Designing with AI
A three-night, after-work conference on design, AI, and technology — produced years before generative AI went mainstream. It sold out all three nights.
- 3 nights
- ~300 attendees / night
- Sold out
Event & Field Marketing
I build events people actually show up for.
Hi, I'm Andi Galpern! I'm the Founder of Cascade SF, a design and technology organization based in San Francisco. For the past 15 years, I've brought speakers, partners, volunteers, and communities together to produce conferences and events that connect designers and technologists. I love turning ideas into memorable experiences that spark conversations, build relationships, and inspire new possibilities.
- 15
- Years running
- 200+
- Events produced
- 10
- Multi-day conferences built from the ground up
- 10,000+
- Community members
- 15,900+
- Tickets sold
Community-funded through ticket sales, not sponsor-dependent.
What I do
Great events are a team sport.
I lead every phase, and I never do it alone. Here's who's in the room at each step.
01
Strategy
Who I work with
With host companies and partners to shape the theme, audience, and goals, and with the community to choose topics people actually want.
- Concept development
- Programming & topic curation
- Positioning & messaging
02
Speakers
Who I work with
1:1 with every speaker: shaping the story, tightening the flow, designing slides, and rehearsing until they're confident on stage.
- Speaker & mentor recruiting
- Speaker coaching
- Sponsor & venue partnerships
03
Marketing
Who I work with
With partner marketing teams on co-promotion, plus email, social, and community channels to fill the room.
- Email & social campaigns
- Promotional design
- Ticket pricing & registration
04
Production
Who I work with
With venue teams, caterers, AV crews, and volunteers to make the night run smoothly, from registration to the last goodbye.
- Budgets
- Catering & AV
- Logistics, volunteers & onsite production
The crew
It takes a crew.
Every event is a small team working as one. Host companies open their doors, speakers bring their best thinking, and volunteers run registration, wrangle mics, and keep the energy up. My job is to make sure everyone knows the plan, has what they need, and feels like part of something worth showing up for.
Featured work
A few events I'm proud of.
Mentor Night at Adobe HQ
A large-scale mentorship event at Adobe's headquarters, pairing seasoned mentors with designers looking to grow.
- ~45 mentors
- ~220 attendees
Virtual events
Virtual events
When the world moved online, I rebuilt the whole production stack from home — lighting, audio, streaming, and run-of-show — and kept the community connected. I produced live talks, panels, and workshops for thousands of remote attendees without missing a beat.
- Live-streamed talks & panels
- Remote speaker coaching
- Interactive online workshops
Community
Founder, Cascade SF2011 – present
Cascade SF is a San Francisco community for designers, product managers, and engineers who want to learn from each other, meet the people doing the work, and help each other grow. I started it in 2011 because I was looking for design events and couldn't find the ones I wanted, so I started building them. Fifteen years later, it's a community of more than 10,000 people.
What we do
Talks & panels (UXNight)
After-work events where practitioners share what they're actually building, followed by time to meet the room.
Mentor Nights
Designers bring their work and get 1:1 feedback from senior mentors, hosted at companies like Adobe and Microsoft Reactor.
Multi-night conferences
Deep-dive series on emerging topics, including UX of VR, Growth Design, Data & Design, and Design + AI.
“I used to only get big name speakers. Now I help designers, product managers, and people in tech tell their stories, so they can share their knowledge and we can create more people like them. It's about creating new leaders, and creating content the industry needs.”
UXNightPodcast
Listen: how I design events so everybody wins.
Featured on the freeCodeCamp Podcast · Ep. 79
I talked with freeCodeCamp about how Cascade SF started, what makes an event worth showing up for, and why great events are designed content-first.
Speakers & partners
Who I've built events with.
Senior designers and leaders from Google, Apple, Amazon, Salesforce, YouTube, Workday, Chase, and Cisco.
- Apple
- Amazon
- Salesforce
- YouTube
- Workday
- Chase
- Cisco
Notable speakers
- Alan Cooper
- Daniel Burka
- Mark Otto
- Julia Melton
- Josh Constine
- Eva Galperin
Partners & sponsors
- Adobe
- Intuit
- Microsoft
- & more
Also
Women Techmakers Ambassador, Google
One of about 1,000 ambassadors worldwide, supporting women in technology through community events.
Gallery
From the room.
Kind words
From the people I've built these with.
She went above and beyond by jumping in and helping me not just with the flow and content of the presentation, but with the visual design of the slides. The finished product was significantly better than it would have been without her.
Jane Davis
Senior Product Manager, Salesforce
Not only is Andi able to logistically pull off sell-out-sized events, but she also does a fantastic job at curating, shaping and honing the content itself.
Nicholas Cottrell
Principal Operator, 3DMATH
My company has sponsored several of her events, and she's been a pleasure to work with from start to finish. She's very responsive to one-off requests and goes out of her way to make sure your company gets the most out of being involved.
Amy Ziari
Senior Vice President, We. Communications
We've worked together at several Adobe events and Andi is always on top of things during the planning stages. When the day of the event arrives, I am always shocked at how smoothly everything runs.
Kelly McCathran
Staff Technical Writer, ServiceNow
UXNight is by far the best event I had a chance to speak at. Well organised (up to every single, tiny, detail), extremely professional and super-successful in gathering large crowd of super-smart designers.
Marcin Treder
Director of User Experience, Google Play
Andi's Cascade events are an essential portion of any designer's calendar who hopes to keep up with local trends and network with the best collection of talent in the bay.
Jamie Martin
Head of Design, Reka AI
I am impressed how she was able to build CASCADE SF from zero to one of the most engaged entrepreneurial groups in SF/Bay Area… I also recommend Andi as a business partner without any reservation.
Vasil Azarov
Founder, Growth Blazers
Planning something people will remember?
I'm open to full-time event and field marketing roles, plus select event partnerships.