Bad Idea Startup Meetup - Silicon Valley

Meet New People! Saturday Night Networking Tickets, Multiple Dates | Eventbrite

Attendees must purchase their own liquid refreshments and food.

There's no content or speaker at this event -- just business and social networking.

Build your business and social network - face to face! (in-person)

Come out and enjoy a great evening of good food, liquid refreshments, and connecting.

You may meet your next business collaborator, client, employer, employee, friend, or tennis partner!

Getting away from a screen for a few hours will do you some good!

: -)

Meet Silicon Valley movers and shakers - Internet entrepreneurs, developers, engineers, mobile app coders, attorneys, bloggers, academics, financiers, marketing professionals, community organizers and investors.

This event is organized in collaboration with other groups!

@ideatoipo

www.idea-to-ipo.com

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjYga11avYH_CUpC0BSyDng

(videos of online events)

Look for the MEETUP sign!

Organizational Sponsor:

Startup House

Need a place to stay short term in Silicon Valley?

Stay at Startup House in Palo Alto - the heart of Silicon Valley - for as low as $50 a night!

-Network, socialize and connect with entrepreneurs all over the world!
-Enjoy social events and startup and venture capital-related programming!
- Have access to world class amenities, iconic tech companies, top tier venture capital firms, Stanford University, etc. - all within walking or biking distance!

For more info, visit:
https://startuphouse.carrd.co/

www.idea-to-ipo.com (our main meetup group among 160 meetup groups globally)

https://www.youtube.com/@ideatoipo2 (videos of online events)

@ideatoipo

In order to attend, please register here:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1999858261896?aff=oddtdtcreator
Most professionals already have the raw material for a strong personal brand. It is sitting inside their resume, LinkedIn profile, portfolio, past projects, presentations, client work, and career stories. The challenge is knowing what to extract, how to package it, and how to share it consistently.
In this Albert’s List webinar, we’ll explore how AI workflows can help professionals build visibility online without starting from scratch every week. Whether you are employed, between roles, freelancing, consulting, building a side hustle, or exploring your next move, a stronger personal brand can help others understand your expertise before they ever meet you.
We will demonstrate how tools like n8n and ComfyUI can help transform existing career assets into LinkedIn posts, short-form video scripts, content ideas, visual assets, audio concepts, and repeatable workflows.
Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of how AI can support personal branding, career visibility, and opportunity creation in 2026.

In order to attend, please register here:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/2003644029228?aff=oddtdtcreator
The software engineering market didn't collapse. It split — and most candidates are still preparing for the market that existed three years ago.
Openings exist, but they've concentrated. AI-adjacent and infrastructure roles are competitive to fill while generalist roles sit far below their pre-2022 baseline. The entry rung has thinned as AI absorbs the well-bounded work that used to train junior engineers, which pushes recent grads and career changers into a crowded middle already occupied by laid-off mid-level engineers. Time-to-hire has stretched. Fully remote postings are rare.
The bigger change is one almost nobody is preparing for: the interview itself got rebuilt. After a wave of real-time AI assistance in remote coding screens, companies responded in two directions. Some dragged interviews back on-site. Others redesigned the assessment — adding rounds where you're handed an AI assistant and evaluated on whether you can prompt it, catch its mistakes, and defend the result. Follow-up questions became the filter. Narrating your reasoning out loud went from nice-to-have to the thing you're actually scored on.
If your prep strategy is "grind 500 LeetCode problems," you are optimizing for a screen that increasingly isn't the deciding round.
Join software engineer and mentor Phong Lam for a working session on what's actually required to land a software engineering role right now. He'll cover:

• Where the market genuinely split, and which side of it your background currently sits on
• Why interview loops changed in 2026 — on-site returns, AI-assisted rounds, and follow-up questions as the real filter
• How to prepare by pattern, not volume: recognizing question families instead of memorizing solutions
• The new prep skill nobody practices — debugging and defending code you didn't write
• How to talk about using AI in your work without sounding like you've outsourced your judgment
• How mid-level and senior engineers coming off a layoff avoid reading as "generalist" on paper
• Where the openings actually are, including the non-obvious companies quietly hiring software talent
• What career changers and recent grads can do to clear a bar that moved after they enrolled

Come with your questions, your loop stories, and the roles you're targeting.
ABOUT PHONG LAM
Phong Lam is a senior software engineer at Circle, with past stops at DoorDash, Walmart, and IBM. Alongside his career he mentors junior and senior engineers on algorithmic problem solving, web frameworks, and navigating interviews. Connect with him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/phongtlam/.