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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Nagasrikanth
Founder in Robotics & ML. Built Explorer AI, a large-scale mapping platform for autonomous vehicles (acquired by Standard Cognition). On a mission to bring robots 🤖 into everyday life. CMU alum & yoga teacher 🧘🏻‍♂️.
Priya
Priya co-founded ZestMoney (India’s earliest BNPL fintech) in 2015. Prior to Zest, Priya was at Wonga.com, a UK fintech company. Priya has had stints in investment banking and consulting. Education - MBA from London Business School, B.Tech from IIT BHU.
Tarin
I am working on tackling robotics and AI by throwing out almost all of the existing paradigms. Instead, I want to develop and refine ideas around artificial life, virtual biology, etc. This will draw heavily on simulations, and biological principles. Furthermore, I am seeking to stand up a new type of organization to do this, a cross between a venture-studio, research-lab, and a traditional start-up. Bio: Angel investor and technologist, 20+ years of experience, Apple (Autonomous Vehicles), CTO @ Voyage (Autonomous Vehicles, acquired by Cruise), Director R&D @ CTRL-Labs, (Brain Machine Interfaces, acquired by Meta), US Army Research Labs / Naval Underwater Warfare Center / RADAR/SONAR imaging and autonomous systems / Neurosys computational neuroscience. (BSEE @ GMU 2004 / MSEE @ George Washington University 2007)
Vivek
Vivek has been an AI researcher at Google, working on applied AI problems in healthcare. Earlier, he worked at Facebook AI research on multimodal assistant systems.
Scott
Software Engineer with experience in Autonomous Driving, VR/AR and On-Device Machine Learning. North Carolina -> SF Bay Area.
Dmitry
I'm interested in exploring applications of AI and LLM models into fields from search, recommendations, SWE productivity, or creative productivity tooling. I've worked on products, teams, and systems in ML and data, and has built teams from early to late stage at consumer social, B2B SaaS (security) and looking into new domains.
Michael
Michael Lai's six word story is “failed professional athlete, striving education entrepreneur.” He is currently building Tinycare, a network of micro daycares aiming to fix the childcare crisis. Previously, he built Promise, a nonprofit venture studio for early childhood development, Minerva Project, Google.org, and competed on Harvard's varsity golf team (where he was decidedly NOT the next Tiger Woods). His passion for education starts from the classroom — 6 years volunteer teaching preschool, elementary, and middle school.
Ning
Ning came from Meta FAIR where he worked as a research engineer on speech/text translation and multimodal LLM. Ning is exploring the intersection of AI applications and SMS platforms.
Jaclyn
Jaclyn worked at Alphabet for 7 years in a variety of operational roles. She helped launch Google Helpouts (a consumer marketplace to deliver expertise over live video) and most recently worked at CapitalG helping portfolio companies scale.
Allen
A bit on my background: - Born & raised in Minnesota - Most recently, Chief of Staff at Zip ($2.2B procurement SaaS) - Formerly, PE Investor at Bain Capital, Econ grad at Harvard & bootstrapped DTC founder. - I like backpacking, golfing, and recently got into motorcycling!

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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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