South Park Commons helps you go from -1 to 0

SPC is a home for the most talented technologists and founders figuring out what's next—a community designed to turn the illegible into the inevitable.

Our Story

PAths THROUGH SPC

Community

A home for people looking for open-ended exploration, learning, idea testing, and relationship-building. If you're actively exploring what to do next, we'd love to meet you.
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Fellowship

Founder Fellowship: A structured, guided path through the -1 to 0 phase for anyone committed to starting a venture-scale company but still navigating ideation. Up to $1M investment, 1:1 partner mentorship, small cohorts, and no set deadlines or demo days.
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Funding

The SPC Fund also works with select entrepreneurs who are not part of the community. We partner with founders primarily in the pre-seed or seed stage, leveraging our operational expertise and the broader community to help you achieve your vision.
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OUR APPROACH

Why join SPC?

Slope instead of intercept

Pre-idea investing is founder-centric investing. We are more interested in potential than we are in traction.

Founder-market fit

The low-hanging fruit has been picked. We set founders up for category-creation, not digital co-option.

Long-term partnership

Great ideas take time. We embrace the messiness of ideation, don’t rush founders, and partner with founders longer than any other investor.

It takes a community

-1 to 0 takes you unexpected places. We take a whole-team approach to supporting the journey—and embed founders in a community dedicated to it.

Member Stories

Anurag
Amit
Waseem & Jeff
Abiel & Andres
Tom
Bilal
Ashton
Trisha & Clarence
James & Dylan
Harsh
Anurag Goel
Anurag

How did Anurag Goel turn side-projects into a company?

A graduate of IIT in India and employee #8 at Stripe, Anurag joined SPC knowing only that he wanted to take on big problems. He built apps around healthcare, deep learning, and real-time communication, while helping other members with their projects. All this building and feedback revealed the opportunity for a new platform that could radically simplify DevOps. Render was born and subsequently has become one of the fastest growing tools in the developer ecosystem, raising $150M+ to date.

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Render
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Amit Jain
Amit

Building the foundation for a multi-modal future, starting with 3D.

Amit joined SPC in 2021 after working on cutting-edge camera tech at Apple, driven by a fascination with NeRFs, a new way to turn photos into rich 3D models. As he explored the frontier, he saw a bigger shift coming—the world is multi-modal, and AI will be too. That insight sparked Luma, where he's built state-of-the-art image, 3D, and video models powering a new generation of immersive, AI-native content. The company has since raised $150M+ to bring this vision to life.

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Luma
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Waseem Daher & Jeff Arnold
Waseem & Jeff

Two founding members went on to start the first SPC unicorn.

Both engineers from MIT, Waseem and Jeff co-founded two companies together that were successfully acquired before they helped found SPC. They were instrumental in building the culture and ethos of the community. This dynamic duo left SPC to start Pilot, the first company founded out of SPC to reach a unicorn ($1B+) valuation.

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Pilot
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Abiel Gutierrez & Andres Santos
Abiel & Andres

Banking built for those who’ve been left out—starting with Latino immigrants.

Abiel and Andres grew up just 30 minutes apart in Monterrey, Mexico, but they only crossed paths during the Fall 2021 Fellowship, when they discovered a shared frustration for navigating the U.S. banking system as immigrants. That experience led them to start Comun, a neobank designed from the ground up for Latino immigrants: Spanish-first, simple to use, and offering everything from remittances to peer-to-peer transfers. It's now one of the fastest-growing companies at SPC.

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Comun
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Tom Brown
Tom

He joined to start a consumer company. He left to do AI research.

A software engineer and serial entrepreneur, including co-founder of Grouper, Tom joined SPC to explore ideas for a new consumer startup. While in the community, Tom ended up diving into a peer learning group exploring machine learning topics. He graduated to join Google Brain and later OpenAI, leading the engineering team for GPT-3. He has since founded his own AI safety and research company, Anthropic.

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Bilal Mahmood
Bilal

A founder and policy wonk takes first principles to politics.

After serving as a policy staffer in the Obama Administration and later successfully exiting a startup he founded, Bilal joined us to explore how he could put his experiences to use for his community. He decided to bring a data-driven, first principles mindset to politics, becoming the first SPC member to run for office and successfully winning a bid for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

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Ashton Eaton
Ashton

A 2x Olympic gold medalist joined to figure out what to conquer next.

Ashton won gold medals as a decathlete for the US in back-to-back Olympics. After retiring from the sport, he joined SPC to figure out what he wanted to put his talents toward next. He explored systems design and became passionate about engineering, graduating to join Intel as a product engineer.

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Trisha Kothari & Clarence Chio
Trisha & Clarence

From meeting at SPC to starting a $800M company together.

Trisha joined SPC after stints as an early engineer and product manager at Affirm. Clarence joined to explore new topics while writing an O'Reilly book on Machine Learning and Security. They met and discovered a shared interest in security and fintech, eventually graduating to combine their skills and start Unit21, now one of the fastest growing fintech startups with $50M+ in funding.

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Unit21
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James Cadwallader & Dylan Babbs
James & Dylan

Helping brands navigate the shift to AI, one search at a time.

James and Dylan met around the lunch table at SPC NYC and quickly bonded over a shared curiosity: what happens when AI becomes the default interface to the internet? That exploration led them to join the Spring 2024 Fellowship and go all in on Profound, where they're building the tools behind AIO—the next generation of SEO—to help brands track, improve, and influence how they're represented across AI systems.

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Profound
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Harsh Sikka
Harsh

Harsh came to SPC to research the question: what comes after ChatGPT?

Harsh joined SPC in early 2024 after a career in AI research and academia at Georgia Tech, driven by a desire to push model capabilities even further. At Metarch, he’s pioneering Frontier AI systems that can navigate open-ended, multimodal environments and interact with software, APIs, and tools to get real-world work done. Metarch is laying the foundation for the next generation of AI systems.

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Metarch
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NEWS AND EVENTS

The Case for Talent Density in -1 to 0
Article
Gopal Raman
Recapping SPC Winter 2025 Demo Faire
Article

-1 to Satya Nadella

SPC will host Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft, for a special fireside chat on March 4th.

What is -1 to 0?

Defining a crucial stage of company-building—and why you should take it seriously.

How to go from -1 to 0

The worldbuilder approach to generating and validating venture-scale startup ideas.

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South Park Commons
380 Brannan St, San Francisco, CA
© 2025 All rights reserved.
South Park Commons
380 Brannan St, San Francisco, CA
© 2022 All rights reserved.
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