SURREAL
A community & event series for creative technologists.
MANIFESTO
Surreal products are created when a research breakthrough rapidly meets a consumer behavior shift.
The speed of this latent unlock creates a reality distortion field.
It's not just improbable, it seems impossible.
The premise is first questioned, then fought, and then shaken.
But then a small group of people finds your work - and it's what they've been looking for their whole life.
They fought and clawed for an answer despite the experts' heeding that it wasn't possible.
And then they met you. Your research redefines what's possible.
You make the surreal, real.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” - Arthur C. Clarke
The Community
- Over 6,400 of the top engineers, researchers, & founders in Bay Area have applied to be part of Surreal
- ~450 active in the WhatsApp group
- Biweekly events: Group coffees, TopGolf/Surfing outings, Research table readings, Monthly dinners at art galleries, Weekly "Ask Me Anythings" in WhatsApp)
Upcoming Dinners
August: Religion & AI
San Francisco
September: Design & AI with Perplexity
TBD
October: The Future of LLMs Part 3: Continuous Learning w/Recursive
TBD
Sponsored by
Past Surreal Dinner Speakers include…
Ami Vora (Head of Product, Anthropic) Amir Haghighat (CTO of Baseten) Tomer Cohen (CPO, LinkedIn) Grant Lee (CEO of Gamma) Jeff Wang (Cofounder, CTO of Exa AI) Amit Jain (CEO, Luma AI) Ben Kus (CTO, Box) Harrison Chase (CEO, Langchain) Michele Catasta (President, Replit) Janie Lee (VP Product, Abridge) John Stull (CPO, Handshake) Erich Elsen, (Cofounder of Adept) Adam Cheyer, (Cofounder of Siri - Apple) Sunita Verma, (CTO of Character.AI) Manuel Bronstein, (CPO of Roblox) Andi Peng (Cofounder, Humans&)
and many, many more….
Past Dinners
April: Devtools with Michele Castata, President of Replit
Stanford University
April: Building with Will Bryk, CEO of Exa
San Francisco
March: Frontier of LLMs with Higgsfield, Reflection AI & Handshake
Speakers included: Aakanksha Chowdhery, Sahil Bhaiwala, & Mahi de Silva
February: Becoming Enterprise Ready in AI
Speakers included: Harrison Chase, LangChain's CEO/Founder, Ben Kus, Box's CTO, and Janie Lee, Abridge's VP Product
January: Product Management post AI
Speakers included: Tomer Cohen, LinkedIn's CPO, Ami Vora, Anthropic's Head of Product, and Amit Jain, Luma AI CEO
November: Capturing & Recalling Memory
Attendees hailed from Anthropic, OpenAI, SuperMe, Phota, Turing, Locket, Instagram, TikTok, Apple, MidJourney, Roblox, Scale AI, Zoom, Youtube, Luma AI, Retro, Stripe, Microsoft, etcOctober: Productivity with Gamma
Attendees hailed from Midjourney, Anthropic, OpenAI, Perplexity, Cognition, Pika, Vercel, Deepmind, Niantic, Apple, Meta, Stripe, Glean
September: Messaging
Attendees hailed from OpenAI, Discord, Slack, Uber, WhatsApp, Glean, Vercel, xAI, JanitorAI, Together AI, Apple, Meta and more.
August: Gamification
Attendees hailed from Google, Niantic, Roblox, Inworld, Chess.com, Duolingo, Twitch, Meta, Stanford PhDs, X.com, Luma, Nvidia, Instagram, Volley, Apple, Glean, Amazon, and more. July: Wearables
Attendees hailed from Oura, OpenAI, Scale AI, Humane, Stanford PhDs, Vercel, Meta, Roku, Niantic, Harvey, SpaceX, Tiktok, Zoox, Apple, Doordash, etc
June: Mixer
Attendees hailed from 11x, Vercel, Niantic, JanitorAI, Perplexity, WorkOS, Consensys, Stanford PhDs, Robinhood, Google, etc
May: Consumer Social
Attendees hailed from Stanford PhDs, Perplexity, TikTok, OpenAI, Meta, X.Ai, Eventbrite, Glean, Rippling, Vercel, Twitch, Typeface, Weights, Fizz, Apple, Google Gemini, Jane Street, Microsoft, Coactive, Nvidia.
April: Interfaces & Design
Attendees hailed from OpenAI, Glean, Harvey, 11x, Humane, Mistral, Replit, Character AI, Alloy Automation, TikTok, Figma, Onlook, Roblox, Grammarly, Notion, JPMorgan, Stych, Meta, Stanford PhD AI Researchers, Assembled, Nvidia, and more.
March: Agents
Attendees hailed from Adept, Databricks, Orby, Retool, OpenAI, Assembled, WorkOS, Kumo, Tesla, Deepmind, 11X, Replit, CharacterAI, Alloy Automation, Nvidia, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, PhDs.
WHAT ATTENDEES ARE SAYING
"I feel like the quality of the folks you guys invited was amazing — and to be honest, rather rare for this kind of event."
"I met a potential co-founder, clients, and investors as well as potential startups to invest in as an angel investor."
Join Us
Surreal events are tightly curated,
with a focus on technical talent:
researchers, engineers, PMs, and designers.