Before 2015, I had the opportunity to work at two rocket-ship-ride startups: Facebook & Dropbox. They were exhilarating, creating products that impacted millions, cultures built for innovation, and lifetime relationships.
Leaving felt like crash landing. I missed the adrenaline of building at the frontier, I missed the focus of a singular mission, but most of all I missed the camaraderie. So I set out to recreate it while figuring out my next project.
It started with 10 people around my dining table reading new AI papers. We were inspired by historical learning societies like Benjamin Franklin’s Junto Club and the Bloomsbury Group. Without knowing it, this group of early engineers from Facebook, Dropbox, and Stripe was solving -1 to 0. Our solution became South Park Commons.
- Ruchi Sanghvi, Founding Member
South Park Commons began in 2016 around Ruchi’s dining table. There was no plan. Just ten people, each pursuing their own project, with a shared commitment to keep showing up. Over time, a clearer idea took shape: to build a space for that exact phase—when you don’t yet know what comes next, but you know you want to build something meaningful.
Later that year, South Park Commons became a physical space in San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood. Two years later, we raised a venture fund to back companies started within the community and introduced the Founder Fellowship for those still building conviction. Expansion followed—first to New York City, and most recently to Bengaluru.
-1 to 0 is the term we coined to describe the challenge SPC solves. It's the stage when you figure out what you want to dedicate the next 5-10 years of your life to building. It's also a philosophy of ideation—a commitment to taking the process of "figuring it out" as seriously as you take building whatever "it" turns out to be.
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Great ideas don't emerge from isolation. We believe you are much more likely to discover something worth building in a dedicated cluster of people who share the same goal. The keys are talent density and curiosity. To set yourself up for success in -1 to 0, seek an environment where interruption and interrogation are features, not bugs.
Going from -1 to 0 is an act of worldbuilding. You're not just solving a near-term problem or building something people want right now. You're pulling some piece of the future into the present. From helping over 1000 members through the ambiguity of ideation and validation, we've developed a repeatable process for reaching conviction—and turning the illegible into the inevitable.
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Minus one is more than a stage. It's a mindset of perpetual reinvention that separates founders who build enduring companies from those who settle. The best founders return to Minus One again and again, planting new fields even when the current harvest looks good. We believe that restless ingenuity is the founder's real moat.
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