Diving into Silicon Valley’s world of entrepreneurship as an undergraduate
If you met the Founder of a world-changing company, what would you ask?
I racked my brain for questions as I sat in a private Zoom event with Reid Hoffman (Founder of LinkedIn).
I was in this virtual meeting with about one hundred members of South Park Commons, a tight-knit community of professionals who are tackling a diverse range of problems. Their creative ideas often blossom into unconventional startups like Whisper, which recently raised $35M to revolutionize hearing aids.
South Park Commons (SPC) invited four college students to experience its professional community last summer in the midst of the pandemic. The four students, including me, joined SPC as visiting members while working internships at tech companies and research labs. Here’s an inside look into my experience with some of the most knowledgeable technologists in Silicon Valley.
The Three Best Aspects of South Park Commons
1. Genuine Relationships
The people who organized the program are community builders, experienced startup operators, and early-stage investors. They work alongside Ruchi Sanghvi (first female engineer at Facebook) and Aditya Agarwal (former CTO of Dropbox). I often asked them for feedback while I was building Duffl, a YC-backed delivery startup, during the COVID pandemic. The organizers shared their perspectives on how B2C businesses like Duffl needed to adapt to survive in the rapidly changing world. I soaked up their advice on how to navigate uncertainty and prepare the startup for its next round of funding.
Since there were only four visiting undergraduate members and a few organizers, we all got to know each other well through social events like playing Codenames and casual coffee chats. Through the SPC Slack and events, I met full-time members from a diverse range of backgrounds, like an algorithmic trader who became a professor at UChicago and a healthcare startup founder who graduated from my university.
2. Personal Mentorship
Should I drop out of college to fully focus on building my startup? Or should I intern at Robinhood and finish college? I consulted my mentor in SPC for advice. She decided to leave her job as an Engineering Manager at Palantir to join SPC and start her own company.
I was surprised when she told me that leaving school was a safer option than I thought. She explained that, with the right network and work experience, it’s actually not too difficult to score a top engineering job within a few years of dropping out. That being said, the decision comes with disadvantages as well. Hearing her industry experiences reshaped my opinion, which was previously built on the societal stigmas I grew up with.
3. Startup Job Opportunities
South Park Commons is deeply connected with the next class of innovative, daring startups. SPC members offered to refer me to rapidly growing companies, from scrappy 5-person startups to selective hyper-growth unicorns (e.g. Anduril Industries). I found these opportunities to be enticing because early employees at a startup play a key role in the company’s success. That’s the reason I rejected an offer from a Big Five company to work at Robinhood.
As I got to know the community better by meeting members and attending events, I began to understand what South Park Commons is really about. It’s not just a group of experienced professionals trying to create successful companies. The members are linked by meaningful relationships and their shared passion for solving difficult problems. The combination of this genuine camaraderie and mutual interest creates a judgment-free environment of flourishing creativity and collaboration.
Joining South Park Commons gave me a series of opportunities to learn from exceptional entrepreneurs, receive guidance from seasoned professionals, and sharpen my Codenames skills. If you’re a college student who wants to create the future through entrepreneurship, I highly encourage you to apply to South Park Commons after graduation.
Meet The 2020 Visiting Members
Yash Moondhra | UCLA ‘21
I was the CTO of Duffl, which is a 10-minute delivery service powered by electric scooters. I temporarily left college to help build the startup during the Y Combinator accelerator, raise our $1.3M seed round, and grow our customer base to over 6,000 students at UCLA. I am currently finishing my Computer Science degree at UCLA. After college, I will be working at Robinhood to help people grow financially.
Amanda Deng | MIT ‘21
Amanda has a special interest in supporting young founders. She has interned at Greylock Partners, worked with Lightspeed Venture Partners, and is currently an investor at Rough Draft Ventures. Aside from startups, she’s excited about product, interning at both Splunk and Microsoft. After finishing her Electrical Engineering and Computer Science degree at MIT, Amanda will be an Associate Product Manager at Uber.
Girish Kumar | Stanford ‘22
Girish interned in a graduate-level program at Google AI when he was a freshman. Fueled by his passion for machine learning, Girish has worked with leading NLP researchers in multiple publications at Stanford. He is currently a Junior studying Symbolic Systems at the university. Outside of his schoolwork and internships at artificial intelligence companies, Girish is building a live shopping application for e-commerce merchants.
Behzad Haghgoo | Stanford ‘21
Behzad was selected as one of the top 25 entrepreneurial engineering students in the USA by Pear Garage. His deep passion for freeing humans from repetitive work drove him to invent a pomegranate deseeder in middle school and create a medical hardware company in high school. Behzad is a robotics researcher at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is currently pursuing his B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science at the university.
