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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Malcolm
Malcolm was the first employee at Asana and worked on many pieces of the infrastructure there. Before that he was on the Android team at Google and wrote much of the initial version of Gmail for Android.
Jie
Jie has been part of the OpenAI research team since 2016. He was previously an early engineer at Dropbox.
Yi
Yi is an assistant professor of statistics at UChicago. His research is in probability and applications to machine learning and high dimensional statistics.
Ola
Ola is a member of Technical Staff at OpenAI. Prior to that, he was an early engineer at Facebook and an active contributor to civic tech efforts through U.S. Digital Response.
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.
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.
Nishant
Co-founded Color (color.com), left in early 2020. Currently investing in companies at the intersection of biology + engineering.
Tim
Founder and CEO of Zulip, a powerful team chat platform for distributed engineering teams. Previously co-founded Ksplice (acquired by Oracle) and led major infrastructure projects at Dropbox. MIT-trained engineer with deep expertise in building robust, developer-centric systems.
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.
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.

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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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