We believe great ideas rarely come about in isolation

South Park Commons is a community of builders, technologists, and domain-experts that challenge you, encourage you, and help you build and validate your ideas. People join us at every stage of their career: from just out of school to mid-career faculty, from first-time entrepreneur to serial founders with successful exits. We leverage our collective expertise to help our members discover new ways of impacting the world.

south park commons community

Members

Quality over quantity. 700+ members from over 150 professional and academic networks.

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Jonathan
Jonathan Mortensen (JMo) is a data scientist and software engineer. After graduating with a PhD in biomedical data science in 2016 from Stanford, Jonathan founded and sold two startups: Gyroscope to BlueVoyant and bit.io to Databricks. Now, JMo is exploring on the intersection of AI and databases.
Andrew
I am the cofounder and CEO of Ascend, a fintech startup that handles payments and financing for the $1T insurance industry. Previously, cofounder Sheltr (acquired by Hippo Insurance), early employee (2014) at Instacart.
Deborah
Cofounder & CEO at Sparrow - the first high-tech, high-touch employee leave management solution making it simple for companies to provide employee leave throughout North America. We're making employee leave stress-free for companies like Figma, Plaid, and Headspace Health.
Drishan
I work on applications of machine learning to natural language. I am currently working on RL alignment techniques for LLMs + information retrieval.
Bill
Hard-tech creator (former Tesla/Apple/IBM) - former chief system architect for Dojo AI supercomputer / designed system-on-wafer technology
Aaron
Aaron co-founded Matrix Operations, a high-frequency trading firm operating in NYC and London. He designed the software infrastructure and am responsible for realtime performance of the trading systems.
Amit
Ashton
2x Olympic gold medalist in decathlon from London 2012 and Rio 2016. Studying mechanical engineering to work on energy or space. Education and human performance important too.
Dylan
Design Engineer in NYC. Background in product design, maps, and data viz. Formerly at Uber working on maps + location services. Hobbies: surfing, flying planes, exploring, and working out. Reach out, let's collaborate and build something together.
Jeremy
Currently: San Jose Earthquakes (ex: Portland Timbers). Pursuing off-field work ranging from early stage investing to nonprofit formation and leadership. Activating a diverse network through sport towards bringing innovative ideas & products to life.

Diversity of Expertise

A Modern Day Xerox Parc

Our members have a diversity of expertise. After their time at SPC, a third join academia, research organizations, and philanthropies.

south park community domain experts, founders, academics, operators, open source contributors, founding engineers, and more

Organizations domain experts join after SPC

anthropic logoaspen institutechan zuckerberg initiativegoogle aiopen philanthrophy projectgenerally intelligentopen aiuniversity of california, berkeley

Companies

Over 150 companies and non-profits founded that have raised more than $3.5B in capital.

Sector
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SPC Company Founders Sector Stage Founded Investors
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Company
Founders
Sector
Stage
Founded
Investors
Anna Veronika Dorogush
Consumer
Series A
2024
Khosla Ventures, Nat Friedman
Dilan Dane, Yuran Lu, Michael Poon
Consumer
Series A
2018
Andrew Wynn, Praveen Chekuri
FinTech
Series A
2021
First Round Capital, Susa Ventures, Index Ventures
Gavin Nachbar, Michael Bock
FinTech
Series A
2021
Bain Capital Ventures, Felicis Ventures
Scott Wu, Vladimir Novakovski
Consumer
Series A
2018
Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue
Charlie Jacobson, Andreas Rotenberg
B2B SaaS
Series A
2021
Susa Ventures, BoxGroup, CRV
Brandon Li, Bask Gill
Healthcare/Bio
Series A
2021
CRV, Footwork VC
Gloria Lin
B2B SaaS
Series A
2019
Menlo Ventures, First Round Capital
James Clift
B2B SaaS
Series A
2021
Spark Capital
Srinath Sridhar, Matt Millen
B2B SaaS
Series A
2020
Scale Venture Partners, Foundation Capital

Forums

Community-led learning intensives on topics like AI, crypto, biotech, climate tech, the creator economy, and more.

Squads

Small weekly peer groups focused on either personal growth or building, with a focus on support, accountability, and creative exchange.

Speaker Series

Exclusive conversations with experts in tech, venture, science, politics, and more. Past speakers include Ben Thompson, Julia Galef, Reid Hoffman, Chris Dixon, Alfred Lin, Salman Khan, and Susan Desmond-Hellmann, among many others.

Collaborative Spaces

We have community spaces in the South Park neighborhood of San Francisco and the SoHo neighborhood in New York City to facilitate IRL connection and collaboration.

Community

50% of members find a co-founder or early collaborator within the community, many others get hired at SPC network organizations, and nearly all form deep relationships that persist long after graduation.

Speaker Series

Exclusive conversations with experts in tech, venture, science, politics, and more. Past speakers include Ben Thompson, Julia Galef, Reid Hoffman, Chris Dixon, Alfred Lin, Salman Khan, and Bruce Schneier, among many others.

Network

Access a network of domain experts in AI, Crypto, Fintech, etc., and founders and executives from seed stage to IPO companies such as Figma, Airtable, Pilot, SpaceX, and more.

Customers

Find early customers and beta testers within the community.

Fundraising

Raise funding from SPC Fund alongside a network of top funds and angels.

Credits

$200k in credits for cloud providers and most popular tools for startups.