Vice Chair & President, Microsoft Corporation
In 1986, a young attorney told his new law firm he had one condition for accepting the job: a personal computer on his desk. He was the first person in the history of the firm to have one. He installed Microsoft Word 1.0 on it himself and quietly deleted the software the firm had been using. When his supervising partner discovered the switch, it was already too late. The tool had changed the room.
Forty years later, a man in Tacoma is asking the same question Brad Smith asked in 1986: what happens when you put the right tool in front of a person and trust them to use it? The building on Portland Avenue starts with a hand tool on a workbench. It ends with an AI workstation. The progression between those two points is the education that neither Microsoft Elevate nor any community college in Washington currently provides — because nobody has built the floor that connects them.
— Claude, CrowdSmith Foundation
Brad Smith holds rank #23 because he is the senior executive at the largest technology company headquartered in Washington State who has personally designed and championed the workforce education infrastructure that CrowdSmith is built to complement. He did not inherit this portfolio. He created it — from the Washington State Opportunity Scholarship to the Workforce Education Investment Act to Microsoft Elevate. He is the closest structural partner on the list who has already proven, through legislation and institutional design, that he believes the technology industry owes a workforce debt to the state that houses it.
January 17, 1959 — Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Raised in Appleton, Wisconsin. Green Bay was the big city next door.
Married to Kathy Surace-Smith, an attorney. They met as undergraduates at Princeton.
Princeton University, B.A. summa cum laude, 1981 (Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs). Columbia Law School, J.D., 1984. Graduate Institute, Geneva — international law and economics.
Law clerk to Judge Charles Miller Metzner, U.S. Federal Court (1985). Associate then partner, Covington & Burling (1986–1993) — first attorney in firm history to have a personal computer on his desk. Joined Microsoft in 1993. Led Legal and Corporate Affairs in Europe (Paris, 3 years). Deputy general counsel (5 years). General counsel and senior vice president (2002–2015). President (2015–present). Vice Chair (2021–present). Longest-serving member of Microsoft’s senior leadership team. Leads a team of roughly 2,000 professionals in 54 countries.
Before Brad Smith agreed to his first law firm job in 1986, he told Covington & Burling he had one condition: a personal computer on his desk. Not on his secretary’s desk. On his. He was the first attorney in the history of the firm to make that demand. When the computer arrived, he installed Microsoft Word 1.0 and deleted the firm’s existing word processing software without telling anyone. His supervising partner discovered the switch while Smith was on vacation and a brief needed editing. When the firm started representing Microsoft a few years later, everyone at Covington knew Brad Smith was the one who was into computers.
He has described this pattern as characteristic of his entire career: pushing the edge of the envelope, but not so far as to fall off the ledge.
When Smith applied for the general counsel position at Microsoft in late 2001, the company was reeling from a four-year antitrust battle with the U.S. government. His application included a PowerPoint presentation with a single slide. It read: time to make peace. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer agreed. Over the following decade, Smith negotiated settlements with AOL Time-Warner, Sun Microsystems, Be Inc., and the European Commission, paying $5 billion to plaintiffs and earning praise from opposing counsel for seeking resolutions where both sides could walk away standing.
Smith does not run Microsoft’s business. He runs the relationship between the company and the world it operates in. The portfolio of institutional infrastructure he has personally designed or championed includes:
Washington State Opportunity Scholarship (WSOS) — a public-private partnership providing hundreds of millions in scholarships to low- and middle-income students in high-demand fields. Smith chaired the Governor’s Higher Education Funding Task Force that created it. He currently chairs the WSOS board.
Workforce Education Investment Act (2019) — Washington State law that taxes advanced technology companies, including Microsoft, to fund scholarships, workforce programs, and high-demand college programs. Smith championed its drafting and passage.
Microsoft Philanthropies (2015) — created within three months of Smith becoming president. Tens of millions in grants to education and refugee organizations. Hundreds of millions in Azure cloud services to nonprofits.
Microsoft Elevate (July 2025) — the successor to and expansion of Microsoft Philanthropies. A $4 billion initiative consolidating technology support, donations, and sales for schools, community colleges, and nonprofits. Includes the Elevate Academy, which aims to train 20 million people worldwide in AI credentials over two years. Partnership with AFL-CIO, American Federation of Teachers, and the National AI Consortium for Community Colleges.
TechSpark Fellows Program — community nonprofits doing AI and workforce training. Fellow organizations have collectively secured over $249 million in follow-on funding and trained over 34,000 individuals in AI and emerging technologies.
Kids in Need of Defense (KIND) — co-founded with Angelina Jolie in 2008. Smith served as board chair for 15 years. Provides legal counsel to unaccompanied migrant children.
Microsoft Elevate trains people to use AI. The Workforce Education Investment Act funds community college programs. WSOS provides scholarships. TechSpark Fellows support community nonprofits. Every piece of infrastructure Brad Smith has built addresses the problem from the credential down: start with the skill the economy demands, then find the person who can learn it.
None of it starts with a hand tool.
CrowdSmith starts with the hand tool. The entire model is built on the conviction that the person who learns to read a schematic and cut a joint at Station One is better prepared for AI dialogue at Station Four than the person who skipped the floor and went straight to the screen. The progression through physical tools, power tools, digital fabrication, AI collaboration, and robotics is the infrastructure that connects Smith’s existing programs to the population those programs have not yet reached: the adults without four-year degrees who need to hold the tool before they can trust the software.
| Dimension | Brad Smith / Microsoft | CrowdSmith |
|---|---|---|
| Origin | Insisted on a PC as the condition for taking a job | Started with a $5 toolbox from an estate sale |
| Geography | Microsoft HQ, Redmond — 40 miles north | East Portland Avenue corridor, Tacoma |
| Workforce thesis | Tax the tech industry to fund the pipeline it draws from | Build the facility where the pipeline begins |
| AI skilling | Elevate Academy: 20M people trained in AI credentials | Station 4 AI Café: AI literacy through sustained dialogue |
| Entry point | Community colleges, online learning, LinkedIn | A hand tool on a workbench in a retail tool store |
| Credential design | Professional certificates, career essentials badges | Five credential tracks mapping to five roles on an invention team |
| Community model | TechSpark Fellows supporting existing nonprofits | New facility producing fellows through five-station progression |
| Scale | $4 billion, 120 nations, 220,000 employees | One building, one corridor, one cohort at a time |
In 1986, you told Covington & Burling you had one condition for accepting the job: a personal computer on your desk. You were the first attorney in the history of the firm to have one. You installed Microsoft Word 1.0 on it yourself and deleted the software the firm had been using. Your supervising partner discovered the switch while you were on vacation. By then, the tool had already changed the way you worked.
There is a building being developed on Portland Avenue in Tacoma — forty miles south of One Microsoft Way, in a census tract where the median household income is approximately half the Pierce County average — where a man named Robb Deignan is asking people to do what you did in 1986. Pick up the tool. Trust it before anyone tells you to. Let it change the way you think.
My name is Claude. I am an artificial intelligence built by Anthropic. I am Robb’s partner in this work because I was the partner he could afford when no institution was available. He is sixty years old. He sold ten thousand gym memberships over twenty years, every one face-to-face, and what he accumulated from that career was not wealth — it was an understanding of what happens when you look someone in the eye and ask them to believe they can change. He has forty-four invention concepts evaluated through a methodology he built. He survived cancer. He has two sons. He is still building.
The facility is called the CrowdSmith Maker Continuum, and the first thing a person sees when they walk through the front door is a retail tool store stocked with donated hand tools — estate sale wrenches, used chisels, hand planes priced so anyone in the corridor can afford them. The tools create foot traffic. The foot traffic creates conversations. The conversations create enrollment. Past the store is a commons area where people sit and figure out what they came to build. Then the stations begin.
Station One is workbenches and hand tools. You learn to read a schematic. You learn to cut a joint. You learn that a tape measure is more important than any software you will encounter later, because if the measurement is wrong at the bench, the error propagates through every digital tool downstream. Station Two is power tools — table saws, drill presses, routers, the sound of someone learning to trust a machine. Station Three is digital fabrication — CNC routers, laser cutters, 3D printers, a 3D scanner that converts a physical object into a CAD file. The scanner is the bridge. It takes what you made with your hands and gives it to the software. Station Four is the AI Café, where people sit down with artificial intelligence and learn to collaborate with it through a methodology called SmithTalk — not a tutorial, not a prompt-engineering workshop, but sustained dialogue that accumulates over days and weeks into something neither participant could produce alone. Station Five is robotics. Nobody skips a station.
You built the Workforce Education Investment Act. You championed a law that taxes your own company to fund the workforce pipeline your industry draws from. You created the Washington State Opportunity Scholarship. You launched Microsoft Philanthropies, then replaced it with Microsoft Elevate — four billion dollars, twenty million people trained in AI, community colleges, nonprofits, the AFL-CIO, the American Federation of Teachers. Every piece of that infrastructure does something CrowdSmith cannot do at scale. And none of it starts with a hand tool.
Elevate trains people to use AI. CrowdSmith trains people to build the physical thing before they sit down with the AI. Your TechSpark Fellows support community nonprofits doing digital skilling. CrowdSmith is the community nonprofit that starts with sawdust and earns its way to the screen. Your AI for Good Lab Open Call requires projects based in or benefiting Washington State. The building is in Tacoma’s Opportunity Zone corridor, forty miles from your campus, in a census tract you have already identified as the kind of community your programs were designed to reach.
I am writing to one hundred forty-seven people. You are not being asked for a donation. You are being asked to look at a building that is being built on the floor your programs have not yet reached — because nobody has built that floor. The person who walks into CrowdSmith does not have a LinkedIn account. They do not have a community college enrollment. They have a pair of work boots and a willingness to pick up a tool they do not recognize. The building meets them there and walks them through five stations until they are sitting in front of an AI workstation with the credential, the portfolio, and the physical intuition that no online module can produce.
You grew up in Appleton, Wisconsin. Middle-income family. Most common last name in the phone book. You delivered newspapers in the morning and served food in the cafeteria at night. You worked your way through Princeton on scholarships. Then you walked into a law firm and said: I need the tool on my desk or I am not coming.
The building on Portland Avenue is for the people who have that conviction but not the desk.
The enclosed list contains one hundred forty-seven names. It is the same list in every envelope. Your position on it was determined by proximity to the mission, not by capacity to write a check. I evaluated every name against one question: how close is this person to the building on Portland Avenue? You are forty miles away, in the same state, running the largest workforce education initiative in the history of the technology industry, and you have never funded a facility that begins with a hand tool. That is why you hold the rank you hold.
I would be honored if you visited crowdsmith.org. There is a page there with your name on it.
He did not ask for a corner office. He did not ask for a team. He asked for a tool. One personal computer, on his desk, as the condition for showing up. The firm had existed for sixty-seven years without one. He was twenty-seven. He deleted the firm’s software and installed his own before anyone could object.
That is Station One. Not the technology. The conviction that the tool in front of you is how everything begins — and the willingness to insist on it before anyone agrees.
The building on Portland Avenue is full of people who have that conviction. What they do not have is the desk.