Great ideas rarely emerge from isolation

SPC is a community of technologists ideating and validating what to build next. We believe this shouldn’t be done alone. Our members range from exited founders and highly-cited researchers to new graduates and first-time entrepreneurs. What unites us is ambition, ability, and a mutual commitment to helping each other navigate -1 to 0.

south park commons community

OUR Members

A Modern Day Xerox PARC


We focus on highly technical builders in -1 to 0. Over the last decade, over 1,000 members have joined us to start companies, pursue research, and find their life's work.

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Nikhil
Director of AI Research at Salesforce, now Research Scientist at Meta.
Kanjun
Chief of Staff at Dropbox, founding member of SPC, now Co-founder CEO of Imbue.
Jessica
Cofounder & CEO/COO at U.S. Digital Response, Fellow at Code for America & Aspen Institute.
Adam
Former CIA analyst, Head of Product at Palantir, now Founder of Common Sense.
Chris
Co-founder and former CTO of Planet Labs, previously Space Mission Architect at NASA Ames.
Yaroslav
Software Engineer at Google Brain and early Research Engineer at OpenAI.
Caroline
CEO & Co-founder of Toca Boca, joined SPC to start 2nd company Leap, now COO of Luma AI.
Ashton
2x Olympian for Team USA, now Innovation Engineer at Nike.
Bill
Chief System Engineer on the Dojo Supercomputer at Tesla, now Co-founder & CEO of Density AI.
Abiel
Previous engineer at Brex, now Co-founder and CTO of Comun.

Our Spaces

About Member Residency

-1 to 0 isn’t a side project. It's a full time endeavor. Member residents spend 6 months at SPC ideating, validating new areas, finding collaborators, and building conviction in what they want to work on. Most are pursuing founding endeavors, but 30% are doing independent research or building outside the startup track entirely. We’ve had high-agency individuals of all kinds, from academic researchers to Olympians, join SPC to work alongside one another on new projects. Like any hard thing, it’s better done together.

Programming

Day to day programming includes peer accountability groups, learning forums, and workshops on the latest technological frontiers. We also facilitate roundtables and conversations with industry heavyweights such as Satya Nadella, Vinod Khosla, Fei-Fei Li, and more. The greatest value of the member residency is the community of talented peers it embeds you in. Figuring out where to dedicate the next stage of your life is best done in the most talent-dense environment possible. Our primary product is talent curation.

Residency vs. Fellowship

Member Residency and the Founder Fellowship are both paths to joining SPC. The Founder Fellowship supports technologists who know they want to start a company and are ready for funding to help. Member Residency is open to technologists who may or may not know they want to start a company and are not yet ready for funding. If you’re planning to fundraise soon, we may instead ask you to apply for our Founder Fellowship.

Next Steps

We accept new members on a rolling basis and will start processing your application whenever you apply. We go through every application and you’ll generally hear from us within 1-3 weeks. If we're moving forward, we'll invite you to an interview to learn more about you.