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.

Apply
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.

See More
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.
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.
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.
Howard
Howard founded Betty Labs, makers of consumer social apps for die-hard fans, later acquired by Spotify. Prior to that he led product teams at Facebook and Pinterest.
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.
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.
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.
Jie
Jie has been part of the OpenAI research team since 2016. He was previously an early engineer at Dropbox.
Nishant
Co-founded Color (color.com), left in early 2020. Currently investing in companies at the intersection of biology + engineering.
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.

Our Spaces

San Francisco
New York
Bengaluru

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.

google ai
South Park Commons
380 Brannan St, San Francisco, CA
© 2025 All rights reserved.
South Park Commons
380 Brannan St, San Francisco, CA
© 2022 All rights reserved.