Nobody in Silicon Valley cares what you did a decade ago. Even more so now, when a month in AI time can feel like years in SaaS time.

This ecosystem runs on obsession with the future. It doesn’t matter if you started a company twenty years ago and took it public. If you’ve stopped building, you’re forgotten. There’s an egalitarianism here which I haven’t found anywhere else in the world. That quality is Silicon Valley’s superpower.

But lately, I’ve watched it curdle into something destructive.

The average tenure at startups keeps compressing. I see brilliant researchers cycling between labs every eighteen months, never staying long enough to push past the frontier they wanted to explore. Founders wind down companies after a year, not because they tested the idea and lost conviction, but because the initial excitement wore off and something shinier appeared. I see engineers treat career progression like a video game. Collect the title, vest the cliff, move to the next stage.

To be clear, there’s good speed and there’s bad speed.

Good speed is table stakes. It’s strategic velocity, when you take fast signals seriously and pivot from stagnant ideas. Learning cycles get compressed and execution compounds, getting you from insight to iteration before the world has caught up.

Bad speed is impatience that pretends to be ambition. It optimizes for novelty over depth and doesn’t let you sit long enough inside the unglamorous stretch where the real edge is formed. Because the truth is that the frontier rarely yields itself in the first six months.

The danger today is that AI’s pace can make constant reorientation look like progress. Every week brings a new model, a new lab, a new interface, a new consensus. Reorientation at good speed can be strategic. But when everyone is perpetually restarting at bad speed, nobody stays long enough to discover something non-obvious. And increasingly, that’s what bad speed looks like: an ecosystem optimized for perpetual beginnings, but allergic to the endurance required for real breakthroughs.

The harder skill now is discernment, knowing when a pivot reflects genuine new information and when it’s simply fueled by fear, impatience, or the seduction of momentum itself.

AI tools make it dangerously easy to generate forward motion. You can prototype faster, test faster, ship faster, and convince yourself faster that you’re on the right path. But lower friction can also mean accelerating false starts and finding yourself in a local maxima.

Finding the right footing at the very beginning matters more than ever. In a world where it’s cheap to build almost anything, the real edge is choosing what is actually worth building and staying with it long enough to learn something the market doesn’t know yet.

Why Depth Always Beats Bad Speed

You don’t really understand a problem until you’ve lived inside it for a while. Trust with a team isn’t built in a quarter. Neither is the kind of institutional knowledge that lets you see second- and third-order consequences before they happen. The most valuable professional assets (judgment, relationships, domain expertise) compound. Cut the timeline short and you never reach the part of the curve where the returns become extraordinary.

When I visited hard-tech companies in El Segundo, where teams are building electric boats, nuclear reactors, and space habitats, what struck me wasn’t just the ambition. It was the time horizon. Conversations there stretch decades, not quarters. Nobody talks about disruption. They talk about what needs to exist and the painstaking work of figuring out how. There’s a seriousness to that kind of building that you lose when you’re optimizing for eighteen-month cycles. It reminded me of old-school Silicon Valley, before everything became a show, when people built things because someone had to build them.

If you only spend a short amount of time on a project, the most you can do is modify an existing solution. You can make something faster, cleaner, cheaper, more polished. But genuine novelty demands a different kind of compounding. You have to compound toward creation, not toward endless modification of what already exists.

In a world where AI is compressing the time it takes to execute, compounding matters more, not less. When powerful tools can handle more of the building, the bottleneck shifts to knowing what to build and why. That kind of judgment doesn’t come from a weekend with a new model. It comes from years of accumulation.

We live in fast times. AI is rewriting the assumptions underneath entire industries. The temptation to optimize for optionality is completely rational. But grit, resilience, and loyalty will be eternal traits of the best people. No amount of speed changes that.

This past month SPC members brought hardware to the stage, shipped new products, and sat down with leaders building at the intersection of AI and the physical world.

Events at SPC

We hosted Minus One to Replit, featuring co-founders Amjad Masad and Haya Odeh. Later we were joined by Nikesh Arora, chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks, for a conversation on cybersecurity and AI. Nato Saichek, co-founder and CTO of Longshot Space, shared how his team is building a giant pneumatic cannon to shoot satellites into orbit. Amit Jain, co-founder of Luma AI and SPC alum, discussed how he's pushing toward unified general intelligence that can perceive and act in real-world environments.

In NYC, OpenAI, Ramp, Nominal, and Dataland joined us on a panel to break down what forward-deployed engineers really do, and how they're collapsing deployment cycles.

Our recent Demo Night in SF surfaced another wave of wacky and wild explorations, from visual hearing aids to sleepwalking inside generative models. In Bangalore, SPC India hosted escape velocity, bringing together teams building at the frontier of space, defense, and dual-use technology.

Member Updates

Product Launches, Company News & More

• Zain & Eddie launched Flipbook, a prototype that streams every pixel on your screen directly from a model. No HTML, no layout engine, no code.

• Oliver & Ben released Mesa, the first POSIX-compatible filesystem with built-in version control, designed for enterprise AI agents.

• Ben, Grey, & Aditya launched Bevel 3.0, the health platform that unifies your biometrics, medical records, and life context into one AI-powered coach and data analyst.

• Emma launched Scriben, a pen that acts as a second brain for knowledge workers.

• Andrew shared how he turned to AI to research his girlfriend's brain tumor after two surgeries fell short, deciding to push the frontier of medical research himself.

Coming Up

• Human Agency in the Intelligence Age with Jason Crawford (SF), May 4th

• -1 to Snowflake with Sridhar Ramaswamy (SF), May 6th

• Design Chat with Dylan Babbs, CTO at Profound (NYC), May 7th

• -1 to Razorpay with Harshil Mathur (BLR), May 14th

• Embodied AI Hackathon (SF), May 15th-17th

Thanks for reading! The work continues.

We’re entering the next era of AI: post-prompting. As we reach the apex of manual prompting capabilities, the actual frontier lies in autonomous agents and spatial canvases. You should not have to coax an AI step-by-step through a build. You should drop it in a repository, give it a directive, and let it operate in the background. It should push solutions to you, not wait to be pulled.

We spoke with Replit co-founders Amjad Masad and Haya Odeh last month at SPC. The future is clear: we’re entering a new era of autonomy.

1. Infinite coherence unlocks true autonomy. A year ago, agents lost their minds after an hour of operation. Today, with embedded evaluation loops and unit tests, models can stay on track indefinitely.

2. The pre-training plateau forced a pivot. The current leap in agent capabilities is driven by reinforcement learning and models reasoning through their own compressed context windows.

3. Agents must push, not pull. You should not have to coax an AI step-by-step through a build. Autonomous agents must operate in the background, understand your organization, and proactively deliver solutions.

4. The defining bottleneck is amnesia. Today's interfaces force you into a tedious loop—re-explaining your project, re-arguing your intent, micromanaging a tool that forgets everything between sessions. The winning systems will passively retain context, infer intent from your usage patterns, and shift the dynamic from negotiation to expectation.

5. The UI is shifting to the spatial canvas. Typing is too slow. The future of interaction is multi-modal. It looks less like a terminal and more like Iron Man’s lab: a mix of voice, touch, and spatial manipulation.

6. The big labs abandoned UX. OpenAI and Anthropic are building raw engines. They are ignoring the user experience to focus on model scale. This leaves a massive, lucrative space for founders to invent the actual interface.

7. Consolidate or die. Context switching kills velocity. The winning developer environment places the mobile app, the backend, and the investor pitch deck onto a single, unified canvas.

8. Syntax is dead; logic is king. The role of the engineer switches permanently when AI graduates from a Q&A chatbot to a persistent background operator. You start orchestrating complex systems instead of boilerplate.

9. Vibe coding weaponizes domain expertise. The profile of a builder changes when natural interaction replaces rigid prompt engineering. The next great applications will be built by domain experts solving their own complex problems.

Watch the full Minus One talk with Amjad and Haya, out now on YouTube.

Minus One is series about the winding journeys the world’s most interesting people take to becoming great—and what they do when figuring out a question we all face: What’s Next? Because before you launch at Zero, you have to figure out what to launch at Minus One. Hosted by South Park Commons Partners.

Interested in SPC? Apply to join us here.

Real, working demos are hard. Making them excellent is harder. Our portfolio companies in India stood up to the challenge. Packed room. Epic stories. Energy you can’t find anywhere else.

Here’s a quick highlight reel, followed by the demos from SPC companies.

Maya

You don’t expect a combination of singing, dancing, movie-making and world-building in just one demo. But that’s exactly how Dheemanth Reddy started things off. He and Bharath Kumar are building Maya — the voice interface for the majority of the world to access all frontier AI models.

SurgeGrowth

We all love the idea of scale. But who’s building the structures that will scale in the agentic future? Vaibhav Dusad, Joe Kochitty and Shivam Mishra are—with SurgeGrowth. SurgeGrowth gives operators the command center to design and run complex agentic operations at scale.

GameRamp

Have you ever broken out in hives at the mention of the term “let’s take this offline,” or the dreaded… “circle back?” Thankfully, Shashank Vandgrangi and Vivek Ramachandran from Gameramp are solving for that with Actioneer—the agentic decision layer for growth teams, where AI agents continuously detect opportunities, drive recommendations, and drive action!

Armor

“What do I do with my money? What’s the right decision, from among many possible scenarios?” These are questions that keep us up at night. Thousands of financial products, changing regulations, and uncertain life situations have overwhelmed India’s mass affluent. Yogesh Tomar and Biswanath Patel are building Armor—a proactive financial planner with a hedge-fund grade quant engine, and emotionally aware AI that starts by understanding the person.

SuchamaAI

Manufacturing involves high-stakes environments, where unpredictable changes can lead to massive downstream losses. And yet, factory planning runs on brittle legacy software—hardly built to adapt. Sanjay Shekhawat and Ayush Agarwal are building SuchamaAI—the context-aware intelligence layer for manufacturing that adapts in real time to changing scenarios in man, material, machine, and method.

Fest

Social media promised us connection. It has created anything but. Likes, swipes, endless scrolling... trolling, even. Harish Uthayakumar and Samesh Lakhotia are building for real connection in the age of AI, with Fest — to help everyone feel seen, heard, and understood.

Cent Health

If you or a loved one has ever known what it means to have be dependent on luck rather than certainty for a health outcome—Cent Health is the answer that removes luck from the equation. Shashank ND, Arpit Garg, and Anshul Khandelwal are building an AI-led preventive health intelligence platform focused on early detection of 300+ life threatening diseases—across cancer, cardiac, neuro, and metabolic conditions.

We are excited to be part of each and every one of their journeys, and cannot wait to see what’s next.

Interested in SPC? Apply to join us here.

Events at SPC

March at SPC was packed. We hosted a Minus One conversation with Elad Gil, fireside chats with Stephen Wolfram (Wolfram Research), Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face), and a Design Chat with Sam Stephenson, exploring how Granola approached their recent (and controversial) rebrand. We also hosted Dr. Fei-Fei Li (World Labs), who shared her perspectives on finding a north star and building with intentionality.

SF’s Demo Night showcased explorations from digital public squares to ambient intelligence. Across the globe, SPC India hosted its 2nd-ever Demo Faire in Bangalore—the room was packed for live demos!

Fund Updates

• Sentience raised a $6.5M seed round led by Bain Capital Ventures to build AI that emulates and multiplies individual human minds.

• Nyne raised a $5.3M seed round co-led by Wischoff Ventures and SPC to build people intelligence infrastructure for AI systems.

• Escargot raised a $2.75M seed round co-led by Wischoff Ventures and Hannah Grey VC, with participation from SPC, to build the greeting card company for the 21st century.

We also kicked off our Founder Fellowship S26 cohort. These companies are building across the spectrum. Space. Energy. Robotics. Agent swarms. Quantum. Biotech. Now's the time to be maximally ambitious, together.

Member Updates

Company News & Product Launches

• Luma launched Uni-1, their newest model that both thinks and generates pixels simultaneously.

• Durable launched their AI builder that helps people launch a new business in minutes.

• Simular launched Sai, the always-on AI co-worker.

• Lica opened early access to their platform, allowing you to turn image model visuals into editable layers.

• Noble Machines debuted their autonomous humanoid robot, Moby, at NVDIA GTC.

Personal Projects, Explorations & Publications

• Jason publicly launched Neuron, AI-native messaging.

• JackJack launched PUNK, turning your phone into a remote control for Claude Code.

• Alex’s AI Language won 1st prize in the Scope competition for its real-time VLM approach.

• Lucas published a blog post on modeling physical motion with AI.

• Kion open-sourced CLaaS, a framework for updating LLM weights in real time.

Coming Up

• Building at the Frontier: A Panel at SPC NYC (NYC), March 31st

• -1 to Replit with Amjad & Haya (SF), March 31st

• SPC Demo Night (SF), April 9th

• -1 to Longshot Space with Nato Saichek (SF), April 15th

Recently Released

Evan explores where founders can still build safely as the AI labs expand their reach in Avoiding the Eye of Sauron, and Aditya reflects on what it means when the skill you’ve spent decades mastering becomes free overnight in When Your Life’s Work Becomes Free and Abundant.

Thanks for reading!

Interested in SPC? Apply to join us here.

Most founders are using an outdated map. The SaaS playbook doesn’t work anymore.

We hosted Elad Gil at SPC for a fireside chat a few weeks back. He might be the biggest crusader against conventional wisdom that I know. Here are a few takeaways.

1. Lingering on stagnant ideas is the most common and fatal mistake founders make right now. The market is moving with unnatural velocity. If your product is not gaining immediate traction, the market is giving you a clear signal. Kill it and move on. When a product works in this market, it works quickly. There is no prize for bleeding out slowly over three years on an idea that nobody wants.

2. Culture is winning. Culture is not kombucha on tap. It is not ping-pong tables or offsites. Fast traction is the only culture that matters. When a startup is growing exponentially, every operational sin is forgiven. When growth stalls, every minor friction point becomes a cultural crisis. Focus entirely on moving the metrics. The culture will follow the traction.

3. Foundation models have crystallized into a capital-intensive oligopoly. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google control the frontier. Open-source models survive primarily through the massive balance sheets of companies like Meta. Competing at this base layer without billions in compute and a hyperscaler partnership is a dead end. The infrastructure map is drawn. Startups must accept this reality and build higher up the stack.

4. Buyers are uniquely open to unproven tools right now. Corporate boards have mandated AI strategies from the top down. Every CEO is asking their team for an AI plan. Big law firms are notoriously slow adopters of technology, yet they adopted Harvey early. This willingness to experiment is unprecedented. The sales cycle has compressed. Startups must capitalize on this temporary window before procurement departments return to their usual friction.

5. Delegation is a trap. Scaling founders are consistently told to hire executives, step back, and delegate. This is a trap. Delegation is necessary for organizational scale, but stepping away from the product is fatal. Builder CEOs consistently outperform. Unapologetic micromanagement is not a flaw. It is a requirement. The transition from maker to manager ruins companies when founders lose their grip on the core product details.

6. You don’t always need a co-founder. Silicon Valley insists every startup needs a co-founder. This is a recent invention. Accelerator programs normalized the equal-equity duo to simplify batch processing. Historical data rejects this entirely. Michael Dell built his company alone. Jeff Bezos built Amazon alone. Larry Ellison drove Oracle by himself. Solo founders can and do win.

7. Incumbent reaction time is compressed. Startups used to enjoy a five-to-seven-year grace period. You could build a wedge before legacy players even noticed you. That window no longer exists. Incumbents are hyper-aware of the AI shift. They are moving faster to deploy capital and clone features. Startups must assume immediate retaliation from incumbents. Speed of execution and deep customer integration are the only ways to survive the compressed reaction time.

8. The single-product startup is dead. Silicon Valley used to preach doing one thing perfectly. That is a luxury founders no longer have. If you build a single tool that is ten times better, an incumbent will build a “good enough” version and bundle it to their existing customers for free. Because AI drastically accelerates how fast your team can ship code, cranking out multiple, deeply integrated products from day one is the only way to survive the incumbent cross-sell.

9. The actual open frontier for startups lies in agentic workflows. Text generation is a solved problem. The immediate technical challenge is moving to systems that maintain persistent memory. These systems must execute complex, multi-step actions across different environments autonomously. That is where new enterprise value will be captured. The winners will not just summarize data. They will execute work.

10. Building software from scratch and fighting for enterprise distribution is no longer the only path. The new -1 phase looks like a buyout. Founders are executing AI-driven rollups. They buy legacy businesses in stagnant verticals, strip out operational bloat, and radically expand margins using AI. It requires a non-consensus triad of skills. You need the ability to buy assets, drive operational change, and deploy deep AI expertise. You buy the distribution, then automate the operations.

Navigating this frontier requires unnatural velocity. The founders who succeed will be those who ignore the outdated map.

Watch the full Minus One talk with Elad on YouTube.

Minus One is series about the winding journeys the world’s most interesting people take to becoming great—and what they do when figuring out a question we all face: What’s Next? Because before you launch at Zero, you have to figure out what to launch at Minus One. Hosted by South Park Commons Partners.

Interested in SPC? Apply to join us here.

The opportunity has never been greater. Neither has the risk of building the wrong thing. I spoke to the SPC community about the state of the market for founders building in and around AI. Weeks of debate followed, and the conversation continues to evolve.

It increasingly feels like founders are building under the Eye of Sauron. In Lord of the Rings, the Eye of Sauron is an all-seeing force. Once it fixes on you, there’s nowhere to hide. Today, the foundation model labs are starting to feel the same way and the line of sight is only getting bigger.

Competition is no longer one-dimensional. There are now four vectors: incumbents, other startups, the foundation models themselves, and—most importantly—your own customers.

The labs aren’t just building better models. They’re arming your customers.

To understand what that means for you, evaluate your startup across three dimensions.

1. Buyer Capability: Can your customers actually wield the new AI tools?

2. Buyer Agency: Are they empowered to just go build?

3. Product Architecture: Is your product primarily workflow or chassis?

While capability and agency are about your buyer’s skill and autonomy, product architecture asks where your product sits in the stack.

• Workflow lives at the interface layer — the surface users directly interact with to get a job done.

• Chassis is the underlying layer — data, security, orchestration, identity and access, compute, deployment. The enabling infrastructure that everything depends on.

The more your product lives at the workflow level, without deeper roots in chassis, the more exposed you are.

If your buyers are high-agency, high-capability, and your product is mostly workflow, you’re at real risk of them building their own version of your product. I’ve seen it firsthand — internal teams spinning up bespoke tools in days that would have taken months to procure and implement a year ago.

Companies At Risk

Run those dimensions together and a few patterns emerge. This may be sobering, especially if it describes your starting point.

Software for software companies. For founders building horizontal workflow applications for high-agency, high-capability organizations, this is aimed at you. If your customer’s team looks a lot like yours (talented engineers with access to frontier models), you’re in danger. They’ll just build it themselves.

Startups and mid-market tech companies are the most dangerous ICP in 2026. We’ve heard this firsthand from internal teams at startups and mid-market tech companies building their own versions of workflow tools they used to pay for — what would have taken months to procure and implement a year ago is now a weekend project. And it’s not just them. Engineers at multiple frontier labs are doing the same thing.

One conclusion here is that low capability + low agency customers who used to seem “boring” (enterprise-focused, services-heavy, slow procurement) are now relatively attractive. The slog is the moat.

Building around model deficiencies. Look at video and image apps. A year ago, it might have been sufficient to say “it doesn’t do inpainting well” or “character consistency in video is broken.” That kind of thinking is now a losing bet.

Model capabilities are non-linear. The behavior is so emergent that what’s hard today becomes trivial tomorrow.

You should assume that the models will eventually do everything.

Build something that gets stronger as the models improve. Not something they make obsolete with the next release.

How To Survive

Survival hinges on how you respond. It’s no longer whether you can build—it’s whether you know what to build, and why, before the window closes.

Strategy can’t wait. Everyone can build fast now. I met two non-technical founders in New York who built fully-fledged products in two days. That’s incredible, but it also means build speed is table stakes.

The old playbook was to build something cool, raise money, figure out the hard stuff later. You had a few years of runway to figure out your strategy. That’s over. The premium is now strategic speed. Technical founders have to lean into the discomfort of answering questions that used to wait until Year 2. The questions about who you’re really building for and where the puck is going now need answers in months, sometimes weeks. You have to be intentional from Day -1.

Go deep on domain. AI is the ingredient. Domain mastery is the product. Find a space where you understand the customer, the workflow, and the problem better than any lab ever will. Legal, healthcare, energy, agriculture, construction — these are industries delivering services and goods, not building software. They’re low technical capability, low agency, and the enterprise go-to-market is hard enough that the labs won’t bother.

One useful reframe: imagine every lawyer, financial analyst, contractor and nurse as a software engineer with domain knowledge. What would you build that these hybrids would need?

Seek out human problems. Selling. Change management. Trust. Compliance. Network effects. Community. The edge is who can get closest to the customer, navigate procurement, and do the messy work of actually getting customers to discover, buy and adopt technology.

Any place where the problem is fundamentally about people, that’s where to focus.

Build chassis products. Chassis is how you end up on Sauron’s side, not under its threat. There are deeply technical problems (AI research loops, bare-metal deployment at scale, compliance and audit infrastructure, SCIM management) where coding agents don’t meaningfully outperform experts over the next 24 months. At the same time, enterprises want these new capabilities but aren’t built to absorb them. If you can build the systems that let companies safely accept and leverage AI capabilities at scale, that’s a powerful position.

Atoms over bits. AI meets robotics, drones, hard tech, science, and biology — and the rules change. A coding agent can’t weld a joint, fly a survey mission, synthesize a compound, or validate a clinical finding.

The moats here are real: proprietary hardware, physical distribution, regulatory approval, and years of operational data that can’t be scraped. These are categories where the foundation model companies aren’t coming for you…yet.

This isn’t meant to be all doom and gloom. In many ways, this is the most exciting time to build in decades.

Yes, Sauron’s line of sight is larger. But the opportunities have never been greater. Customers are eager to try and buy new tools. Companies are clearing seven figures in revenue per employee. What once required large teams and months of work can now be built by a handful of people in days.

The founders who win won’t just build faster.

They’ll pick problems the Eye can’t see.

Interested in SPC? Apply to join us here.

Grant Lee, cofounder and CEO of Gamma, joins South Park Commons GP Jonathan Brebner to share how the "worst idea ever"—an investor's words before he hung up—became a $2B AI unicorn taking on PowerPoint and Google Slides.

Grant gets into what most founders get wrong when competing against entrenched incumbents, why hiring “painfully slowly” was one of Gamma's biggest advantages, and how to build a team where hard problems feel like play. He also covers how Gamma survived the Silicon Valley Bank collapse with two weeks to go before a make-or-break launch, and why founders who want to build an audience online have to push through “cringe valley” first. Watch select snippets below.

Gamma isn’t focused on competing with other startups, they’re changing how people create presentations in the first place. The real challenge is behavior change.

Early discomfort isn't a sign you're doing something wrong. When you’re sharpening storytelling skills, you have to go through “cringe valley” first. Grant’s audience is now a key growth channel for Gamma.

Three years ago, SVB collapsed two weeks before Gamma’s planned launch. The team earned a few resilience points in the process.

Grant’s Minus One Journey: Gammafied

Minus One is series about the winding journeys the world's most interesting people take to becoming great—and what they do when figuring out a question we all face: What's Next? Because before you launch at Zero, you have to figure out what to launch at Minus One. Hosted by South Park Commons Partners.

Interested in SPC? Apply to join us here.

Not long ago, I spent a weekend writing code with Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant. I’ve been programming for more than 20 years. I was one of the first engineers at Facebook, where I built the original search engine. I went on to become chief technology officer of Dropbox, where I scaled the engineering team from 25 people to a thousand. Code has been the foundation of my career, the craft I’ve spent my adult life mastering. And after that weekend, one thing was very clear to me: We will never write code by hand again. Something I was very good at is now free and abundant.

While I was building software with AI, I also noticed that the AI agents elsewhere were building social networks, the very product I helped create at Facebook. Little coding agents were spinning up functional social platforms for themselves. It’s all a bit silly, but what they produce is kind of indistinguishable from what humans built on the larger internet. Both the form and the function of my early career are now being produced by machines.

I sat with that for a while, and what I felt was wonder mixed with a profound sadness. There’s something deeply disorienting about watching the pillars of your professional identity, what you built and how you built it, get reproduced in a weekend by a tool that doesn’t need to eat or sleep.

But here’s the thing about disorientation: It passes. And what replaced my sadness was something I didn’t expect: a kind of wild, almost reckless energy.

In the five days after that weekend, I produced more code than I had in the previous five years. That is not an exaggeration. The software I was making was better than the code I had produced on my own in the past, and far more ambitious. Things I would never have attempted before, because the cost of building them would have been too high, suddenly became possible in an afternoon. I wasn’t watching myself become obsolete. I was watching the constraints I’d accepted my whole career dissolve.

That shift, from sadness to mastery, reveals something important about this moment. The conversation around AI and work has calcified into two camps. The doomers say we’re all going to be replaced, and the boosters say everything will be fine. Neither camp captures what it actually feels like to live through this. The truth is messier. You can hold wonder and grief in the same hand, mourn a version of yourself while sprinting toward a new one.

What I’ve found more interesting than my own experience, though, is what I’ve observed in the people around me. I run South Park Commons, a community and venture capital fund for builders who are figuring out what to work on next. Through SPC, I see hundreds of engineers, founders and technologists navigating this shift in real time. And there’s a pattern that keeps surfacing: The old playbook for evaluating talent is breaking down.

One of our members recently ran about 20 work trials for engineering hires—essentially, extended, weeklong job interviews—and found zero correlation between years of experience and adaptability to AI tools. Another member told me that what predicted success in hiring people who possess that adaptability was evidence of a builder’s disposition: cool personal websites, side projects, an obvious love of making things. FAANG on the résumé and a name-brand university, meanwhile, predicted almost nothing.

A third member shared something even more striking. His company started giving tasks that were intentionally too long to complete by hand during coding interviews. The assignment became a remarkably clean filter: You could quickly tell who was using AI tools in their daily work versus who had merely been reading about them. The gap in the number of lines of code the two groups write wasn’t 10%. It was closer to 10x.

This might sound like a narrow observation about the software industry, but I think it’s something bigger. We are in the middle of what may be the largest shift ever in how knowledge work gets done. And the trait that matters most isn’t intelligence, or credentials or years of experience. It’s someone’s relationship with change—not whether they’ve seen change before, but whether they run toward it.

There’s a common assumption that younger workers will adapt more easily and older ones will resist. But the dividing line isn’t generational—it’s dispositional. Willingness to change seems to operate as an independent variable, cutting across age and seniority in ways that defy easy categorization. I’ve watched 15-year industry veterans pick up these tools and absolutely crush it, while some recent graduates treat AI as an abstraction to be debated rather than a tool to be used.

As an investor, this realization has reshaped what I look for in founders. The people I’m most excited about aren’t the ones with perfect pedigrees. They’re the people who seem constitutionally unable to stop tinkering, who get antsy when things stay the same, who treat every new tool like a puzzle they need to solve before the day is over. I’ve started to think of it as the difference between your résumé and your restlessness. I’d bet on restlessness every time.

Silicon Valley has always been one of the most meritocratic industries, but that has never meant credentials and experience don’t matter here. They just matter less. Now they are going to become even less important.

Paul Ford wrote beautifully in The New York Times about vibe coding’s potential to democratize software, to put the power of building into more hands. I share his optimism. But I’d add that this democratization isn’t just about access to tools. It’s a reordering of what we value in people. We spent decades building a culture that worships credentials and experience. Those things aren’t worthless, but they’re no longer sufficient. The new currency is adaptability, and unlike a Stanford degree, it’s available to everyone.

If anything, this shift is teaching me what it is like to be human again—not human in the romantic, AI-can-never-replace-us sense, but human in the uncomfortable sense, the part where you have to let go of the thing you were in order to become the thing you might be.

That’s always been the hardest part, long before AI. The technology just made it impossible to ignore.

This article was first published in The Information.

Aditya Agarwal is a general partner at South Park Commons. He was previously chief technology officer of Dropbox and an early engineer at Facebook.

Interested in SPC? Apply to join us here.

When Tony Xu cofounded DoorDash 13 years ago, he was rejected by more than 100 investors. Today, it’s a $70B+ behemoth dominating the delivery industry.

Tony joins SPC General Partner Aditya Agarwal to reveal how DoorDash won the delivery war and answer the burning question of whether AI agents pose a threat to his company. He also shares why customer obsession became the company’s guiding principle, the challenges of digitizing the physical world, and how startups today can build competitive advantages in the age of AI. Watch select snippets of the talk below.

DoorDash is currently dominating the delivery industry, but what will happen when new consumer AI agents hit the market?

Perfection is not the goal. Not every experiment becomes the final answer. Teams at DoorDash focus on quickly testing and shipping solutions.

DoorDash struggled to raise capital in its early days. Tony personally remembers being rejected by over 100 investors. Today, the company is valued at over $70B.

Minus One is series about the winding journeys the world's most interesting people take to becoming great—and what they do when figuring out a question we all face: What's Next? Because before you launch at Zero, you have to figure out what to launch at Minus One. Hosted by South Park Commons Partners.

Interested in SPC? Apply to join us here.

Events at SPC

South Park Commons celebrated our 10th anniversary the best way we know how: live demos. Amidst the science fair-style booths, founders, members, alumni, and friends gathered to discuss building the future (and see it with their own eyes). At its foundation, our community is shaped by curiosity and the willingness to stay with the unknown. What began as ten people gathered around Ruchi’s dining table, has grown into something enduring.

In celebration of a decade, we shared our 10-year anniversary video—a reflection on what it means to keep showing up before the idea exists.

The momentum didn’t stop there. We hosted a Minus One conversation with Tony Xu (DoorDash CEO) and a talk on Consciousness, Intelligence & Spirituality with Swami Sarvapriyananda. Demo Night in SF spotlighted explorations on the frontier. In Bangalore, SPC India hosted Building for Bharat, a demo night showcasing founders building for the Indian market, and a fireside chat with the Anthropic CTO, Rahul Patil.

Fund Updates

It’s been a remarkable start to the year for SPC companies.

• Baseten raised $300M Series E at a $5B valuation, led by IVP and CapitalG to power model inference for app companies at scale.

• Render raised $100M in a Series C extension at a $1.5B valuation led by Georgian to give developers an intuitive path to reliable and scalable cloud infrastructure.

• Profound raised $96M in a Series C at a $1B valuation led by Lightspeed to build AI agents that take marketing from concept to execution and define how brands are represented in an AI-first world.

• Goodfire raised a $150M Series B at a $1.25B valuation led by B Capital, advancing the frontier of AI interpretability for LLMs.

• Koah raised $20.5M in a Series A led by Theory Ventures to power monetization for AI-native applications with privacy-first, LLM-native ad formats.

• Fulcrum raised $25M in combined Seed + Series A funding led by CRV to build AI-first workflow automation for insurance brokerages.

• DealMomentum was acquired by Salesforce. The conversational insights and revenue orchestration platform will be integrated with Agentforce 360 to ground agents in the voice of the customer.

• ProducerAI was acquired by Google Labs to enable artists to create and refine songs through AI-powered collaboration.

Member Updates

Product Launches & Company News

• Nirva debuted at CES 2026 — an AI wearable designed to be worn all day that journals your life, tracks mood, and offers personalized guidance.

• Kenneth & Oliver launched Bedside, taking coordination work off clinicians’ plates, so they can spend more time delivering care.

• Sunain Labs open-sourced Sunain Gameplay, a ~2M-frame dataset of gameplay data for world models and video generation.

Personal Projects, Explorations & Publications

• Raveesh published a deep-dive on continual learning.

• Bryson wrote a blog post on conditioning diffusion models.

• Ed published research on finetuning multiagent systems end-to-end as a novel workaround for catastrophic forgetting in continual learning.

• Vatsal wrote an article on World Models, drawing from philosophy and ML to offer a fresh perspective on the space.

Coming Up

• Fireside Chat with Julie Zhuo (BLR), March 3rd

• Minus One to Elad Gil (SF), March 5th

• Beyond Belief with Nir Eyal (NY), March 11th

• SPC India Demo Faire (BLR), March 17th

• -1 to World Labs w/ Dr. Fei-fei Li (SF), March 18th

Team Updates

We’re excited to share three team promotions!

• Jonathan Brebner is now a General Partner. Formerly SPC’s Chief Storyteller, he helped shape -1 to 0.

• Mark Jacobstein joins full time as a General Partner after 6 months as a Visiting Partner.

• Dylan Itzikowitz is now Partner and Head of SPC NYC, where he’s led the community’s growth

Recent Content

We released new conversations with Andrew Yang, Waseem Daher, and Anurag Goel on the Minus One Podcast. From AI’s broader societal impact to the day-to-day realities of building companies, these are real looks at decisions in motion.

Thanks for reading! The work continues.

Interested in SPC? Apply to join us here.

“We’re heading towards a job-killing tsunami for the average American.”

Andrew Yang saw it coming before almost anyone else. In 2018, he warned that without a plan to handle job displacement, AI would destabilize society. Now, he says the crisis he feared is no longer hypothetical—and that the political violence and social unrest we’re already seeing are just the beginning.

Andrew joins his early mentor, SPC General Partner Mark Jacobstein, and Aditya Agarwal to unpack where we go from here: what UBI might look like in practice, why coders are more at risk than truck drivers, and why his new company, Noble Mobile, will actually pay you to use your phone less.

Yang was an early AI visionary, but he admits he got the sequencing wrong. As a presidential candidate, he warned truck drivers and call center workers. He now says he should have warned management consultants, law school grads, and coders.

Yang’s early career was shaped by a series of failures. All those experiences taught him one thing: rejection isn't fatal.

The political system is “held hostage” by the 11% who vote in party primaries, so candidates go to the extremes. Andrew has a system fix.

Minus One is series about the winding journeys the world's most interesting people take to becoming great—and what they do when figuring out a question we all face: What's Next? Because before you launch at Zero, you have to figure out what to launch at Minus One. Hosted by South Park Commons Partners.

Interested in SPC? Apply to join us here.

“I think the mission basically doesn’t matter.”

Waseem Daher, CEO of Pilot (and South Park Commons alum), has a contrarian theory about what actually drives startup success—and it’s not passion for the problem you’re solving.

Waseem joins General Partner Aditya Agarwal to unpack the real patterns behind building companies: why his “thinking time” after Dropbox was torture, why he believes passion is an output rather than an input, and why the conventional wisdom on hiring and delegation is dangerously wrong.

Passion is the output, not the input. If you're searching for purpose, find great people and build alongside them.

Every idea comes with a thousand reasons why it won't work. You can spiral forever. Pick your most interesting idea and go test it.

Waseem is speaking from experience when he says that the milestones won't make you feel like you've “arrived.” The game never ends.

Minus One is series about the winding journeys the world’s most interesting people take to becoming great—and what they do when figuring out a question we all face: What’s Next? Because before you launch at Zero, you have to figure out what to launch at Minus One. Hosted by South Park Commons Partners.

Interested in SPC? Apply to join us here.

South Park Commons started ten years ago, the way many meaningful things begin: quietly, messily, and without a clear plan.

There were ten people around my dining table. At first, everyone was confused. What was this group of people–all of whom wanted to work on their own projects–going to do together? No structure, no brand, no certainty. Just a handful of people showing up for something that yet didn’t exist.

I remember what it was like back then. It took courage to quit our jobs, lose our sense of identity, be vulnerable, and acknowledge to ourselves and the world that we were figuring it out.

So we built a place to show up in that moment. Where ambition didn’t require loneliness. Where people have the courage to linger on the questions worth asking.

Because that moment—the honest “I don’t know yet,” the liminal space between ideas—is where the future is created.

SPC: a learning community

SPC started as a learning community. We drew inspiration from communities that encouraged and incubated out-of-distribution ideas. Ecosystems like Xerox PARC, Benjamin Franklin’s Junto club: groups of people who took ideas seriously and each other even more so.

We explored frontier technologies before they were categories. AI, robotics, space, cryptography, new markets that didn’t yet have clean narratives. SPC was a place where people took the time to explore, tinker, and build together.

Because that’s what we were: builders, pushing each other to discard good ideas for actually great ones. And to do so, we cultivated a space for talent density, high-trust feedback, and a culture that treats ideation as craft.

Over the next decade, SPC grew from those 10 people around my kitchen table to more than a thousand members. Today, 25,000 people apply to SPC every year. We now have physical homes in San Francisco, New York City, and Bangalore.

But SPC isn’t about the numbers, it’s about the people and what emerges when they choose to show up for each other.

The stories that only happen in community

There’s a particular kind of transformation I’ve seen, again and again, at SPC. It’s subtle at first, but gathers momentum through weeks of tinkering. Conversations over lunch. A half-baked demo that invites the right question at the right moment.

It looks like Anurag, already successful and credible, showing up with generosity, helping others, sharing work, iterating in public long before there was a crisp “this is the thing”. And in that steady rhythm of contribution, something emerged. Patterns sharpened and Render was born.

It looks like James and Dylan, who met at SPC to become cofounders building Profound. One of SPC’s underrated superpowers is that it’s an inherently high temperature environment. There’s a ton of productive entropy and chance collisions. Not the shallow kind, but the kind that only happens when people keep showing up long enough to build trust.

It looks like Max, who moved out to California in an RV to be at SPC and eventually build Ironsite. That’s not a networking move. That’s not “checking out the scene”. That’s someone saying, with their whole life, this matters.

And it looks like Ashton, an Olympic gold medalist, walking into SPC not for a career pivot, but for a deeper reinvention. Imagine what it takes to be world-class at something and then voluntarily become a beginner again. To trade mastery for curiosity.

These stories are different on the surface, but underneath, they share an ethos: a talented person in -1, surrounded by other talented people, telling the truth, iterating in public, and building momentum within the community.

And not everyone graduates into a startup. Some join research labs. Some become core open-source contributors. Some go into public service. The point isn’t a predetermined outcome.

The point is finding your life’s work.

Interested in SPC? Apply to join us here.

What does it feel like to bet your company on AI when everyone's talking about a bubble?

Anurag Goel, CEO of Render and former employee #8 at Stripe, joins SPC General Partner Jonathan Brebner to share why he's going all-in on AI infrastructure. The SPC alum breaks down the honest debates happening inside his company, why vulnerability builds more trust than the "always confident" founder persona, and how random events (like his wife's grad school decision) led to his early days at Stripe.

Stripe’s employee #8 could've retired. Instead, he gave himself 6 months to find his life's work.

Some people are worried about the AI bubble. Anurag’s perspective: valuations might be bubbly, but actual value is being created. We all use AI daily. Apps are genuinely useful.

A serendipitous series of events led to the founding of Render. The randomness wasn't pure chance. It emerged from Anurag being in motion, solving problems, and showing up.

Minus One is series about the winding journeys the world's most interesting people take to becoming great—and what they do when figuring out a question we all face: What's Next? Because before you launch at Zero, you have to figure out what to launch at Minus One. Hosted by South Park Commons Partners.

Interested in SPC? Apply to join us here.

First with FreeCharge and now with CRED, he has truly traversed a journey of what it means to build for as diverse and complex a market, as India.

On Minus One, he shares why technology works best when it flows with human insight, why the best builders need to relentlessly keep asking “why?”, and what makes people truly aspire for something.

Connect with us here:

1. Kunal Shah- https://www.linkedin.com/in/kunalshah1/ 

2. Prateek Mehta- https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-mehta-a571972/ 

3. South Park Commons- https://www.linkedin.com/company/southparkcommons/

Timestamps:

00:00 Trailer

01:17 Introduction

03:47 Philosophy and Sales Shaping Perspectives

06:48 Human Motivation and Product Success

33:56 Key Traits for Startup Success

41:46 Design and Aesthetics Matter

47:26 Innovative Marketing

55:48 Wealth, Health, and Business Success

Apply Here by Feb. 1st

The Founder Fellowship is not an accelerator. We’re not here to rush you toward a deadline on your first idea with a bit of traction. You don’t even need traction to apply. Or an idea.

We’re here to help you find what matters. You just need the ability and ambition to build at the frontier. Software, hardware, consumer, enterprise, security, biotech, energy, space—we’re endlessly curious to meet anyone asking big, unanswered questions.

Everything is accelerating. The cost of getting stuck at local maxima is going up. These next few years are an unprecedented window of opportunity. Don’t waste them on something small.

SPC is the best place to see the future—so you can build it.

Apply by February 1st.

FAQ

What is the SPC Founder Fellowship?

The Founder Fellowship is the best way for ambitious technologists to become founders and build at the frontier. Fellows get: 

• $1M in funding. We offer $400K for 7% up front and $600K in your next outside-led round so you can pitch investors from a position of strength.

• Direct partner mentorship. Each company works directly with SPC partners several times per week. You will have access to the entire partner team.

• Open timelines. Work on validating ideas and fundraising on a timeline that makes the most sense for your company. When you’re ready, you’ll have access to Demo Faire events and bespoke fundraising support from the SPC team.

• Unmatched talent density. The SPC community is the most talent dense network of technologists in -1 to 0. This is, by far, the most valuable part of the fellowship.

How is the Founder Fellowship different from SPC Member Residency?

The Founder Fellowship is our funded program for people who know they want to start a company and are ready for capital. It includes a more concentrated curriculum and partnership with the SPC team.

The Member Residency is for people even earlier in their -1 to 0 journey, either before they are ready for funding or before they have decided that a company is the best way for them to build the future. Many residents go on to join the Founder Fellowship. Both are members of the larger SPC community. You are welcome to apply to either.

How long does the Fellowship last?

Upon acceptance, Fellows immediately become SPC members and get full access to our community, partners, offices, and programming. 

The Fellowship has no fixed end date, but does have two distinct phases: 1) bootcamp and 2) residency. During bootcamp, teams work in-person to build, demo, and share feedback in San Francisco or New York City. Afterward, fellows become residents of SPC, a flexible phase with full access to our offices and partners that lasts as long as you need to reach conviction and prepare for a fundraise.

• Immediate Funding & Membership. You become Fellows and members of SPC as soon as you are accepted and sign investment terms. We fund teams immediately—you don’t have to wait for the bootcamp. You gain immediate access to all SPC offices, events & programming, and our online community.

• Bootcamp. Small cohorts with direct partner mentorship. Each company works directly with SPC partners several times per week on everything from customer discovery and product development to branding, storytelling, and pitching. Fellows also join weekly demos, pitch practice, skill workshops, and exclusive events.

• Residency. We want you to work on the right idea, not necessarily the first idea. This can take time, so the residency period lasts as long as you need. Fellows remain full SPC members with access to offices, programming, and partner support. Once you’re ready to raise your seed round, SPC partners will help you prepare your pitch and make white-glove introductions to the right investors.

Do I need an idea to apply?

You do not need an idea to apply, but you do need to show us how you will generate ideas. Be prepared to discuss technical approaches, relevant research, markets you find interesting, previous ideas you considered and discarded, and any insights you find compelling.

We also welcome applicants who know what they want to build—we’ll help make sure you’re prepared to spend the next decade building it.

Is the Fellowship limited to specific industries, domains, or founder profiles?

No, our only strict requirement is ambition to build at the frontier. We actively encourage non-traditional founders to apply, including researchers still a long way from turning their research into product. We have backed space tech, robotics, consumer hardware, biotech, AI research labs, enterprise security, fintech, and a variety of agent and software companies. 

Can I apply as a solo founder?

Yes. If you apply as a solo founder, we have a strong bias for applicants who have the skills to build and prototype. If you are accepted as a solo founder, you may benefit from a co-founder, and we can help in the search process. Previous fellows have found co-founders in the SPC community.

What are the Fellowship funding terms?

• Terms: $400k upfront for 7% on a standard SAFE, plus an additional $600k guaranteed in your next external funding round. 

• Credits: We offer over $900k in credits and perks from companies including Baseten, OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure, GCP, AWS, Render, RunwayML, Figma, and many more.

What are the upcoming cohort application deadlines, program dates, & location logistics?

• Application Deadline: 11:59pm PT on Sunday, February 1st.

• Interviews: All applicants will hear back about whether they have received an interview invitation by February 28th. 

• Program Dates: The Spring 2026 Fellowship Bootcamp runs from late March to late May.

• Kickoff: We host a kickoff week starting with a private retreat in Northern California and in our San Francisco office.

• Location: All fellows are required to work for the duration of the bootcamp from one of our offices in San Francisco, New York City, or Bangalore. After the bootcamp, teams can relocate to where they plan to build their company, though we encourage teams to remain in a city with an SPC location.

Who is behind the Founder Fellowship?

The Founder Fellowship is organized by South Park Commons and run by SPC investors Ruchi Sanghvi, Aditya Agarwal, Finn Meeks, Evan Tana, Jonathan Brebner, Arian Agrawal, Prateek Mehta, Mark Jacobstein, Marco Sanvido, Danh Trang, Dylan Itzikowitz, Gopal Raman, and Ankit Chowdhary. We are builders, entrepreneurs, technologists, and investors who love helping founders pull the future forward.

South Park Commons Companies

We have partnered with a number of breakout companies at the earliest stages of their journeys. We are sector-agnostic and focus on exceptional people. SPC companies include Baseten, Goodfire, Profound, Doppel, Luma AI, Deep Cogito, Orb, Simular, Comun, Pulley, Under Control Robotics, Bevel, and many more.

 In this episode of Minus One, Vidit Aatrey talks to Prateek Mehta about the high-conviction journey of building Meesho — from early uncertainty and brutal trade-offs to cracking scale in one of the hardest consumer markets in the world.

We talk about why most startups fail to truly understand India, what Meesho got right (after getting a lot wrong), and the long game required to build something that actually lasts.

This is the builder’s story — about patience, lifelong learning, and designing for realities…not fantasies.

The Microsoft CTO joins Aditya Agarwal to discuss navigating his Minus One days, the partnership with OpenAI, why the most valuable problems to solve are often the ones others ignore, and why building great things has never been easier, cheaper, or faster.

Together, they draw on real stories from Silicon Valley and reflect on what it will take to unlock India’s deep tech potential. The investor gives crucial insight into the mindset, the team, and the personal qualities required to build meaningfully in the age of AI.