Catan & AI @ Sphere ft. the 2026 Americas Catan Champion

Catan is a game about trade and that incentives don't quite match yours. Felt on-brand. Join us at Sphere's SF office for an invite-only Catan night with Burak Ozgur, the 2026 Catan Americas Champion. Burak plays through the night and shares strategy as we go. Winners from each table advance to a championship round against Burak. A curated room of senior engineers, six tables, two games per table, and plenty of space between games to talk shop on AI and what we're building. Pizza, drinks, and enough trade negotiations to make it through the endgame. If you've never played, the rules take ten minutes and Burak will be around to walk you through your first moves. AGENDA 5:00–5:30 PM — Arrivals + pizza 5:30–6:30 PM — Round 1 6:30–7:00 PM — Hang out + pizza 7:00–8:00 PM — Round 2: Championship round with Burak WHAT TO EXPECT Curated engineering room (invite + application-only). Coaching from the 2026 Catan Americas Champion Two games of Catan, including a championship round Pizza, drinks, and time to talk AI infrastructure between games ABOUT SPHERE Every breakthrough in trade infrastructure has followed the same pattern: reduce a transaction cost, expand the market. Containerization for goods. SWIFT for money. Stripe for payments. Compliance is one of the last and largest — and the hardest, because trade rules aren't data to be looked up. They're a complex adaptive system with 190+ sovereign jurisdictions, in different languages, changing constantly, reacting to each other. Sphere built the system that solves it. Our AI (TRAM) ingests global trade law, interprets it, resolves conflicts across jurisdictions, and produces compliance determinations more reliable than human experts. We handle the entire lifecycle — calculation, registration, filing, remittance — at millisecond latency with zero downtime. Backed by a16z and YC. $21M Series A. 30%+ MoM growth. Customers include ElevenLabs, Replit, Deel, Runway, and Lovable. Small team, global surface area. San Francisco, in office. Jobs board: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sphere