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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Matt
Matt is a Principal Scientist at Adobe, focused on building tools for creative work. Previously founded Facet, a content-aware image editing platform, and held engineering roles at Operator and Kinema. With a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon, he brings deep expertise in simulation, machine learning, and interactive media.
Vijay
I'm a Stanford C.S. grad with 25+ years of experience, mostly in gaming but also feature film visual effects and consumer and enterprise software. I love games, teaching, building tools, karaoke, climbing, and fantasy books.
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.
Daniel
Daniel Tatenko, seasoned detective - focused on leveraging AI to streamline crime reporting, reduce officer workload, and improve public safety by enhancing collaboration between law enforcement and the community.
Josh
CTO at Generally Intelligent, an AI research company focused building human-like intelligent systems. Angel investor. Always happy to help or chat about AI, ML, or anything I've worked on previously (crypto, VR, finance, manufacturing, gaming, etc)
Raveesh
Ex-product lead @ Netflix, LinkedIn, Haptik.ai. Returning to engineering roots. Exploring ML tooling (but curious about other areas!)
Jitendra
Jiten is the co-founder and CSO of PlanetScale, where he previously served as CEO, helping scale it into a leading serverless database platform. He’s a former engineer at Dropbox and U.S. Digital Service expert, and now advises founders as a board member and executive coach.
Arun
2x Founder SmartPhones, Fintech, AI Samsung, Startups, Govt, Non-Profits
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.
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.

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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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