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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Ruchi
Ruchi Sanghvi is the founding member of the SPC Community. She was the first female executive at Dropbox and served as their Vice President of Operations. She was responsible for product, marketing, communications, recruiting and other functions. She came to Dropbox through its acquisition of Cove, a company she founded in 2011. Prior to that Ruchi was the first female engineer at Facebook, and was instrumental in implementing the first versions of key features like News Feed, Facebook Platform, Facebook Connect and Privacy. Ruchi has also served as a director on the board of Paytm, India’s largest mobile payments platform, and is currently on the board of UCSF. ‍ Prior to SPC Ruchi was an active angel investor in 50+ companies including Gusto, Pinterest, Paytm, Brex, Figma and Stemcentrx. Ruchi holds a bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Electrical Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.
Vivek
Vivek was the lead researcher behind Med-PaLM and Med-PaLM 2 at Google. Earlier, he worked at Facebook AI research on multimodal assistant systems.
Chris
Co-founder and former CTO of Planet Labs, where he led spacecraft and constellation design for one of the world’s largest Earth imaging networks. Previously a Space Mission Architect at NASA Ames, where he developed low-cost spacecraft and led commercialization efforts including the Phonesat Project.
Caroline
Caroline is the COO of Luma AI, helping people create through Dream Machine’s generative video technology. Previously co-founder and CEO of Leap and former CEO of Toca Boca, one of the most downloaded kids’ apps globally.
Antonio
Built some stuff (YC, Facebook, Branch, etc.), wrote some stuff ('Chaos Monkeys'). Currently building Spindl.xyz.
John
ML leader with experience in recommendations and humans-in-the-loop. Alum of Square and Stitch Fix. Here to learn and explore by doing. Currently fascinated by LLMs. "The future is already here—it's just not evenly distributed [yet]." –Neil Stephenson
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.
Howard
Howard founded Betty Labs, makers of consumer social apps for die-hard fans, later acquired by Spotify. Prior to that he led product teams at Facebook and Pinterest.
Temina
Currently exploring technologies that support human agency at Agency Fund. Joined SPC from machine learning startup Atlas AI. Co-founded and led the Center for Effective Global Action, a think tank focused on human and economic development.

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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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