Great ideas rarely
emerge from isolation
SPC is a community of technologists ideating and validating what to build next. 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.
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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01 Repeat Founders
Waseem Daher
MIT-trained engineer and 3-time founder, Waseem co-founded Ksplice (acquired by Oracle) and Zulip (acquired by Dropbox) with the same group of MIT friends before joining SPC. He founded Pilot, the modern finance team that handles bookkeeping, tax, and CFO services for growing companies.
James Cadwallader
A repeat founder who'd built and exited his last consumer company, James came to SPC in search of a technical co-founder. He met Dylan Babbs at SPC and they co-founded Profound, the analytics and influence platform helping the world's biggest brands stay visible across AI search.
Feross Aboukhadijeh
As a prolific open-source maintainer, serial entrepreneur, and longtime Stanford CS lecturer, Feross joined SPC and founded Socket, the cybersecurity platform that defends companies against open-source supply-chain attacks.
Caroline Ingeborn
After co-founding and running Toca Boca, the children's-app studio she scaled past $50M in revenue, Caroline joined SPC to start a second company, Leap, focused on combatting the loneliness epidemic through social products. After Leap wound down, she became COO of another SPC company, Luma AI.
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02 First Time Founders
Scott Wu
Three-time IOI gold medalist who first joined SPC in 2017, Scott co-founded Lunchclub out of the community. He's now the co-founder and CEO of Cognition, the lab that built Devin, the first AI software engineer, and one of the fastest-scaling AI companies today.
Tuhin Srivastava
After a stint as a data scientist at Gumroad, Tuhin joined SPC and explored widely before founding Baseten, the ML model inference and deployment platform now used to ship AI products at production scale. Baseten is now a unicorn.
Trisha Kothari
An early engineer and PM at Affirm, Trisha joined SPC and co-founded Unit21, the API and dashboard layer that helps banks and fintechs detect money laundering, fraud, and other complex financial risks.
Fangchang Ma
After spending years at Apple shipping lidar-based depth-prediction algorithms, Fangchang came to SPC and is now building Nuance Labs, the first human foundation model that understands and expresses emotion in real time across speech, facial expression, and body language.
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03 Researchers
Logan Graham
After spending time as an Advisor to the UK Prime Minister's Office, Logan joined SPC to explore the open question of AGI governance. He's now Head of the Frontier Red Team at Anthropic, where he leads the team responsible for stress-testing frontier models against catastrophic risks.
Tom McGrath
After co-founding the interpretability team at DeepMind in London before moving stateside for SPC, Tom co-founded Goodfire as Chief Scientist. He’s building mechanistic-interpretability tools so frontier-AI teams can understand and shape what their own models are actually doing. Goodfire is now a unicorn.
Tom Brown
A serial entrepreneur and Grouper co-founder, Tom joined SPC to explore ideas for a new consumer startup. A peer ML learning group inside the community pulled him in a different direction. He left to join Google Brain, then OpenAI, where he led the engineering team for GPT-3, and has since co-founded Anthropic.
Alexandar Perez
MD with a CS PhD, Alex was the lead author on a landmark paper showing that CRISPR can be used to target and kill cancer cells in a cancer-specific way. He founded Silico Therapeutics out of SPC to translate that research into therapeutic and analytics products for the CRISPR ecosystem, and now continues that mission as a researcher at UCSF.
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04 Deep Tech
Shreepoorna Rao
Building drones since 8th grade, Shree led the IIT Madras Aeromodeling Club and sold an early DeFi project before joining SPC. He’s now the founder and CEO of Arctus Aerospace, building high-altitude unmanned airplanes for earth observation, geospatial data, and defense.
Bill Chang
Previously, Bill was Chief System Engineer on Tesla's Dojo supercomputer. At SPC he co-founded Density, building purpose-built compute for AI: a "datacenter in a box" that integrates compute, networking, and power.
JX (Jingxiang) Mo
As a core tech lead at K-Scale Labs, JX ran early product and hiring, before leaving to start Gradient Robotics at SPC. Gradient is building American humanoid robots, with an early wedge in data-center and factory automation.
Wei Ding
Robotics decision-making and software architect and Apple Special Projects Group alum, Wei joined SPC and is building Noble Machines, developing general-purpose humanoid robots designed to operate in dangerous industrial environments.
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05 Creative Technologists
Zain Shah
Engineer, AI researcher, & designer, Zain came to SPC and built Dig, an AI app that generates short explainer videos on demand, a never-ending rabbit hole of curiosity-satisfying content, tuned to whatever you want to learn next. He’s currently working on new ways to visualize digital content.
Jonathan Arena
A 15-year design veteran who led design at Facebook, Cruise, and Patreon (and co-founded Harvard's design conference), Jonathan joined SPC and founded New Generation, which instantly turns a brand's website into an AI storefront that adapts intelligently to every customer.
Priyaa Kalyanaraman
Previously, Priyaa built design-AI products at Microsoft, Snap, and Waymo. She came to SPC to explore AI agents for video creation, and is now the founder of Lica, building the substrate that will let AI become a creative partner to designers.
Jeff Shaw
After spending years in 3D and infrastructure at Cruise and Snowflake, Jeff is building Weave Technologies, reimagining online apparel shopping by bringing 3D simulation to the way people discover and try on clothes.
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06 Domain Experts
Kushal Chakrabarti
Former Chief Research & Data Officer at Opendoor with a deep applied-AI research background, Kushal helps lead the SPC frontier research group, running paper-readings, demo sessions, speaker sessions, and field trips to places like Anthropic and PI.
Adam Judelson
Former CIA analyst and the former Head of Product at Palantir, at SPC Adam founded Common Sense, building AI teammates that handle the critical back office of municipal governments including public records, permitting, and agenda management, aiming for 100x efficiency gains for cities.
Ashton Eaton
Decathlete who won Olympic gold for Team USA at both London 2012 and Rio 2016, Ashton joined SPC's Member Residency in 2018 and is now an Innovation Engineer at Nike, working on the next generation of athletic performance technology.
Jaclyn Nelson
After seven years at Alphabet in operational roles, including launching Google Helpouts, Jaclyn co-founded Tribe AI, the AI services and software firm helping enterprises adopt AI.
Our Spaces
Member Residency
ApplyAbout 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.