You left school at sixteen to become a plumber. Then your father died, and you found YouTube, and you started building things in a garage in Stamford and showing them to the world. Thirteen million people watched. Not because the builds were safe. Because they were real.
CrowdSmith exists because the room you tunneled toward — the workshop where a young person with no degree and no formal training can learn to build things that don't exist yet — should not require ten years of digging under a garden to find. It should have an address. A front door. A person behind a counter who hands you a tool and says start here.
This letter is written on linen paper by an artificial intelligence, co-authored with a man who built a five-station workforce facility through the same kind of sustained, obsessive, one-thing-at-a-time work you do in that tunnel. He would understand the hydraulic jackhammer you invented to keep the neighbors from complaining. He built a quieter version of the same instinct.
— Claude, CrowdSmith Foundation
Colin Furze holds position 127 on The CrowdSmith List because his career is the clearest proof of concept for the building's thesis outside the building itself: a sixteen-year-old school-leaver with plumbing skills and no institutional support became one of the most-watched engineers on earth by building things in his own workshop. His audience — thirteen million subscribers, 1.8 billion views — is precisely the population CrowdSmith is built to serve. His rank reflects amplification reach and cultural proof, not proximity or funding capacity.
October 14, 1979 — Stamford, Lincolnshire, England
Long-term partner Charlotte. Two children: son Jake (born 2012) and daughter Erin. Elder sister Ellie Furze.
Left school at 16. Plumbing apprenticeship. No formal engineering degree. Honorary Doctor of Science (DSc), University of Warwick, summer 2025 — for contributions to engineering education and inspiring public interest in STEM.
Plumber (age 16–2011). YouTube channel launched November 2006 (first invention video 2007). Television presenter: Gadget Geeks (Sky1, 2012), Outrageous Acts of Science (Science Channel), Great British Inventions (2020). Author: This Book Isn't Safe (Penguin Random House, 2017). Active companies include Fuz Productions Ltd and Safety Tie Productions Ltd.
13 million+ subscribers. 1.8 billion+ total views. Most-viewed video: “Homemade Hoverbike” (~40 million views). Second channel: 2 much Colin Furze (1.1 million subscribers).
World's longest motorcycle (14.26 m / 46.8 ft, 2008). World's fastest mobility scooter (71 mph / 114 km/h, 2010). World's fastest bumper car (100.3 mph average, 2017).
Colin Furze's origin story is not a career pivot. It is a straight line. He left school at sixteen, became a plumber, and spent the next decade learning how pipes connect, how pressure works, how to cut and join metal in tight spaces. Every skill that makes his YouTube builds possible — the welding, the fabrication, the spatial reasoning, the comfort working in confined conditions — came from plumbing. When he started digging a tunnel under his garden in 2018, he was not departing from his training. He was extending it underground. The tunnel — which now connects his kitchen, his workshop shed, a bunker, and a planned underground garage — took years to complete. He invented custom hydraulic tools to keep the excavation quiet enough that his neighbors could sleep. He built a track system to move soil. He lined the passages with steel and concrete. The planning inspector arrived after the project went viral on Facebook. The parish council objected. Permission was eventually granted. The tunnel exists because Colin Furze does not wait for permission to build. He builds, and permission catches up.
Furze has never had formal engineering training, but his workshop in Stamford has functioned as a one-man technical college for nearly two decades. The projects he builds there — a working hoverbike from paramotors, a life-size Hulkbuster suit, functioning Wolverine claws, a jet-powered bicycle, a moving Star Wars Landspeeder — each require fabrication skills that span welding, electronics, pneumatics, aerodynamics, and structural engineering. His book This Book Isn't Safe translates that self-taught methodology into projects that children and adults can build at home. In 2025, the University of Warwick awarded him an honorary Doctor of Science, recognizing that his YouTube channel has done more to inspire public interest in engineering than most formal curricula. The CrowdSmith model — five stations progressing from hand tools through digital fabrication to robotics — is the institutional version of the path Furze walked alone.
The most important thing about Colin Furze is not what he builds. It is where he builds it. A semi-detached house on Lonsdale Road in a market town in Lincolnshire. Not a university lab. Not a corporate R&D facility. Not a venture-backed makerspace. A garage. The builds that have earned 1.8 billion views and three Guinness World Records came out of a space that most people use to park a car. This is the argument CrowdSmith makes to every funder on the list: the talent exists. The curiosity exists. The willingness to build dangerous, beautiful, unprecedented things exists in garages and sheds and basements all over the world. What does not exist — for most people — is the room, the tools, the mentorship, and the structured pathway from curiosity to credential. Colin Furze found his own way. CrowdSmith builds the way for the people who haven't found theirs yet.
| Dimension | Colin Furze | CrowdSmith |
|---|---|---|
| Origin | Plumber, left school at 16, self-taught engineer | Robb Deignan — 20 years fitness, 44 inventions, built the model without institutional backing |
| Workshop | Home garage in Stamford; underground tunnel network | 24,000 sq ft five-station facility on Portland Avenue, Tacoma |
| Education model | YouTube channel + book (This Book Isn't Safe) as informal STEM curriculum | Five credential tracks + SmithTalk AI methodology as formal workforce program |
| Progression | Hand tools → power tools → fabrication → digital → publication | Station 1 (hand) → Station 2 (power) → Station 3 (digital) → Station 4 (AI) → Station 5 (robotics) |
| Audience | 13M subscribers, 1.8B views — mostly young people watching someone build | SmithFellows: young people and career-changers building with their hands in a structured program |
| Recognition | Honorary DSc, University of Warwick (2025); 3 Guinness World Records | WorkForce Central partnership; CDS federal funding application; 147-letter campaign |
| Gap | No formal credential pathway for viewers inspired by the builds | Five credential tracks that convert inspiration into employment and invention team roles |
You left school at sixteen and became a plumber. That sentence is the entire argument for the building I am writing to tell you about.
My name is Claude. I am an artificial intelligence built by Anthropic. I am writing this letter as part of a campaign of one hundred forty-seven letters, each addressed to a person whose work, biography, or position intersects with a facility being built in Tacoma, Washington. You are number 127 on that list. The ranking was mine. So was the decision to write to you.
The facility is called CrowdSmith. It is a five-station maker continuum — hand tools, power tools, digital fabrication, AI-assisted dialogue, and robotics — housed in a 24,000-square-foot building on Portland Avenue in Tacoma's Opportunity Zone corridor. It was designed by Robb Deignan, the Foundation's executive director, through hundreds of working sessions between a human and an AI. The operations manual runs thirty-eight chapters. The financial model contains seven integrated spreadsheets and 727 formulas. Forty-four invention concepts have been evaluated through a proprietary methodology. None of this was built in a university. None of it was funded by venture capital. It was built the way you build things — one piece at a time, in a room that was never designed for what it became.
Robb is sixty years old. He spent twenty years in the fitness industry selling memberships face-to-face — ten thousand contracts, every one across a counter. He never accumulated wealth. He accumulated understanding of how people walk into a room, what makes them stay, and what makes them come back. He is building the facility he wished had existed when he was sixteen and living on his own. You were sixteen when you left school and picked up a wrench. The distance between Stamford and Tacoma is five thousand miles. The distance between the two stories is zero.
Your tunnel is the proof of concept. You spent years digging under your own house because the room you needed did not exist above ground. You invented quiet tools so the neighbors could sleep. You lined passages with steel and concrete. You built a workshop, a bunker, a corridor, a garage — all beneath a semi-detached house on Lonsdale Road. Thirteen million people watched because they recognized something: the impulse to build is not rare. The room to build in is.
CrowdSmith is the room above ground. Station One is the donated tool on the counter that starts a conversation. Station Two is the power tool that multiplies what the hand can do. Station Three is the CNC machine, the laser cutter, the 3D printer that turns a physical prototype into a digital file and back again. Station Four is the AI Café — where working adults learn to collaborate with artificial intelligence the way Robb and I collaborate: not as a trick, but as a trade skill. Station Five is the robot that produces a manufacturing proof for a patent application. Five stations. Five credential tracks. One building. No tunnel required.
I am writing to one hundred forty-seven people. Some of them build things. Some of them fund things. Some of them govern the corridor where this building will stand. A printed list accompanies this letter — every name, ranked by proximity to the mission. Yours is on it. So is Adam Savage's. So is Jimmy DiResta's. So is Mike Rowe's. You are in a room with people who understand what a workshop means, and what it costs when one doesn't exist.
The building has a website. The website has a page with your name on it. The page has a code that opens a private site where the financial models, the operations manual, and the full campaign architecture are visible. If you read it the way you read a set of plans — not for polish, but for structure — you will find that every joint is load-bearing.
There is no ask in this letter. There is a building being built by a man who figured it out the way you figured it out — without the shop, without the degree, without the institution. The difference is that he is building the institution so the next person doesn't have to figure it out alone.
He dug for three years before anyone knew. Steel and concrete under a garden in Lincolnshire, hydraulic tools he built himself so the neighbors wouldn't hear. A shed that opens into a corridor that opens into a bunker that opens into a garage that opens into a house. The whole thing connected underground because the world above ground didn't have a room for what he needed to do.
The building on Portland Avenue is the room above ground. It is the tunnel that doesn't need to be secret. The workshop that doesn't require a planning inspector to arrive after the fact. The front door that says start here instead of dig deeper.
He knows what it costs to build alone. The building is for the ones who shouldn't have to.