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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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.
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.
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.
Tido
Tido is a co-founder at Koala. Prior to that, he was Chief Product Officer (overseeing eng, product, design, and security) at Segment. Before that, software engineer @ Dropbox and Facebook.
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.
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.
Sonia
Currently metalearning across multi-agent reinforcement learning, web 3, speculative science fiction, and multi-billion dollar bets... Twitter: @soniajoseph_
Andrew
Andrew is the co-founder and CTO of Speak, building technology to reinvent how people learn, starting with language. He's former Thiel Fellow and Stanford PhD dropout in neuroscience and bioengineering.
Sam
Sam did a PhD in Algebraic Combinatorics before working at Google and most recently Scale, where he built the incentive system.

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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