StartupSD 1st Mondays Presented by Qualcomm TIPA @ ClickUp – May 2026

Join us for a night of networking and startup community building at StartupSD 1st Mondays – May 2026 edition!

How to Build Faster, Better, Smarter

Leveraging AI: Lean in to get to the next level.

Close the gap between where you are and where your product needs to be.

Today’s most competitive builders aren’t waiting for bigger teams or bigger budgets. They’re using AI to compress prototyping cycles, validate faster, and reach MVP with less. The tools exist. The workflows are proven. The question is whether you’re using them.

Join us for a tactical conversation with founders and engineers innovating at the frontiers of AI, hardware, and software. Our panelists will break down the tools and workflows accelerating their development cycles, how AI is shortening the road to go-to-market, and the hard lessons learned when speed meets reality.

Come ready to engage. Leave with a sharper edge.

Featuring:

Qualcomm: The Inventor’s Patent Academy (TIPA)

The Inventor’s Patent Academy is a free online learning platform offering courses designed to provide students and entrepreneurs with the tools and resources needed for their innovation journey. Join thousands of other students who have enrolled in the Academy to date. Learn More: TheInventorsPatentAcademy.org

NEW – 1:1 Mentoring for Founders (only 8 spots left!)

Reserve your spot as an add on at checkout. Meet with two domain expert mentors from 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM before the event. Each mentee will be assigned two 30-minute long mentoring slots. Register as a non-member for $100 or consider upgrading to a Startup San Diego Membership for $365. FREE for Startup San Diego Members using your promo code at checkout! Explore StartupSD Membership Benefits ($1k+ value): https://startupsd.org/become-a-member/

What’s 1st Mondays?

Startup San Diego 1st Mondays is San Diego’s premier quarterly startup networking and industry event featuring regional innovation ecosystem leaders, resources, and community hubs.

With over 250-300 participants ranging from founders, entrepreneurs, and talent to investors, service providers, and ecosystem supporters, Startup San Diego curates an impact-driven evening of in-demand programming, expo opportunities, and networking.

Whether you’re new to San Diego or seasoned in the local startup scene, this event is for you. Stay tuned on social media to get updates on the event. Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram.

Complimentary light bites and refreshments will be available. Please purchase your tickets ahead of time through Eventbrite – this will be a sold out event. See you soon!

– Startup San Diego

#1stMondays

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Steal Like A Founder

About the event

As builders and entrepreneurs we want to always be innovating; but most brainstorming begins (and ends) in the same obvious places: domain expertise, market and industry trends, and whatever everyone else is doing. You end up with slightly better versions of the same idea.

This hands-on workshop introduces a brand new approach: strategic creative theft.

Learn how to find patterns across unrelated industries, technologies, cultures, behaviors, and business models, then translate those patterns into practical ideas for your own ventures. Through fast-paced exercises, real problem solving, and AI-assisted exploration, you’ll practice expanding your “theft radius” far beyond familiar domains.

Using a dedicated tool, we will use AI not just to polish ideas, but to provoke better ones: to surface analogies, challenge assumptions, remix business models, and view problems from unexpected angles.

Ideal for entrepreneurs, founders, product folks, marketers, and innovation-minded professionals looking to develop sharper ideas without waiting for inspiration to strike.

Bring a real business, product, customer, or growth challenge you are working on. And leave with fresh angles, usable prompts, and a repeatable method for turning outside inspiration into practical next moves. Have your phone or laptop handy for working.

Participants will:

  1. Learn a repeatable framework for creative problem solving: Discover how to break down a business challenge, identify its underlying pattern, and search across unrelated industries or domains for useful analogies.
  2. Use AI as a creative accelerant: Practice using AI as more than a productivity tool, that helps you expand your “theft radius,” generate unexpected comparisons, and find ideas outside your own expertise or market.
  3. Develop the theft mindet: Gain the skills needed for pattern recognition in a human-AI world that is effective and solves real problems.
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Zero to Agent: San Diego

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​Vercel and Hacker Fund are excited to be hosting a hackathon for the San Diego community for the Zero to Agent build week!

Zero to Agent is a global build week where we ship real AI agents with v0 and Vercel. All submissions go into the global competition at Vercel Community with $6,000+ in prizes.

​Hacker Fund is the 501(c)(3) non-profit for hackathons, and will be co-hosting this event.

​Sponsors

​Clinically AI helps behavioral healthcare organizations turn documentation and compliance into a sustainable advantage.

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SSCS Distinguished Lecture – Circuit Labs at the Lunch Table with MOSbius

Learning integrated circuit design requires gaining a broad range of skills and knowledge including circuit analysis and design, signals & systems, applied electro-magnetics, and semiconductor physics. Learning theory has always been most accessible through books or now the internet. Simulation tools are now also widely available on personal computers, including open-source versions. But, learning measurements so far has been mostly confined to school or industry laboratories. Yet, physical intuition and practical experience keeps playing a significant role in the development of successful, high performance integrated circuits. We will present the MOSbius platform that allows a student or designer to experiment with IC-style, analog, CMOS circuits at the lunch table. This unique platform uses a custom chip with CMOS building blocks that can be wired on a breadboard or with a programmable on-chip switch matrix. Measurements can be conducted using an affordable, all-in-one, USB lab instrument. Ready-to-go experiments are provided to learners and instructors on https://mosbius.org. Nothing can substitute for the aha moment when you observe a circuit finally working. The debugging process to bring-up the circuit teaches the designer essential lessons that carry over to high performance circuits in highly scaled technologies. The MOSbius platform aims to make lab experience widely accessible and affordable to learners.
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May 1 – Best of WACV (Day 2)

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Welcome to the Best of WACV series, your virtual pass to some of the groundbreaking research, insights, and innovations that defined this year’s conference. Live streaming from the authors to you.

Date, Time and Location

May 01, 2026
9 AM – 11 AM Pacific
Online. Register for the Zoom!

Beyond Pixels: Type-Aware Contrastive Learning for Global Urban Similarity

Standard visual models often fail to distinguish between superficial appearances and meaningful structural variations in urban environments. We present a type-aware contrastive learning framework that measures city similarity by explicitly modeling infrastructure elements like intersections and bus lanes. Our framework integrates a type-conditioned Vision Transformer that actively fuses visual features with CLIP-derived semantic embeddings via a novel adaptive per-type contrastive loss. This allows the model to dynamically prioritize the most discriminative infrastructure categories while down-weighting less informative visual noise. We demonstrate that this method significantly improves clustering quality and generalizes to unseen cities, providing a scalable, interpretable foundation for urban analysis.

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First Friday Founders Hike – May 2026

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keep it going in 2026 together!

Start your day with San Diego’s most unique tradition: the monthly Founders Hike, where early-stage founders, funders, and community builders gather for a sunrise hike, real-time connections, and a dose of inspiration.

🌊 Sunrise hike + beach cleanup — walk, talk, and leave the beach better than we found it
Whether you’re a founder, funder, or just startup-curious, this is the place to cap an epic journey.

📍 Meet at Gliderport parking lot at 6:30 AM sharp
🪣 Buckets and grabbers provided for beach cleanup
👟 Wear comfortable shoes for hiking in sand

​We start hiking at 6:35am, rain or shine! It’s a serious hike up!

Thanks to partners Surf Vultures!

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VibeFest 2026 – A.I. Project Showcase & Slopathon!

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tick…tick…tick… You clicked this far, so what are you waiting for?

Roll the dice and live a little.

FEEL THE VIIIIIBE

For more details, check the events link.

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Vibe Coding: Troubleshooting and Debugging

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Things break. That is not a sign you are doing it wrong. It is the most normal part of building with AI coding tools. The difference between someone who gives up and someone who ships is knowing what to do when the output is wrong, the app stops working, or you are stuck in a loop where the same fix keeps failing.

This session gives you a practical toolkit for diagnosing problems, communicating issues to the AI effectively, and recovering without starting over. You will work through real troubleshooting scenarios and practice the techniques on your own project.

What You Will Learn

•      Reading error messages. They look intimidating but they almost always tell you exactly what went wrong. You will learn to extract the useful information without needing to understand the code.

•      Describing problems clearly. “It does not work” gets you nowhere. You will learn how to describe what you expected, what happened instead, and what changed.

•      When to refine vs. when to restart. Sometimes you can fix it in place. Sometimes the conversation has gone stale and a fresh start solves the problem instantly. You will learn to recognize which situation you are in.

•      Managing context window issues. When the AI starts “forgetting” things or producing lower quality output, it is usually a context problem. You will learn how to keep conversations focused and when to start a new one.

•      Checkpoint thinking. How to save your progress before making changes so you always have a known good state to fall back to.

What You Will Walk Away With

•      A troubleshooting playbook you can use every time something breaks.

•      Practice diagnosing and fixing real issues in your own project.

•      Confidence that getting stuck is normal and recoverable.

Prerequisites

This session assumes you have some experience building with AI coding tools. You will get the most out of it if:

•      You have built something with an AI coding tool, even something small.

•      You have experienced something breaking or not working as expected (most people have by this point).

What to Bring

•      A laptop with a browser (all tools we use are web-based)

•      A project you are working on or want to start

•      Your current project, especially any parts that are giving you trouble

Part of the From Prototype to Product Series

This is Session 1 of 10 in the Vibe Coding: From Prototype to Product workshop series. Each session stands alone, but the full series is designed as a progression from first build to finished product.

Full series ticket holders get access to all 10 sessions, weekly lab sessions for live troubleshooting, recordings of every session, and Founder Guide community access. Full series: $480 (10 sessions for the price of 8). Visit the series page for details.

Already have a series ticket? Enter your promo code at checkout to register for free.

About the Facilitator

Todd Bashor is the founder of Founder Guide and has 25 years of experience building and scaling software products at ServiceNow, FICO, and Intuit. He co-founded NewRocket in 2017 and led it through hypergrowth to acquisition in 2022. He now works with early-stage founders on product validation, traction, and go-to-market strategy.

Todd has been coding with AI for over two years and has mentored multiple non-technical founders through building their first MVPs with vibe coding tools.

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Founders Fire

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Come gather around the fire with fellow founders and co-creators of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in San Diego. Everyone’s stoke shines brighter when we connect with kindred spirits in business and life. Let’s come together to build community, share experiences, and see how can support each other. Stoked to see you there!

HOT news! 🔥 Founders Fire 🔥 is now sponsored by local San Diego favorites RationAle Brewing 🍺 & Pizza Port Solana Beach 🍕 BIG thanks to both!

🍺 RationAle makes crisp, bold and crushable Non-Alcoholic Brews so you can ditch the rules, crack one open, and rip into right now. Co-Founded in 2021 by Jamie Fay & Wendy Pickett and officially breaking into the non-alcohol craft beer category in September 2022, they’ve been crushing NA brews ever since. Shoutout to Tyler Fay for his support as well!

🍕 Pizza Port is devoted to total customer satisfaction by providing the highest quality and the best service humanly possible while having too much fun. Back in 1987, a pair of siblings, Gina and Vince Marsaglia, started Pizza Port in the sleepy beach town of Solana Beach, California. Shoutout to Chris Knight too!

🪵 BARBARA Industries is building a brighter future for People + Planet. We’re organizing the Founders Fire, sponsoring the wood, and stoking the fire! 🔥

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[Partner Event] UX Design Projects, Demos, & Portfolio Reviews (& more)–(Hybrid)

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# UX Design Projects, Demos, and Portfolio Reviews (and more) – (Hybrid)

Let’s join our friends at Orange County User Experience (OCUX).

Hybrid event (In-person and via Zoom)
Zoom Registration HERE

Put your UX and Design Thinking hats on for another informative OCUX event.

We can continue to work on UX design projects together, share and give feedback for Portfolio Reviews and I plan on sharing more UX demos and having some expert guest speakers share as well. The sky is the limit. Use this as a chance to add something to your portfolio, start a Startup, practice or promote a UX skill or your presentation abilities and more.
We can also talk about our UX goals for the year. If you are looking for a job or any UX work, make sure that UX portfolio is up-to-date. What will the job market look like in 2026? Any concerns about AI and UX? We can discuss.

Summary:
UX Projects
Portfolio Reviews
UX Q&A
Networking

If you are new to our regular monthly location please use this map link or you will get lost. We are not at the main IRWD office but the adjacent Community Room Building attached to the Clinic. Google maps does not help you find the front doors.

*The IRWD Community Meeting Room addr is 15500 Sand Canyon Ave., Irvine. Here is the map link.

IRWD Community Meeting Room Map

Feel free to bring your dinner or snacks. Come early to grab a table spot. Full kitchen with frig and microwave available if needed.

Message me here or find me on LinkedIn to learn more or if you have questions.

Let’s build something amazing together in 2026! Spread the word. Hope to see you there.

Rhett Kuseski
UX Specialist

*“Irvine Ranch Water District makes its facilities available for use by residents and nonprofit organizations merely as a public service, but does not, by allowing this use, endorse or support the purpose of the event or its sponsor.”

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