Marco Sanvido Joins SPC as Visiting Partner
We are thrilled to announce Marco Sanvido has joined the South Park Commons team as a visiting partner. Marco's impressive career as an engineering leader and advisor will be invaluable to the overwhelmingly technical membership at SPC.
Marco has spent over 20 years in the tech industry cultivating early stage engineering teams into powerhouse organizations. He likes to say his approach to building companies closely aligns with the Brachistochrone curve principle: to get from point A to point B the fastest, take the time to build a proper foundation in order to accelerate later.
After completing his PhD and postdoc in computer science, Marco transitioned to industry with stints at VMware and Hitachi Research before joining Pure Storage as an early engineer. A career of leadership experience eventually led him to the VP of Engineering role at Robust Intelligence. He also spent time working on incubations with Sutter Hill Ventures, expanding his exposure across the entire company-building lifecycle, from ideation to scale.
When he joined, we asked to Marco about his approach to early stage building, engineering rabbit holes, and why he's excited to dive into the -1 to 0 phase. Read on for answers, and welcome Marco!
What drew you to SPC?
For the past 15 years, I've worked with startups (Pure Storage, Styra, Memverge, Robust Intelligence), starting with small engineering teams and helping them scale. What I saw over and over was how important the earliest stages of anything are. Decisions you make at the beginning affects the trajectory of everything later. So, when the opportunity arose to join SPC and assist teams during the critical -1 to 0 phase, I couldn't refuse. It's a community built around the Brachistochrone curve principle.
What are your largest areas and markets of expertise?
I mostly work on hard technical problems at the intersection of distributed systems and infrastructure. Lately I have shifted specifically toward AI workloads and agentic systems (apps that use AI for reason and actionability). But my strength lies in helping engineering teams get stuff done. I like to follow a "servant leadership" style—removing obstacles, supporting the team when needed, staying out of the way when things work well, and only intervening when things derail.
In what ways do you see these early building stages impact engineering teams further down the line?
In my experience, I've seen teams take money from venture firms too early, creating false validation (distracting the engineering team), and pulling focus from the core product direction. By scaling too quickly without being appropriately scrappy, you lose velocity in the long run. As the startup journey progresses, the focus will shift towards experimentation, validation and execution. It is my firm belief that the initial conditions during this chaotic stage will have a significant impact on the startup's eventual success. This is where I can bring substantial value, by identifying potential risks and how to avoid them so engineering teams can focus on what matters most.
As an investor, what do you look for when evaluating a potential investment?
The ability of AI to empower small teams to create and implement innovative solutions and companies means that identifying the right mix of talent, curiosity, and problem-solving will be essential for successful investments (the right team can now build amazing products that were unthinkable only a few years ago).
The SPC community is the fertile ground, sort of a primordial soup for startup formation, and the -1 to 0 journey is where the magic happens. Traveling that ideation journey alone is very hard and having a team of curious, talented, and like-minded people with diverse backgrounds is the key to ideate and navigate towards something that is not a local maxima, but a global one. I love that framing.
I'm excited to leverage my experience working with talented engineers to find teams who have incredible execution velocity, raw curiosity, and are fearless and ambitious to tackle hard-to-solve problems.
What's something you're looking forward to working with SPC founders on?
I've always had great mentors and advisors, and I want to pay it forward by helping others achieve incredible things. Nothing makes me prouder than seeing people I've worked with, mentored, or advised accomplish something amazing. SPC is the perfect place to do that and I cannot be more grateful to the SPC team for allowing me to be part of the community.