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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Praveen
Praveen Chekuri is the Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Ascend, the first modern insurance payments platform that provides automated payments, financing, & payment operations. Previously he's worked at Hippo, Houseparty & Instacart.
Matthew
PhD in RL, building new ways of using RL + LLMs
Jackson
Founding CEO of Mentor Collective (edtech). Led company to 100s of customers and 4x listings on Inc 5000. Stepped into Chairman role after 10 years and now exploring new ventures.
Winston
I like building
Ayush
Focused on AI-augmented reading tools and modeling human behavior. Did a PhD in Computer Science (Machine learning and Recommendation Systems) at Stanford, Masters in Economics; undergrad at IIT Bombay Computer Science. Previously co-founded MoveUp AI and worked at Google. Always open to connecting — reach out to discuss mutual interests!
Damon
Software engineer & technical leader in Games. I've worked in the industry for 15 years at studios ranging from my own startup to AAA. If you're interested in the games space hit me up.
Jon
'- Toronto → SF → Beijing → SD → SF → DC - i really loved being a part of early Coursera, and i see so much of that at SPC. glad to be here. - currently exploring NFTs, web3, developer productivity - i'm very deep on frontend engineering (mostly the back of the frontend) as well as developer productivity and engineering culture.
Liam
Grew up in Canada and moved to SF immediately after graduation. Worked with an investor briefly and then spent 5 years growing Meter, working across product, operations, and sales. I'm now in NY and interested in a variety of fields like computing infrastructure and healthcare.
Tim
Tim Shi is the Co-Founder & CTO of Cresta. He started his PhD at Stanford AI Lab researching natural language processing and reinforcement learning. He was an early member of the OpenAI team in 2016 and made contribution to building safe AGI in digital environments. His work on "world of bits" laid foundation for web-based reinforcement learning agents. He co-founded Cresta in 2017 and Cresta was one of first companies to deploy generative AI in enterprise, including GPT based suggestions product in 2019. Cresta is backed by top investors including Sequoia, a16z, Greylock and helps drive hundreds of millions in ROI across Fortune 500 customers like United Airlines, US Bank and Verizon. He and his team hold multiple patents in AI for contact center conversations.
Harsha
Career in I-Banking and Fund Management. 3rd time founder. Enthusiastic gamer. Bangalorean.

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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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