Inside Untapped Ventures’ SF & LA Tech Week Dinners

This past October, during SF and LA Tech Week, we brought together more than 150 founders and investors across a series of small, curated dinners - each one designed to create space for honest conversations about building in AI today.

Rather than host another large event or panel, we focused on something more intentional: intimate rooms where Day Zero, Stealth, and early-stage founders could connect directly with one another, compare notes, and talk openly about what’s working, what isn’t, and where AI is heading.

The result was one of the most energizing moments for our community this year.

San Francisco: Four Dinners, Four Distinct Communities

Over the course of SF Tech Week, we hosted four private dinners:

• Day Zero Founders

• Stealth Founders

• Pre-Seed & Seed Founders

• Portfolio + Investor Dinner

Across these gatherings, more than 100 founders and investors came through.

Each dinner had its own dynamic, but the through-line was unmistakable: this generation of AI founders is moving faster, thinking deeper, and tackling bigger problems than ever before.

Some conversations were technical - debugging agentic workflow designs, bottlenecks in context windows, or infra constraints founders are facing as they scale. Others went deep on GTM, customer pull, and the transition from prototypes to production-ready systems.

What stood out most wasn’t any single insight, but the feeling of momentum.Founders across completely different domains kept echoing the same sentiment:

“AI is at an inflection point - and the ones who ship fast, automate deeply, and adapt quickly are going to define the category.”

LA: One Dinner, One Converged Community

LA Tech Week took a different shape.

Instead of holding separate dinners by founder stage, we gathered all groups - Day Zero to Seed, stealth teams, portfolio founders, and investors - into one combined evening.

Something special happens when you put that range of founders in the same room.

Technical founders working on infra ended up in conversations with applied AI builders. Consumer AI teams traded notes with B2B enterprise founders. Investors asked questions that turned into whiteboard-style discussions at the table.

With 50 people in the room, the connections felt organic and high-signal.

The combined format led to a different kind of cross-pollination than what we saw in SF: ideas moved faster, conversations jumped across verticals, and several founders left with new potential collaborators - or even customers.

Why These Gatherings Matter

There’s a lot happening in AI right now - new infra happening in AI right now - new infra layers, rapid experimentation in agentic systems, changing customer expectations, and a wave of founders turning early prototypes into real businesses.

What became clear across both cities is this:

Founders learn more from each other than any panel or keynote could offer.

When you bring together the people who are actually building - not just talking about what’s coming, but shipping the future in real time - the conversations become more honest, more tactical, and far more valuable.

This is why we host these dinners.

Not for scale - but for quality.

Not for noise - but for signal.

These rooms become the connective tissue for the next generation of AI-native companies.

Looking Ahead

We’re planning more intimate founder gatherings, collaborative sessions, and small-group events in 2025. If you’d like to be part of what we’re building, there are two simple ways to plug in:

👉 Founders: Check out our RFS page and pitch us here

To everyone who joined us in SF and LA - thank you for bringing your energy, insights, and honesty.