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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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.
Jessica
Believer in people and cultivator of civic life, often using tech. Former lives: Cofounder & CEO/COO @ U.S. Digital Response; Fellow @ Code for America & Aspen Institute; local govvie; edtech builder. Field trip schemer, forever poet, persistent host.
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.
Jie
Jie has been part of the OpenAI research team since 2016. He was previously an early engineer at Dropbox.
Sonia
Currently metalearning across multi-agent reinforcement learning, web 3, speculative science fiction, and multi-billion dollar bets... Twitter: @soniajoseph_
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.
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.
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
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.
Bilal
Bilal is the elected Supervisor for San Francisco’s District 5, representing neighborhoods including the Tenderloin, Haight-Ashbury, and Japantown. A former tech executive and nonprofit leader, he previously served as Head of Product at Amplitude and Executive Director at Electric Action. He’s also the founder of the 13 Fund, supporting equity and local journalism.

Our Spaces

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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