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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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.
Nick
Previously co-founder/CTO of Gem, led eng/product/design through Series C. Eng manager at Facebook before that. Now working on starting something new!
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.
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.
Malcolm
Malcolm was the first employee at Asana and worked on many pieces of the infrastructure there. Before that he was on the Android team at Google and wrote much of the initial version of Gmail for Android.
Ashton
2x Olympic gold medalist in decathlon from London 2012 and Rio 2016. Studying mechanical engineering to work on energy or space. Education and human performance important too.
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.
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.
Yaroslav
Yaroslav came from OpenAI where he worked on algorithms to run neural networks under resource constraints. Previously he worked at Google Brain where he designed a system to replace manual StreetView labeling pipeline with a neural network.
Tom
Tom is the co-founder of Anthropic. Previously led engineering for GPT-3 at OpenAI, scaling it from 1.5B to 170B parameters, and contributed to foundational work on RLHF.

Our Spaces

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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