Our Story

Built by founders, for founders.

We started as founders building products, raising rounds, and trying to break into new markets. Every time we needed to run an event, we hit the same wall: agencies that did not understand our product, audience, or pressure. So we built the company we always needed.

See How We Work Meet the Team

Elena Marchetti

80+ events personally led

Lars Bergström

200+ EU AI relationships

Founder-led strategy with senior production, creative, community, and operations specialists attached to every engagement.

80+

Founder-led events

Elena personally led the early playbook before scaling the team

200+

EU AI relationships

Lars keeps the European partner and founder network warm

300+

Live events produced

Production leadership across Bay Area rooms and conference stages

3,000

SF-Europe community

A practitioner network for speaker, attendee, and partner sourcing

The Origin

The frustration that became a company.

In 2010, we were organizing tech events in Berlin because we were trying to build community for our startup and could not find anyone who got what we were doing. We learned venue negotiation, speaker sourcing, and audience curation the hard way. By 2018, we had relocated to San Francisco and were watching European AI companies make the same mistakes: overpaying for agencies that did not understand their technology, market, or what good looked like in the Bay Area. SF Event Factory was founded to make world-class event production accessible to tech companies without 6-month lead times, corporate agency markup, or the mismatch between vendor expectations and startup realities.

AI conference audience watching a keynote presentation — The origin story is not skyline nostalgia. It is the repeated experience of founders needing rooms that understood technical products and Bay Area buyer dynamics.
2010
First tech events
2018
SF operating base

Mission

Remove the event burden from founders and CTOs.

The promise is simple: your team stays focused on product, customers, investors, and community while senior operators run the event system.

Named audiences first

Every event starts with the exact buyer, developer, investor, or partner profile that should be in the room.

Founder-grade reporting

We plan the event around pipeline, community, press, and board-ready proof, not vague impressions.

Senior operators only

Clients work with people who have run rooms, built companies, managed vendors, and shipped under pressure.

Why Events

The last channel executives still show up for.

Your target decision-makers have YouTube Premium. They use ad blockers. They ignore cold emails. But they'll show up to a curated event with their peer group — because good events are the only remaining channel that puts them in genuine conversation mode, not defensive scroll mode. A well-run 200-person meetup with the right audience delivers more qualified pipeline conversations than $50K in LinkedIn ads. We can prove it. Our impact plans include a projected ROI calculation before you've spent a dollar.

Channel comparison

YouTube adsskipped

LinkedIn campaignsskipped

Cold email sequencesskipped

Display retargetingskipped

In-person eventthey showed up

The Team

The people behind your events.

Every client works with senior team members, not coordinators. Here is who builds your events.

Elena Marchetti

Founder & CEO

80+ events personally led

Former AI founder and SF community builder. Leads strategy, audience design, and founder-facing event architecture.

Lars Bergström

Co-founder & Head of European Partnerships

200+ EU AI relationships

Three-time founder connecting European AI teams with the SF rooms, partners, and investors that matter.

Maya Chen

Creative Director

Config brand experience lead

Turns technical narratives into memorable rooms, demo zones, and conversion-focused event flows.

James Okonkwo

Head of Production

300+ Bay Area live events

Owns showcalling, vendors, AV, and the production systems that make event day feel calm.

Sophie Durand

Community & Developer Relations

3,000-member SF-Europe community

Builds developer rooms through speaker curation, community outreach, and practitioner-level AI fluency.

Alex Petrov

Operations Lead

Supply-chain trained operator

Runs budgets, timelines, permits, and vendor dependencies with engineering-grade operational control.

Operating Values

What you should feel while working with us.

Outcomes over outputs

We measure our success by your pipeline, not your headcount.

Radical transparency

You see every vendor quote, every attendee metric, every timeline decision. No black boxes.

Speed without shortcuts

4-week delivery is possible because we've done it 100 times, not because we cut corners.

Ready to build your event?

Tell us about your goals. We'll send back a free event impact plan in 48 hours.

Get Your Free Event Plan Book a call