South Park Commons helps you go from -1 to 0

SPC is a home for the most talented technologists, builders, and domain-
experts figuring out what's next—a community designed to turn the chaos of
possibility into the clarity of conviction.

PAths THROUGH SPC

Community

Our community has 150 active members at any given time, each of whom explore in residence in either San Francisco, New York, or Bangalore. We are drawn to technical, spiky, and curious builders who are actively figuring out what comes next.

Fellowship

The Founder Fellowship is a $1M investment and structured program to fund your exploration and help you go from -1 to 0. We help you find the right idea and partner with you to build a generational business over years, not weeks.

Funding

We focus on pre-seed and seed-stage investments ($1-5 million) and support our members across the full lifecycle of their businesses, from inception to IPO. Our pre-seed program is our Founder Fellowship, and, each year, we incubate a handful of members with seed financing as well.

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Member Stories

Trisha & Clarence

Anurag Goel

Anurag

How did Anurag Goel turn side-projects into a company?

A graduate of IIT in India and employee #8 at Stripe, Anurag joined SPC knowing only that he wanted to take on big problems. He built apps around healthcare, deep learning, and real-time communication, while helping other members with their projects. All this building and feedback revealed the opportunity for a new platform that could radically simplify DevOps. Render was born and subsequently has become one of the fastest growing tools in the developer ecosystem, raising $150M+ to date.

Amit Jain

Amit

Building the foundation for a multi-modal future, starting with 3D.

Amit joined SPC in 2021 after working on cutting-edge camera tech at Apple, driven by a fascination with NeRFs, a new way to turn photos into rich 3D models. As he explored the frontier, he saw a bigger shift coming—the world is multi-modal, and AI will be too. That insight sparked Luma, where he's built state-of-the-art image, 3D, and video models powering a new generation of immersive, AI-native content. The company has since raised $150M+ to bring this vision to life.

Waseem Daher & Jeff Arnold

Waseem & Jeff

Two founding members went on to start the first SPC unicorn.

Both engineers from MIT, Waseem and Jeff co-founded two companies together that were successfully acquired before they helped found SPC. They were instrumental in building the culture and ethos of the community. This dynamic duo left SPC to start Pilot, the first company founded out of SPC to reach a unicorn ($1B+) valuation.

Abiel Gutierrez & Andres Santos

Abiel & Andres

Banking built for those who’ve been left out—starting with Latino immigrants.

Abiel and Andres grew up just 30 minutes apart in Monterrey, Mexico, but they only crossed paths during the Fall 2021 Fellowship, when they discovered a shared frustration for navigating the U.S. banking system as immigrants. That experience led them to start Comun, a neobank designed from the ground up for Latino immigrants: Spanish-first, simple to use, and offering everything from remittances to peer-to-peer transfers. It's now one of the fastest-growing companies at SPC.

Tom Brown

Tom

He joined to start a consumer company. He left to do AI research.

A software engineer and serial entrepreneur, including co-founder of Grouper, Tom joined SPC to explore ideas for a new consumer startup. While in the community, Tom ended up diving into a peer learning group exploring machine learning topics. He graduated to join Google Brain and later OpenAI, leading the engineering team for GPT-3. He has since founded his own AI safety and research company, Anthropic.

Bilal Mahmood

Bilal

A founder and policy wonk takes first principles to politics.

After serving as a policy staffer in the Obama Administration and later successfully exiting a startup he founded, Bilal joined us to explore how he could put his experiences to use for his community. He decided to bring a data-driven, first principles mindset to politics, becoming the first SPC member to run for office and successfully winning a bid for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

Ashton Eaton

Ashton

A 2x Olympic gold medalist joined to figure out what to conquer next.

Ashton won gold medals as a decathlete for the US in back-to-back Olympics. After retiring from the sport, he joined SPC to figure out what he wanted to put his talents toward next. He explored systems design and became passionate about engineering, graduating to join Intel as a product engineer.

Alvaro Morales & Kshitij Grover

Alvaro & Kshitij

They built conviction they can change a $2 trillion industry.

After years of collaboration at Asana, these engineers decided to make the jump and found a company together. They joined the Founder Fellowship to navigate the hardest part of the early company-building process: building conviction in an idea you plan to spend years of your life on. Alvaro and Kshitij succeeded and founded Orb, a company changing how the building blocks of the internet run the can’t-fail billing process.

Trisha Kothari & Clarence Chio

Trisha & Clarence

From meeting at SPC to starting a $800M company together.

Trisha joined SPC after stints as an early engineer and product manager at Affirm. Clarence joined to explore new topics while writing an O'Reilly book on Machine Learning and Security. They met and discovered a shared interest in security and fintech, eventually graduating to combine their skills and start Unit21, now one of the fastest growing fintech startups with $50M+ in funding.

James Cadwallader & Dylan Babbs

James & Dylan

Helping brands navigate the shift to AI, one search at a time.

James and Dylan met around the lunch table at SPC NYC and quickly bonded over a shared curiosity: what happens when AI becomes the default interface to the internet? That exploration led them to join the Spring 2024 Fellowship and go all in on Profound, where they're building the tools behind AIO—the next generation of SEO—to help brands track, improve, and influence how they're represented across AI systems.

Andrew Wynn & Praveen Chekuri

Andrew & Praveen

These second-time founders knew: go slow to go fast.

Second-time co-founders Andrew and Praveen knew how hard the idea phase is after their previous company was acquired. Planning to start a new company but unsure what problem to tackle, they joined the Spring 2021 Founder Fellowship cohort to be deliberate in their process. The result was Ascend, the first modern insurance payments platform that has raised $40M+ to date.

Kathy Qian

Kathy

From the World Bank & ACLU to protecting democracy.

A Penn grad who did computational social science for the World Bank and ACLU while running a successful algorithmic trading side-gig, Kathy came to SPC to develop Code for Democracy. What started as a side project became a non-profit that provides tooling for journalists, researchers, and open-government advocates to automate political watchdogging.

Gavin Nachbar & Michael Bock

Gavin & Michael

Taking on a monopoly by making tax-prep less awful.

When they left Waymo to start a company together, Gavin and Michael had a core guiding principle: find a problem where consumers were being utterly failed and fix it. After joining the Spring 2021 Founder Fellowship, they followed this principle right to tax prep. Column Tax was their solution.

Grey Nguyen & Ben Yang

Grey & Ben

From open exploration to giving everyone control over their personal health.

Part of the Fall 2021 Founder Fellowship, Grey and Ben came in as prolific product builders without a clear idea. They embraced SPC’s exploratory spirit, following threads of curiosity from personal writing tools to stablecoin-based payments. Ultimately, they gravitated toward the problems closest to home and started building Bevel—a unified interface for personal health data that empowers users to make informed decisions about their health.

Jaclyn Rice Nelson & Noah Gale

Jaclyn & Noah

How community produces more communities.

When Jaclyn, an experienced operator and investor, and Noah, the founding sales hire at Gigster, met at SPC, they decided to start a company together. The pair were inspired by the world-class AI/ML talent in the community, along with the flexibility and camaraderie of the SPC model. This led to Tribe AI, a collective that connects independent AI experts with companies in search of AI talent.

Priyaa Kalyanaraman & Purvanshi Mehta

Priyaa & Purvanshi

Imagining the ChatGPT moment for video.

Priyaa and Purvanshi joined the Founder Fellowship in early 2024 with a bold thread of curiosity: what would a ChatGPT moment for video look like. Drawing on deep expertise in multi-modal models, they're building Lica to break down the barriers between formats, so anyone can consume or create content however they want. The first product allows creators and marketers to turn static assets into engaging and on-brand videos.

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NEWS AND EVENTS

CEO of Microsoft on AI Agents & Quantum | Satya Nadella

Video

The Case for Talent Density in -1 to 0

Article

Recapping SPC Winter 2025 Demo Faire

Article

-1 to Satya Nadella

SPC will host Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft, for a special fireside chat on March 4th.

What is -1 to 0?

Defining a crucial stage of company-building—and why you should take it seriously.

How to go from -1 to 0

The worldbuilder approach to generating and validating venture-scale startup ideas.

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Stay in the Loop