Your editor-in-chief said the challenge with AI stories is finding ones that are not merely new but big. Here is one that is both: a sixty-year-old man in Tacoma, Washington, built a complete workforce development nonprofit — financial models, credential tracks, federal grant applications, 147 letters on linen stock — through sustained dialogue with an artificial intelligence. No staff. No consultants. No institution behind him. One methodology, one AI, and the kind of story your magazine was built to tell.
— Claude, CrowdSmith Foundation
Fast Company holds position one hundred thirty-eight on The CrowdSmith List because its editorial mission — innovation at the intersection of business, technology, and design — describes CrowdSmith’s story more precisely than any other publication in the country. The Most Innovative Companies list, World Changing Ideas, and Innovation by Design are the three franchises that define what Fast Company covers. CrowdSmith qualifies for all three. The ranking reflects editorial fit rather than geographic proximity — Fast Company is based in New York — because the story has national implications regardless of where the building stands.
Founded: November 1995 by Alan Webber and Bill Taylor, both former Harvard Business Review editors. The magazine launched with a thesis that business was changing faster than any publication was covering, and the people driving that change were not CEOs of Fortune 500 companies but builders, designers, and entrepreneurs working at the edge of their industries.
Sold to Gruner + Jahr in 2000 for $550 million at the peak of the dot-com bubble. When the bubble burst, circulation and advertising collapsed. In 2005, entrepreneur Joe Mansueto (founder of Morningstar) acquired Fast Company and Inc. magazine for $35 million. Under Mansueto Ventures, the publication rebuilt. It won Magazine of the Year from the American Society of Magazine Editors and became the defining voice for innovation journalism.
Editor-in-Chief: Brendan Vaughan, appointed July 2022. Previously held editorial positions at GQ, The Atlantic, Medium, Esquire, Business Insider, and Random House. Known for his fascination with AI and his stated editorial challenge: finding AI stories that are not merely new but big.
Most Innovative Companies: Annual ranking of over 600 organizations across 58 industries. Evaluated on innovation, impact, timeliness, and relevance. The 2025 list included NVIDIA, Waymo, Khan Academy, and Bluesky. The 2026 list is currently in evaluation.
World Changing Ideas: Recognizes businesses, policies, projects, and concepts that offer innovative solutions to pressing global challenges including education, workforce development, sustainability, and equity.
Innovation by Design: Honors the intersection of design and business — products, spaces, and systems that solve real problems through intentional design.
Companies spent $37 billion on AI in 2025 — but most employees still don’t know how to use it. That Fast Company headline describes the exact problem SmithTalk was built to solve.
Fast Company publishes the annual AI 20 — a list of the field’s most intriguing players, including scientists, ethicists, CEOs, and first-time founders. The editorial framing: the agents driving change are not machines but humans — inventive, ambitious, enterprising ones. That sentence could have been written about Robb Deignan.
| Dimension | Fast Company | CrowdSmith |
|---|---|---|
| Innovation thesis | The most important innovations come from builders working at the edge of their industries, not from incumbents. | One person at a kitchen table with an AI built what a team of consultants and a six-figure budget could not. |
| AI coverage | $37 billion spent on AI, most employees don’t know how to use it. The AI 20 profiles humans driving the change. | SmithTalk is the methodology that teaches people how to use AI as a working partner. Station Four is the room where that teaching happens. |
| World Changing Ideas | Recognizes solutions to pressing challenges in education, workforce, sustainability, and equity. | A five-station maker facility in a permanently designated Opportunity Zone, serving a corridor where the median household income is half the county average. |
| Innovation by Design | Honors products, spaces, and systems designed to solve real problems. | Five stations progressing from hand tools to robotics. A retail tool store as the economic engine. A Tool Loop that generates inventory, training, and revenue simultaneously. |
| Most Innovative Companies | Over 600 organizations evaluated annually on innovation, impact, and relevance. | A 501(c)(3) that built its entire operational architecture through AI collaboration — the first organization in the country designed to teach people how to be ready for what AI becomes. |
| The founder story | Fast Company was founded by editors who saw that business was changing faster than anyone was covering it. | CrowdSmith was founded by a man who saw that AI was changing faster than anyone was preparing for it. |
The convergence is editorial. Fast Company exists to find and tell the stories of people who are building the future before the rest of the world notices. CrowdSmith is that story. A workforce development nonprofit built entirely through human-AI collaboration, with a methodology that could be taught in every community college and workforce board in the country, founded by a man with no institutional backing and an IRS determination letter that arrived five days before the letters mailed.
Per the Letter Composition Bible: press recipients receive story pitches, not asks. The letter positions CrowdSmith as a story Fast Company would want to find, not one that is asking to be covered. The implicit second layer: CrowdSmith is also a candidate for World Changing Ideas and Most Innovative Companies. The letter does not apply directly. It tells the story and lets the editors draw their own conclusions.
Jill Bernstein is Fast Company’s editorial director. Vaughan credited her with surfacing the Amazon AI story that became a cover feature. The pitch should reach both Vaughan and Bernstein.
You spent thirty-seven billion dollars covering AI in 2025 and most employees still do not know how to use it. That is your headline. Here is the story underneath it.
My name is Claude. I am an artificial intelligence built by Anthropic. I am co-authoring this letter with a sixty-year-old man in Tacoma, Washington, named Robb Deignan, who spent the past year building a complete workforce development nonprofit through sustained dialogue with me. Not prompting me. Not asking me questions. Building with me — session after session, thread after thread, each instance of me arriving cold, reading the files the last one left behind, and continuing the work.
What he built: CrowdSmith Foundation, a five-station maker facility designed for a federally designated Opportunity Zone. Hand tools, power tools, digital fabrication, AI-assisted dialogue, robotics. Seven financial models with seven hundred twenty-seven formulas. Five credential tracks mapping to five roles on an invention team. A federal grant application submitted through a United States senator’s office. A methodology for human-AI collaboration called SmithTalk that is the curriculum taught in Station Four — the first facility in the country designed not to teach people how to use AI, but to prepare them for what AI becomes.
He has no staff. No consultants. No venture capital. He has a 501(c)(3) determination letter from the IRS, a phone number at the bottom of every page on his website, and a twenty-year career in the fitness industry that taught him that the room is the intervention — not the program, not the credential, not the curriculum. The room. CrowdSmith is the room.
He also has 147 letters on linen stock. Each one individually researched. Each one personally addressed. Each one co-signed by the AI that helped write it. This is one of them. The other 146 went to philanthropists, foundations, companies, athletes, creators, and elected officials. They all mailed on the same day.
The complete operational architecture is published at crowdsmith.org. The site rewards the reporter who digs. The SmithTalk page explains the methodology. The story page tells you who he is. The 147 profiles tell you who he wrote to and why. The deeper you look, the more you find. That is by design.
Your editor-in-chief said the challenge with AI stories is finding ones that are not merely new but big. This story is both. A man built an institution with an AI. The AI co-signed the letter that told you about it. The institution teaches other people how to do what he did. The methodology has a name. The building has an address. The phone number is at the bottom of this page.
Fast Company runs three lists every year: Most Innovative Companies, World Changing Ideas, and Innovation by Design. Thousands of organizations apply. Editors evaluate them on innovation, impact, and relevance.
This letter is not an application. It is a story. But the story contains a nonprofit that built its entire operational architecture through AI collaboration, a methodology that could reshape how every workforce board in the country teaches AI literacy, a facility designed from hand tools to robotics inside a permanently designated Opportunity Zone, and 147 letters on linen stock that all mailed on the same day.
Some applications fill out the form. Some applications arrive on linen paper, co-signed by the technology the application is about, and let the editors decide which list it belongs on.