmann (founder, mdhub — an AI platform for mental health clinical workflows) and Dr. Girgis (medical director, mdhub); another on sports performance psychiatry featuring leadership from the American Board of Sports & Performance Psychiatry, the International Society for Sports Psychiatry (ISSP), and Stanford's Sports and Performance Psychiatry Fellowship. 8 The event is the most niche pick of the weekend — relevant if you're at APA or working at the intersection of behavioral health and AI.

Two events just outside this weekend to add to your calendar: May 17 — SPC Embodied AI Hackathon Live Demos (South Park Commons, SF; demo showcase 4:30–7 PM; host approval required) 9; May 19 — WorkOS Applied AI Showcase at 660 Market St, SF, hosted by Michael Grinich (founder, WorkOS — a developer platform for enterprise app authentication and identity), 456 going. 10