San Diego AI Showcase #7 (North County) August 2026 (Main theme: Retention)
Note: we are charging $10 just to help with food and drinks, we already have an awesome space. If you don’t feel like paying, please choose the INVITEE ticket (free). Thanks!
San Diego AI Showcase (North County)
A Homebrew-style night for AI experiments and demos. Just sharing and learning.
This is a monthly, in-person gathering for San Diego founders who are actively building with AI, and who are willing to show their work before it’s perfect.
Inspired by the original Homebrew Computer Club, where builders like Steve Wozniak casually shared what they were experimenting with, this is a space for real demos, early prototypes, bold ideas, and honest lessons. No polished pitch decks. No sales. No pressure.
This is about learning in public, helping each other think sharper, and accelerating progress through thoughtful feedback.
The San Diego AI Showcase is designed to grow a tight, curious, builder-driven founder community in the region.
What you’ll see
• Early AI products, tools, agents, workflows, and experiments
• Things that are half-working, just launched, or still a little rough
• Lessons from what didn’t work (often the most valuable part)
• Live demos, screen shares, short walkthroughs
Format
• 5–10 founders present for ~10 minutes each
• 3-minute Q&A and group discussion after every presentation
• Hang out, meet other builders, and keep the conversation going
Who this is for
• Founders actively building with AI (pre-seed to growth)
• Engineers, designers, and product leaders experimenting hands-on
• People who value curiosity, humility, and substance over hype
What this is not
• Not a pitch night
• Not an investor demo day
• Not a sales event
Just builders helping builders.
📍 Event Details
When: August 4 (Tuesday), 2026, from 6 pm to 8:30 pm
Where: LVLUP USA (North County San Diego. Vista, California)
Organizer: Demian Borba, Founder and CEO of Pactto (Stanford StartX S25, ex-Adobe, Intuit, PayPal, BlackBerry)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/demianborba/
If you’re interested in presenting, attending, or shaping the future of this meetup, please email Demian at [email protected]. The goal is to create something long-lasting for San Diego — a place where meaningful work gets shared early, and momentum compounds over time.
Presenters:
6:30 pm
Demian Borba, Founder and CEO of Pactto (Stanford StartX S25, ex-Adobe, Intuit, PayPal, BlackBerry)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/demianborba/
Title: How the AARRR (Pirate Metrics) framework is helping Pactto retain users
Details:
The AARRR framework (often called “Pirate Metrics”) is a five-stage customer lifecycle model created to provide startups and product-led growth companies with actionable metrics to measure business health: Acquisition (how users find you), Activation (how they engage), Retention (if they return), Referral (if they share it), and Revenue (how you make money). Let’s learn how Pactto is using it to retain users.
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6:45 pm
Kristine Angell, MBA, MDM (Founder of Mutiny Retreats: Wine Rack, ex-Amazon, Hopscotch Labs, Mutiny Retreats, NewSchool of Architecture + Design)
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/kangell
Title: Vibe Coding tools lead users towards UX bloat and Frankenstein experiences
Details:
Kris built Wine Rack, a real-time note-taking app to help retreat attendees remember their experiences without being glued to their phones. During the initial build she found vibe-coding tools over-enabled: their “Yes, And” grew a simple idea into bloated, ugly interfaces that demanded too much manual input and distracted from the retreat. She resolved the UX by using v0 to build a background system integrating SMS and WhatsApp, where users simply text the system as part of their normal experience, keeping the technology seamless, invisible, and the user’s focus on their retreat itself.
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7 pm
Jennifer Fouquier (Bioinformatics Scientist, Founder & Developer of EXPLANA, Postdoc in Bioengineering, Consultant at EnteroTrack)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-fouquier/
Title: Building the EXPLANA User Community: Beta Recruitment, Adoption, and Retention
Details:
EXPLANA (https://www.explana.io/) finds key drivers of research outcomes. Uniquely, it automates the detection of order-dependent categorical feature changes, or cases where sequence of events, not just presence, differentially impacts an outcome (AB vs. BA). For example, a long half-life drug followed by a short half-life drug carries a different risk than the reverse. No other tool automates this kind of detection. EXPLANA also generates a report with figures and plain-language explanations, opening up the “black box” common to many AI tools and making complex results interpretable. This supports rigorous documentation and publication-ready reporting. Jennifer is actively seeking beta users.
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7:15 pm
Tom Krcha, Founder and CEO of Pen.dev (a16z Speedrun, ex-Adobe, Miro, Around)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomkrcha/
Title: From code to design and back to code
Details:
Learn about the journey of launching a Pen.dev, a revolutionary product launched in the era of AI, going from 0 to 100k registered users in 1 month, and how constant iterations close the community are shaping their next steps.
