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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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.
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.
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!
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
Connor
Connor is the CEO, co-founder of Speak, an AI Speaking App that teaches users English. Prior to that, Connor created Flashcards+ which is an education app used by over 5 million students worldwide and eventually sold it to Chegg.
Yi
Yi is an assistant professor of statistics at UChicago. His research is in probability and applications to machine learning and high dimensional statistics.
Nishant
Co-founded Color (color.com), left in early 2020. Currently investing in companies at the intersection of biology + engineering.
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.
Antonio
Built some stuff (YC, Facebook, Branch, etc.), wrote some stuff ('Chaos Monkeys'). Currently building Spindl.xyz.
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.

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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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