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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Bilal
Bilal is the elected Supervisor for San Francisco’s District 5, representing neighborhoods including the Tenderloin, Haight-Ashbury, and Japantown. A former tech executive and nonprofit leader, he previously served as Head of Product at Amplitude and Executive Director at Electric Action. He’s also the founder of the 13 Fund, supporting equity and local journalism.
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
Jie
Jie has been part of the OpenAI research team since 2016. He was previously an early engineer at Dropbox.
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.
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.
Sam
Sam did a PhD in Algebraic Combinatorics before working at Google and most recently Scale, where he built the incentive system.
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.
Antonio
Built some stuff (YC, Facebook, Branch, etc.), wrote some stuff ('Chaos Monkeys'). Currently building Spindl.xyz.
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.
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.

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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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