Great ideas rarely emerge from isolation

SPC 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 -1 to 0. Over the last decade, over 1,000 members have joined us to start companies, pursue research, and find their life's work.

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Malcolm
Senior engineer at Google on Android team, first employee at Asana, now Managing Partner at Strong Atomics.
Kushal
Chief Research & Data Officer at Opendoor, now Advisor at SPC.
Jessica
Cofounder & CEO/COO at U.S. Digital Response, Fellow at Code for America & Aspen Institute.
Chris
Co-founder and former CTO of Planet Labs, previously Space Mission Architect at NASA Ames.
Jie
Early engineer at Dropbox, Member of OpenAI Research Team since 2016.
Howard
Product leader at Facebook, Pinterest. Founded Betty Labs, makers of consumer social apps for die-hard fans.
Trisha
Early engineer and PM at Affirm, now CEO of Unit21.
Tuhin
Former Data Scientist at Gumroad, explored widely at SPC, now Co-founder & CEO of Baseten.
Nikhil
Director of AI Research at Salesforce, now Research Scientist at Meta.
Henry
Co-Founder of Super.com, now Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic.

Our Spaces

About Member Residency

-1 to 0 isn’t a side project. It's a full time endeavor. Member residents spend 6 months at SPC ideating, validating new areas, finding collaborators, and building conviction in what they want to work on. Most are pursuing founding endeavors, but 30% are doing independent research or building outside the startup track entirely. We’ve had high-agency individuals of all kinds, from academic researchers to Olympians, join SPC to work alongside one another on new projects. Like any hard thing, it’s better done together.

Programming

Day to day programming includes peer accountability groups, learning forums, and workshops on the latest technological frontiers. We also facilitate roundtables and conversations with industry heavyweights such as Satya Nadella, Vinod Khosla, Fei-Fei Li, and more. The greatest value of the member residency is the community of talented peers it embeds you in. Figuring out where to dedicate the next stage of your life is best done in the most talent-dense environment possible. Our primary product is talent curation.

Residency vs. Fellowship

Member Residency and the Founder Fellowship are both paths to joining SPC. The Founder Fellowship supports technologists who know they want to start a company and are ready for funding to help. Member Residency is open to technologists who may or may not know they want to start a company and are not yet ready for funding. If you’re planning to fundraise soon, we may instead ask you to apply for our Founder Fellowship.

Next Steps

We accept new members on a rolling basis and will start processing your application whenever you apply. We go through every application and you’ll generally hear from us within 1-3 weeks. If we're moving forward, we'll invite you to an interview to learn more about you.