South Park Commons Uses Five Dimensions to Identify Early-Stage Founders

Lessons on spotting talent from a decade of investing at the frontier.

South Park Commons exists to do three things:

Find outlier technologists

Create the most talent-dense environment for them to expand their ambitions

Invest with conviction, today, into the most important ideas of tomorrow

We are maniacally focused on attracting and evaluating talent far ahead of success. We serve the most ambitious founders at (and ahead of) the formation stage.

To do so, we first need to be able to recognize greatness when we see it.

In this letter, we’ll dive into how we evaluate the founders we seek out, where their interests have led us (and are leading us) to invest, and why we believe this model will lead to durable returns in a rapidly accelerating world.

Most venture firms talk about the founders they want to work with as "spiky." We agree but have always been unsatisfied by the lack of falsifiability, specificity, and repeatability of that term. We find that spikiness is more a “magnitude” than a clear “direction” to seek out. We want SPC members to spike, but not in a general sense; we seek out founders who clearly demonstrate excellence in five core dimensions:

Curiosity

Clarity

Depth

Magnetism

Engine

For each of these qualities, we’ll unpack both how we define the term and also illustrate how our north star of finding outlier talent has consistently led us to important themes and categories well ahead of the market.

Importantly, our model of in-person community affords us the unique advantage of gaining area under the curve over many months to better understand how these qualities develop over time in our founders. We believe in slopes rather than y-intercepts. The most salient data points along that curve emerge from positive-sum and collaborative in-person relationships, not 2-3 meetings of a founder performing a practiced pitch.

Curiosity

This is, in many ways, the foundation of SPC's culture. People join us to explore their ambitions in a community of other curious people. Oftentimes, the missions people end up embarking on come from divergent conversations with people they would’ve otherwise never met. We seek variance in both our individual members and the emergent networks that form at SPC.

We define “curious” people as:

Generative: They are constantly tinkering. We care less about legible, prestigious experience and more about obsession.

Original: They have a history of building unusual, non-incremental things (often, these are not businesses – they may be research papers, side projects, creative artifacts).

Polymathic: They can connect insights across disparate domains.

Clarity

Being at "-1" does not mean that a founder lacks the ability to think clearly. Often they’re actually just breaking fundamentally new ground. They’re surfing technological waves that haven’t yet existed.

Because we spend our time exclusively at the frontiers of technology, we have found it even more critical to search for founders who reduce complexity in pursuit of the most important (and often less sexy) solutions.

Founders with clarity:

Operate with epistemic humility: They can update their weights rapidly with new information, which is increasingly important in today’s compressing timelines for technological progress.

Know what matters: They can answer "what matters most right now?” across technology, product, and business.

Historical perspective: They are students of the game. In their free time, from a place of authentic curiosity, they study the greats and learn from their judgement.

Depth

The vast majority of our returns will inevitably come from a small handful of founders who, through obsession, vision, and execution, actually manage to bend the world to their will.

Far before they actually do that, these founders almost always show patterns of being able to break new ground and go deep in domains that others might find non-obvious.

We decompose “depth” into three pillars.

Technical: They operate with out-of-distribution capabilities and have an ability to solve hard technology problems quickly and well. Their intuition stems from authentic insight and earned experience.

Product: They have great taste and craft. They can spot (and produce) exceptional work. They make non-obvious decisions with real tradeoffs that they are excited to articulate.

Commercial: They know how money flows in their space and where value can be captured (as well as who is capturing it today). They are obsessive about their customers and are open-minded about inventing new business models to meet an evolving ecosystem.

Magnetism

As we bring people into SPC and work with them, in-person, every day, we build incredible longitudinal signal to inform our investment decisions. In particular, we pay extreme attention to who other members in the community gravitate toward. Even before they have a clear idea, outlier founders naturally pull peers into their orbit and demonstrate natural leadership.

We look for:

Storytelling: They are able to distill their vision into real artifacts, and, even if they don’t know what they want to work on, they can compellingly articulate their own life story. They are perceptive and can adapt to their audience.

Authentic charisma: Great talent will find excuses to be around them. They don’t necessarily attract everyone, but they do command respect and admiration.

Idiosyncrasy: Ideally, they are uniquely magnetic — i.e., they are not just yet another fundable or smart individual. There’s something about them that is off the beaten path; like individuals with “curiosity,” they are original.

Engine

Time and time again, we have found that the best companies are often overlooked for years at a time until the world wakes up, seemingly overnight. To persevere during these extended periods of rejection, great founders need both the initial sparks of courage to get started and endurance to grind through the fog of war.

To evaluate engine, we seek:

High agency: They do not ask for permission and behave like the main characters in their own lives. Their decisions stem from a source of internal self-motivation.

Will to win: They take risks. This can show up in unusual life decisions, precocious career trajectories, and failures that they own (and are often proud of). They are competitive and hungry. They have a chip on their shoulder and have something to prove.

Stamina and grit: They don’t stop when they hit a speed bump. They have shown the ability to stick with problems and ideas for longer than others would deem reasonable.

Founder-driven Thesis Building

We talk about curiosity, clarity, depth, magnetism, and engine in almost every conversation we have internally at SPC. This framework pervades how we think about sourcing, evaluating, winning, and supporting our investments. Importantly, it also consistently leads us, far ahead of the pack, to the nascent categories that drive venture-scale returns.

Timing matters. You cannot drive alpha simply by investing into a category after it is clearly “hot.” By focusing on exceptional founders and following the gradients of their curiosity, we’ve been able to be both right and early.

Inference in 2019, Interpretability Today

Baseten | 2019 | Curiosity

Tuhin Srivastava came to SPC curious about one question: why is it still so hard to get ML models into production? Though he had a background in ML, he explored quite widely across training, ML ops, and a variety of other problems before landing on the insight that inference, rather than training, would become the defining bottleneck of the next decade.

Leading their seed round was contrarian in 2019. Today, inference has become a consensus massive market.

Goodfire | 2024 | Depth

We brought Tom McGrath into the community before he knew he wanted to start a company. He led interpretability research at DeepMind, and though he didn’t know whether he wanted to be a founder, he brought incredible technical depth into the community. Working alongside him, we dug into the emerging field of interpretability and helped Goodfire get off the ground in 2024.

Now as models diffuse into more of the economy, we believe interpretability will become essential infrastructure over the coming years. To use AI in cybersecurity, biology, and other critical fields, we need to understand how frontier models make decisions at a fundamental level.

AI Applications from 2020 to Today

Gamma | 2020 | Engine

For Gamma’s first few years, Grant Lee and his co-founders had a clear north star of reinventing presentations but found very little pull. Most founders would’ve hung their hat and moved on. Grant, on the other hand, kept at it. Nearly three years in, the world woke up to generative AI after ChatGPT launched, and he pushed the team to rebuild the entire product for the coming wave.

Grant’s stamina is what allowed him to be well-positioned to be one of the first major AI applications to ride the adoption curve to millions of users. Far before 2023, we began to build our thesis by recognizing and underwriting Grant’s spikes.

Profound | 2024 | Magnetism

James Cadwallader is one of the most magnetic founders to come through SPC.

Nearly every night in our New York office, James would convince other members to stick around into the early hours of the morning and help him ideate. He raised the bar for intensity in everyone around him, and people flocked to him. By jamming in-person, we could recognize his magnetism far before the “idea” for Profound, as such, existed.

Even before the product was fully built, he got in front of CMOs at the world's largest brands and won them over while he was still iterating through different ideas. Customers, investors, and early hires all found reasons to be around him and Dylan Babbs.

When we first invested in 2024, few marketers were thinking about how AI search would change discovery. Over the last two years, James has drawn customers into Profound as the comprehensive platform for marketing.

Chips, Robotics, Energy

Density | 2024 | Depth

Ganesh Venkat, Bill Chang, and their co-founders built Tesla's Dojo program, which was one of the most ambitious AI training systems in the world. Bill joined SPC to explore the future of AI hardware as a member of our residency without yet knowing what Density would become.

Leaning into their depth, which runs from silicon to interconnect to power, Ganesh and the team have made a series of hard, non-obvious hardware bets that most teams can't. As demand for compute far surpasses what GPUs can deliver, we believe the next major gains in computing will come from a next-generation architecture.

Gradient Robotics | 2025 | Engine

JX Mo has a raw hunger and a pace we rarely see. In the weeks after we first met, he left his previous company, recruited founding engineers from Tesla Optimus and Matic, rented a house in Palo Alto, and started building. Within months he was lining up supply chain partners. Soon after, he narrowed in on solving critical autonomy issues for datacenter manufacturers and moved with pace to drive early customers toward pilots.

Hardware is unforgiving, and most teams in robotics move at the speed of their supply chain. We believe the ones that can move fast will define the category.

Nyquis | 2026 | Clarity

Dan Hunter spent a decade building an EV charging network and wore every hat as the founder. When he came to SPC to explore a variety of ideas, he reduced all of that experience down to the largest possible problem he could find: utilities can't see what's happening on their own grids.

Once he narrowed in on the idea, he operated with extreme epistemic humility (and urgency) to go meet forward-thinking utilities and operators in the field and, within weeks, emerged as an expert. From a high-level view on how volatility affected energy markets all the way down to low-level fault detection mechanics, he can speak as if he’s been working on the grid for years.

We believe, through working with Dan, that the grid is the most complicated machine on Earth, and visibility for it will become critical national infrastructure.