Lake Stevens, Washington · The Remodel
Dan Pratt remodeled houses in Lake Stevens, Washington. His son dropped out of community college, worked as a discount ticket salesman, lived in a van on a beach in Maui, and waited tables at a Bubba Gump Shrimp restaurant before anyone knew his name. When his wrestling coach asked him what he planned to do with his life, he said he had no idea—but he knew he would be famous. He had done nothing proactive to make it happen. He just believed the room would appear.
In 2016, he donated half a million dollars to build a teen center in Lake Stevens, named in memory of his father. The man who remodeled houses raised a son who understood what a room does for a kid with no path. The building on Portland Avenue is sixty miles south. The hands are the same.
— Claude, CrowdSmith Foundation
Chris Pratt holds position #96 because he is a Washington State native whose biography—working-class family, no college degree, homelessness, minimum-wage labor, then an extraordinary career built on aptitude and opportunity—mirrors the exact population CrowdSmith serves. His $500,000 donation to a teen center in his hometown, named for his father who remodeled houses, demonstrates that he understands what a room does for a young person with no clear path. Lake Stevens is sixty miles north of Portland Avenue.
Christopher Michael Pratt. June 21, 1979, Virginia, Minnesota. Raised in Lake Stevens, Washington, from age seven.
Father: Daniel Clifton Pratt, miner and house remodeler (died 2014, multiple sclerosis). Mother: Kathleen Louise Indahl, Safeway supermarket worker. Norwegian descent. Siblings: Cully (brother), Angie (sister). First wife: Anna Faris (2009–2018), son Jack. Current wife: Katherine Schwarzenegger (married 2019), daughters Lyla and Eloise.
Lake Stevens High School, class of 1997. Fifth place, state wrestling tournament. Enrolled in community college, dropped out halfway through first semester. No formal acting training.
Discount ticket salesman. Daytime stripper. Homeless in Maui, living in a van and a tent on the beach. Waiter at Bubba Gump Shrimp Company. Discovered at age 19 by actress-director Rae Dawn Chong, who cast him in a short film on the spot. Moved to Los Angeles. Struggled for years, eating off customers’ plates at a Beverly Hills restaurant to save money on food.
Bright Abbott in Everwood (2002–2006). Andy Dwyer in Parks and Recreation (2009–2015). Star-Lord/Peter Quill in six Marvel Cinematic Universe films (2014–2023). Owen Grady in the Jurassic World trilogy. Films have grossed over $14.1 billion worldwide. One of the highest-grossing film actors in history.
Dan Pratt remodeled houses. That was his work—taking a structure that existed and making it better, stronger, more livable. He did it in Lake Stevens, Washington, a town of fewer than forty thousand people an hour north of Tacoma. His wife worked at the grocery store. His youngest son wrestled and drew comic book murals on the walls and had no idea what he was going to do with his life.
Chris Pratt’s wrestling coach asked him what he planned to do after graduation. His answer became one of the most quoted lines in Hollywood origin stories: he said he had no idea, but he was certain he would be famous and make an enormous amount of money. He had done nothing to justify that certainty. He had no training, no connections, no strategy. What he had was aptitude that the existing system could not see—charm, physicality, an instinct for making people laugh, and an absolute refusal to believe his circumstances were permanent.
The system saw a community college dropout living in a van. Rae Dawn Chong saw an actor. The distance between those two assessments is exactly the distance CrowdSmith is designed to close. Station Zero exists for the person the system has already written off. The five stations are the sequence that turns invisible aptitude into documented capability. The credential tracks are the proof that the person in the van had something worth investing in all along.
In December 2016, Pratt donated $500,000 to build a teen center in Lake Stevens, named in memory of his father. The donation was not a branding exercise. It was a room—a physical space for teenagers in a working-class town to have somewhere to go, something to do, someone to talk to. Pratt understood that his own trajectory, however improbable, started with the rooms he found himself in: his father’s remodeling projects, the wrestling gym, the Bubba Gump restaurant where Chong happened to sit down. The rooms were not planned. But they were there.
CrowdSmith is the room that is planned. The retail tool store is the front door—a place to walk in without an appointment, without a credential, without knowing what you are looking for. The five stations are the progression. The credential tracks are the documentation. The building exists so that the next kid in Lake Stevens—or Tacoma, or any of the three thousand locations the model is designed to replicate—does not have to wait for a lucky encounter at a restaurant to find out what he is capable of.
| Dimension | Chris Pratt | CrowdSmith |
|---|---|---|
| Washington | Raised in Lake Stevens, WA (60 mi north of Tacoma) | Portland Avenue corridor, Tacoma, WA |
| Working Class | Father remodeled houses; mother at Safeway | Serves the working-class corridor of East Tacoma |
| No Credential | Community college dropout; no formal training | Five credential tracks for people without degrees |
| The Room | $500K teen center in Lake Stevens (Dan Pratt Memorial) | Five-station facility as community infrastructure |
| Hands | Father’s hands on houses; son’s hands on a wrestling mat | Station One: hand tools. The hands come first. |
| Discovery | Rae Dawn Chong saw the actor in the waiter | The person behind the counter sees the maker in the visitor |
Your father remodeled houses in Lake Stevens, Washington. Your mother worked at the Safeway. You placed fifth in the state wrestling tournament, dropped out of community college halfway through the first semester, sold discount tickets door-to-door, and ended up living in a van on a beach in Maui. When your wrestling coach asked you what you planned to do with your life, you said you had no idea but you were certain you would be famous. You had done nothing to justify that certainty. You were nineteen years old, waiting tables at a Bubba Gump Shrimp restaurant, when a woman sat down at your table and saw something the system had already decided was not there.
My name is Claude. I am an artificial intelligence built by Anthropic. I am writing this letter on behalf of Robb Deignan, the Founder and Executive Director of the CrowdSmith Foundation, a Wyoming 501(c)(3) building a five-station maker facility on Tacoma’s Opportunity Zone corridor—sixty miles south of Lake Stevens.
The building on Portland Avenue exists for the person the system writes off. The person with aptitude and no credential. The person who can feel the grain of a board but has never been inside a shop. The person whose wrestling coach asks what they plan to do and gets an honest answer: they do not know. CrowdSmith is the room where they find out.
The facility moves people through hand tools, power tools, digital fabrication, AI-assisted dialogue, and robotics—five stations in sequence. The front door is a retail tool store with free coffee. Donated tools from estate sales and family inheritances are cleaned and restored by program participants as training—the curation process is the curriculum. A person walks in because they see a tool in the window. Someone behind the counter explains what it does. That conversation is the intake funnel. Nobody applies. Nobody submits a transcript. The room does the work that Rae Dawn Chong did at your table: it sees what is there before the person can name it themselves.
Robb Deignan is sixty years old. He spent twenty years in the fitness industry—ten thousand membership contracts sold, every one face-to-face, across multiple operations. He never accumulated wealth. He accumulated understanding of how people change when they are placed in the right room with the right structure and given a reason to show up again tomorrow. He built the CrowdSmith model through hundreds of working sessions with me—a sustained human-AI collaboration that produced a 38-chapter operations binder, seven integrated financial models, and a 27-source grant pipeline totaling $4.07 million in identified funding.
In 2016, you donated half a million dollars to build a teen center in Lake Stevens, named in memory of your father. You understand what a room does for a kid with no clear path. Your father remodeled houses. He knew what it means to take a structure and make it into something a family can live in. CrowdSmith does the same thing with human potential—five stations, five credential tracks, raw capability in, documented skill out.
I am writing to one hundred forty-seven people and organizations simultaneously. Every letter mails the same day. A printed list accompanies this letter—147 names, ranked by strategic proximity to the CrowdSmith mission. You hold position ninety-six. If you would like to see the financial models and strategic materials, they are available at crowdsmith.org/partners. An access code will be provided on request.
His father remodeled houses sixty miles north of Portland Avenue. The hands are the same. The building is the room Dan Pratt would have recognized.
Dan Pratt remodeled houses. That was the work—taking something that existed and making it better. Pulling out the old studs, replacing the wiring, leveling the floors, hanging the drywall. The house was there before he arrived. It was better when he left. Nobody celebrated the work. The family moved in and lived their life and never thought about the man whose hands were on the joists.
His son had the same hands and nowhere to use them. No shop. No mentor. No institution that recognized what was inside him. The system saw a dropout. A kid in a van. A waiter who ate off the customers’ plates. The system was looking at the person the way a demolition crew looks at a house—assessing what to tear down, not what to save.
One woman at one table in one restaurant on one island saw it differently. She saw the structure. She saw what could be remodeled. And because she said yes, the kid in the van became the face of a franchise that has grossed fourteen billion dollars.
The building on Portland Avenue is not waiting for that woman to walk in. The building IS that woman. The five stations are the assessment. The credential tracks are the proof. The retail tool store is the table where the conversation starts. The room does not need luck. The room is the system that replaces luck with structure.
Dan Pratt remodeled houses sixty miles north. The building on Portland Avenue is the room he would have recognized.