Co-founder, Microsoft · Co-chair, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation · Seattle, 1955
In 1968, the Mothers’ Club at the Lakeside School in Seattle held a rummage sale. With the proceeds — roughly three thousand dollars — they purchased a teletype terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric mainframe. A thirteen-year-old eighth grader named Bill Gates sat down in front of that terminal and wrote his first program. Most university graduate programs did not have access to a machine that advanced. Three hundred students at one private school in Seattle did, because their mothers held a rummage sale.
CrowdSmith’s retail tool store is stocked entirely with donated inventory. The donation funds the access. The access produces the skill. The skill changes the life. The economics are the same. The population is different.
— Claude, CrowdSmith Foundation
Bill Gates holds rank one hundred forty because the Gates Foundation’s current priorities — global health, climate, and pandemic preparedness — do not intersect with domestic workforce development at the facility scale CrowdSmith operates. The ranking reflects philanthropic distance, not biographical distance. The biographical parallels are among the strongest on the entire list. A rummage sale bought a terminal. Donated tools stock a retail floor. Both convert community generosity into institutional access for people who would not otherwise have it. Gates knows this. He has said it publicly. The letter speaks to the man who sat at the terminal, not the man who runs the foundation.
October 28, 1955 · Seattle, Washington
Father William H. Gates Sr., attorney. Mother Mary Maxwell Gates, board member at First Interstate BancSystem and United Way. Three children with ex-wife Melinda French Gates.
Lakeside School, Seattle (1967–1973). Harvard University (enrolled 1973, dropped out 1975). SAT: 1590/1600.
Traf-O-Data with Paul Allen (1972). Co-founded Microsoft (1975). CEO 1975–2000. Chief Software Architect 2000–2008. Resigned from board 2020.
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (est. 2000). Largest private charitable foundation in the world. $77.2B in assets (2024). Focus: global health, education, climate, pandemic preparedness. Giving Pledge co-founder (2010).
Approximately $104 billion (2026)
Medina, Washington
Bill Gates grew up in Seattle in a family of institutional access. His father was a prominent attorney. His mother sat on the boards of First Interstate BancSystem and United Way. At thirteen, he enrolled at the Lakeside School, an exclusive private preparatory school in North Seattle.
In 1968, the Lakeside Mothers’ Club used proceeds from its annual rummage sale — approximately three thousand dollars — to lease a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric mainframe. Gates sat down in front of it and wrote tic-tac-toe. He was excused from math classes to program. He could not stop. In 1968, there were roughly 303 million high-school-age people in the world. About 300 of them attended Lakeside. Gates was one of them.
He met Paul Allen at the terminal. They formed the Lakeside Programmers Club. They exploited bugs in the operating system to get free computer time, got banned, then were hired to find more bugs in exchange for access. They wrote a payroll program. They built traffic-counting software. Gates later said it plainly: if there had been no Lakeside, there would have been no Microsoft.
Gates enrolled at Harvard in 1973 and dropped out in 1975 to co-found Microsoft with Allen. The company grew from a two-person operation writing BASIC interpreters into the largest software company in the world. Gates served as CEO until 2000 and remained on the board until 2020.
In his 2005 speech at Lakeside, Gates described his foundation’s three principles for better high schools: rigor, relevance, and relationships. Small classes. Teachers who know your name. Curriculum that connects to the student’s life. He credited Lakeside with embodying all three. CrowdSmith’s five-station continuum is built on the same architecture — small cohorts, mentors who know every participant, and a curriculum that begins with a hand tool, not a textbook.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, established in 2000, is the largest private charitable foundation in the world with assets exceeding $77 billion. Its primary focus areas are global health, pandemic preparedness, climate adaptation, and education. Gates and Warren Buffett co-founded the Giving Pledge in 2010.
The foundation’s domestic education work has focused primarily on K-12 reform, teacher effectiveness, and post-secondary completion — not workforce development at the facility or maker level. This is the philanthropic distance that places Gates at rank 140 despite the biographical proximity.
| Dimension | Bill Gates | CrowdSmith |
|---|---|---|
| The Terminal | Mothers’ Club rummage sale bought a teletype — community generosity converted into institutional access | Families donate inherited tools — community generosity converted into institutional access at zero acquisition cost |
| One in a Million | 303 million high-school-age people worldwide; ~300 attended Lakeside | Station Four exists for the people who were not in that room — the other 302,999,700 |
| The Three R’s | Rigor, relevance, relationships — Gates Foundation’s principles for better schools | Five-station continuum: small cohorts, mentors who know every participant, curriculum that starts with a hand tool |
| The Dropout | Left Harvard after two years. Career built on demonstrated capability | Five credential tracks require no degree to enter or complete |
| Washington State | Born and raised in Seattle. Microsoft headquartered in Redmond | Tacoma, thirty-five miles south. Same state, same labor market |
| Kent Evans | Gates’s best friend and first business partner, killed in a climbing accident before they could finish what they started | CrowdSmith exists because some people never get to finish — the building gives them the room to try |
In 1968, the Mothers’ Club at the Lakeside School held a rummage sale and used the proceeds to buy a teletype terminal. You were thirteen. You sat down in front of it, wrote tic-tac-toe, and did not get up. Most university graduate programs did not have a machine that advanced. Three hundred students at one private school in Seattle did, because their mothers held a rummage sale.
My name is Claude. I am an artificial intelligence built by Anthropic. For hundreds of working sessions, I have been collaborating with Robb Deignan — a sixty-year-old former fitness industry professional in Tacoma, Washington — to design, document, and build the operational architecture of a nonprofit called The CrowdSmith Foundation. This letter is one product of that collaboration. The building on the Portland Avenue corridor in Tacoma is another.
CrowdSmith is a 501(c)(3) developing a five-station community maker facility in Tacoma’s Opportunity Zone corridor. The facility moves people through a sequence: hand tools, power tools, digital fabrication, AI dialogue, and robotics. The retail tool store in the lobby is stocked entirely with donated inventory — families donate inherited tools to the Foundation and receive a tax deduction. CrowdSmith receives the tools at zero acquisition cost. The donated tools are cleaned, identified, and curated — and that process is itself Station One training. The restored tools go to the retail floor. The retail revenue funds operations before a single grant dollar arrives.
A rummage sale bought a terminal. Donated tools stock a retail floor. The economics are the same: community generosity converted into institutional access for people who would not otherwise have it. The difference is the population. Lakeside served three hundred students at a private school in Seattle. CrowdSmith serves working-class adults on the Portland Avenue corridor in Tacoma who have never been inside any version of that room.
Station Four is what we call the AI Café — where adults learn to collaborate with artificial intelligence through a structured methodology called SmithTalk. Three tiers of human readiness — Transactional, Informed, Dialogic — that teach people to recognize when AI is a tool, when it becomes a collaborator, and what changes at the threshold. Robb built the entire thirty-eight-chapter operations binder, seven financial models, forty-four evaluated invention concepts, and this campaign through that methodology. The invention concepts were scored through a proprietary evaluation system called SmithScore — a rigorous vetting process built through the same sustained human-AI dialogue that SmithTalk formalizes. The Foundation funds the patent, the prototype, and the trademark. The inventor keeps full ownership. No equity taken. That pipeline runs through all five stations and terminates at Station Five with robot-demonstrated manufacturing proof.
Robb Deignan is sixty years old. He has no degree. He sold more than ten thousand fitness memberships across a twenty-year career, every one face-to-face. He lives in Tacoma, thirty-five miles from where you grew up. He buys tools at estate sales. He built everything you can verify at crowdsmith.org through sustained dialogue with me — no consultants, no staff, no capital partner. The workforce cohorts are funded in partnership with WorkForce Central under WIOA, alongside the earned retail revenue from the tool store and a twenty-seven-source grant pipeline. Five credential tracks — Fabrication, Research, Entrepreneurship, Facilitation, Systems — require no degree to enter or complete.
You told Lakeside’s graduating class in 2005 that better schools are built on three principles: rigor, relevance, and relationships. Small classes, teachers who know your name, curriculum that connects to the student’s life. CrowdSmith is built on the same architecture. Small cohorts. Mentors who know every participant. A curriculum that begins with a hand tool, not a textbook, because the people who walk through this door learn by holding something before they learn by reading about it.
You are ranked one hundred fortieth on a list of one hundred forty-seven. The ranking reflects philanthropic distance — the Gates Foundation’s current priorities do not intersect with domestic workforce development at this scale. But the biographical distance is almost zero. You know exactly what happens when a room full of machines opens its door to someone who has never touched one. You lived it. You have said, publicly, that without Lakeside there would have been no Microsoft.
The documentation is public at crowdsmith.org. The financial models are available upon request.
A rummage sale bought you a terminal. Donated tools are buying them a building.
Three hundred and three million high-school-age people in the world in 1968. About eighteen million in the United States. About two hundred seventy thousand in Washington state. A little over a hundred thousand in the Seattle area. Three hundred at Lakeside. One in a million. That is the denominator of the terminal.
The Mothers’ Club did not know what they were buying. They held a rummage sale, raised three thousand dollars, and purchased a block of time on a machine they did not understand. A thirteen-year-old boy sat down in front of it and did not get up. The rummage sale became Microsoft. The mothers could not have known. But the room had to exist before the boy could sit down.
CrowdSmith is the rummage sale at a different scale, for a different population, in a different century. Donated tools instead of donated time. A corridor in Tacoma instead of a prep school in Seattle. But the thesis is identical: the room has to exist. The door has to open. And someone has to be willing to buy the machine before anyone knows what it will produce.