Great ideas rarely emerge from isolation

South Park Commons 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 the -1 to 0. Over the last decade, we have had 1,000 members join us to start companies, pursue research, and work on other ambitious projects.

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Yi
Yi is an assistant professor of statistics at UChicago. His research is in probability and applications to machine learning and high dimensional statistics.
Andrew
Andrew is the co-founder and CTO of Speak, building technology to reinvent how people learn, starting with language. He's former Thiel Fellow and Stanford PhD dropout in neuroscience and bioengineering.
Nikhil
Nikhil is a Director of AI Research at Salesforce. He is experienced in AI research and its applications in enterprise SaaS and bio-medicine. Before Salesforce Research, Nikhil obtained his PhD from MIT in AI and worked at Google, Microsoft, and Harvard.
Nishant
Co-founded Color (color.com), left in early 2020. Currently investing in companies at the intersection of biology + engineering.
Jeff
Jeff is the co-founder and former COO of Pilot.com. Prior to Pilot, he led operations at OpenAI and founded Zulip (acquired by Dropbox), where he later led product for client and platform teams.
Ashton
2x Olympic gold medalist in decathlon. Mechanical engineer. Nike R&D.
Sam
Sam did a PhD in Algebraic Combinatorics before working at Google and most recently Scale, where he built the incentive system.
Tom
Tom is the co-founder of Anthropic. Previously led engineering for GPT-3 at OpenAI, scaling it from 1.5B to 170B parameters, and contributed to foundational work on RLHF.
Connor
Connor is the CEO, co-founder of Speak, an AI Speaking App that teaches users English. Prior to that, Connor created Flashcards+ which is an education app used by over 5 million students worldwide and eventually sold it to Chegg.
John
ML leader with experience in recommendations and humans-in-the-loop. Alum of Square and Stitch Fix. Here to learn and explore by doing. Currently fascinated by LLMs. "The future is already here—it's just not evenly distributed [yet]." –Neil Stephenson

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What our members do


Our members have started 250+ companies, including several unicorns. Others have become core contributors to leading research organizations, open-source software projects, and academic institutions.

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