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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Sam
Applied ML and fishing enthusiast. Former ML eng at Waymo and Google.
Shishira
Shishira is a PhD student at UMD working on video compression and understanding. He has experience with labs at Snap and Apple and was also a researcher at IISc Bangalore. Currently passionate about building systems that understand the world!
Kshitij
Co-founder of Orb, building billing infrastructure for modern software teams. Previously led real-time infrastructure at Asana. Studied computer science and philosophy at Caltech and was part of the South Park Commons founder fellowship.
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.
Craig
Craig Stanton is a Partner focused on investor relations, based in Boston. Craig previously led capital formation for Sierra Ventures, Commerce Ventures, and Top Tier Capital Partners, and held business development roles at Freebird (acquired by Capital One) and Monitise (acquired by Fiserv). He holds a BA in Biochemistry, Cellular and Molecular Biology from Connecticut College.
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.
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.
Lora
Interested in amplifying human agency and personal fulfillment when AI takes over production. Currently building consumer AI that's embedded in real life: fun, safe, and truly personal. Previously did research in interpretability & agents.
Scott
Scott was a senior engineer at Addepar and studied at Harvard. He was the absolute winner of IOI 2014.
Benjamin
New founder after 8+ years at Stripe. Building Substrate: the best inference APIs for the top open-source AI models. Talk to us if you're interested in super fast SDXL infra or other use cases!, I spent the last 8 years at Stripe, where I was the founding engineer on Stripe Terminal, drove the acquisition of Index, and post-launch led integration experience and global expansion for the Terminal product. I've run teams large (50) and small, led mobile strategy across Stripe with @shreyas as my mentor, and spent the last 2 years working on Stripe Connect. I'm so excited to be building something new with Rob Cheung, who I met at Venmo.

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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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