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.

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.

Ola
Ola

Early engineer at Facebook, contributor to civic tech efforts through U.S. Digital Response, now Technical Staff at OpenAI.

Kushal
Kushal

Chief Research & Data Officer at Opendoor, now Advisor at SPC.

Adam
Adam

Former CIA analyst, Head of Product at Palantir, now Founder of Common Sense.

Yaroslav
Yaroslav

Software Engineer at Google Brain and early Research Engineer at OpenAI.

Caroline
Caroline

CEO & Co-founder of Toca Boca, joined SPC to start 2nd company Leap, now COO of Luma AI.

Henry
Henry

Co-Founder of Super.com, now Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic.

Nikhil
Nikhil

Director of AI Research at Salesforce, now Research Scientist at Meta.

Pete
Pete

Creator of Coinbase Wallet and Cipher Browser, now Engineering Lead for USDC.

Vivek
Vivek

AI Researcher at Meta, now Lead Researcher behind Med-PaLM and Med-PaLM 2 at Google.

Jessica
Jessica

Cofounder & CEO/COO at U.S. Digital Response, Fellow at Code for America & Aspen Institute.

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.

About Member Residency

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.

Programming

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.

Residency vs. 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.

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