How should I meet people in the Bay Area working on interesting things?

Question

I moved to San Francisco after undergrad a few years ago to work at a unicorn as an engineer to learn with ambitions of doing my startup after a few years. I've ascended the ladder relatively quickly as the company has grown, but find myself increasingly bored with the work. I'm realizing it's time to do something new, but I'm not totally sure where to start.Where would one go in the Bay Area to meet other people that are interested in working on new projects or ventures? Do in-person forums for talking about interesting topics (and potentially working on them) exist in the city? Note that I explicitly didn't say tech startups &mdash; I have pretty diverse interests, and I'd be very open to non-tech work, though tech startups are often interesting.Apologies for this post being Bay Area-centric (though folks might have advice that generalizes).

dingosity · Accepted Answer

I'm a fan of the Stanford CS380 Seminar class. When I was a younger engineer, before the pandemic, it was more or less open to anyone who wanted to attend. Depending on who else showed up, you could end up having interesting conversations afterwards.
https://online.stanford.edu/courses/ee380-colloquium-compute...
I'm sure there's a Berkeley equivalent. So maybe my answer is "check out the local university to see if there are open-to-the-public talks or events."
I've found a number of interesting groups on meetup.com, though I find their interface maddening.
I suspect there's a lot of hit-or-miss groups, covering a wide range of topics. So... universities and meetup.com.