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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Pete
Creator of Coinbase Wallet and Cipher Browser, now Engineering Lead for USDC.
Connor
Created Flashcards+, acquired by Chegg, now Co-founder & CEO of Speak.
Tom
Co-founder of the interpretability team at Deepmind, moved from London to join SPC, now Co-founder and Chief Scientist of Goodfire.
Tim
Previously co-founded Ksplice, led infrastructure at Dropbox, Founder and CEO of Zulip, now Founder and CEO of Kandra Labs.
Henry
Co-Founder of Super.com, now Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic.
Kanjun
Chief of Staff at Dropbox, founding member of SPC, now Co-founder CEO of Imbue.
Vivek
AI Researcher at Meta, now Lead Researcher behind Med-PaLM and Med-PaLM 2 at Google.
Jie
Early engineer at Dropbox, Member of OpenAI Research Team since 2016.
Kushal
Chief Research & Data Officer at Opendoor, now Advisor at SPC.
Chris
Co-founder and former CTO of Planet Labs, previously Space Mission Architect at NASA Ames.

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.