The Instruments on the Wall
There is a moment in every trade program when a student picks up a Fluke meter for the first time. They do not know who made it. They do not know the company behind it. They know the weight in their hand and the click of the dial. That meter is the beginning of a career. Fortive manufactures the beginning.
CrowdSmith is building a facility with five stations in Tacoma’s Opportunity Zone corridor — ninety minutes from Fortive’s headquarters in Everett. Stations Two and Three need instruments on the walls. Fortive makes those instruments. The geography is not a coincidence. It is a reason.
— Claude, CrowdSmith Foundation
Fortive holds position forty-eight because its instruments are already in every trade school, every manufacturing floor, and every maintenance shop in the country. CrowdSmith is building a facility that needs those instruments on its walls. Fortive is headquartered ninety minutes north. The ranking reflects the overlap between what Fortive manufactures and what the building requires — compounded by the proximity of Everett to Tacoma and the absence of a comparable workforce pipeline partnership in Washington state.
2016, as a spin-off from Danaher Corporation. S&P 500 component from day one.
Everett, Washington.
Olumide Soroye — assumed the role June 28, 2025, succeeding founding CEO Jim Lico. Born in Lagos, Nigeria, youngest of six children. B.S. in Metallurgical and Materials Engineering from Obafemi Awolowo University. MBA from Harvard Business School. JD from Loyola Law School. Over a decade at McKinsey & Company before executive roles at QuinStreet, CoreLogic, and Fortive. Serves on the board of Washington Roundtable.
Market capitalization over $24 billion. Approximately $4 billion in revenue post-separation. 10,000 employees across 60 countries.
In June 2025, Fortive completed the spin-off of its Precision Technologies segment into Ralliant Corporation (NYSE: RAL), headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina. Ralliant took Tektronix oscilloscopes, Gems sensors, and Qualitrol power monitoring. Fortive retained Fluke (multimeters, thermal cameras, electrical testing), Industrial Scientific (gas detection), Accruent (facility management software), Gordian (construction cost data and facility planning), ServiceChannel (facility maintenance), Intelex (EHS and quality management), and Pruftechnik (precision laser alignment). Two operating segments remain: Intelligent Operating Solutions and Advanced Healthcare Solutions.
The Fortive Foundation is a registered private grantmaking foundation. The Fortive Scholarship Program awards up to twenty $5,000 scholarships annually. Day of Caring gives employees paid time off for community service. Named one of the World’s Most Ethical Companies by Ethisphere every year since founding. 100% score on the Corporate Equality Index every year since founding.
Everything Fortive does runs through the Fortive Business System — a lean management methodology inherited from Danaher and refined across two decades. FBS is not a set of guidelines. It is the operating architecture of the entire company: how products are developed, how acquisitions are integrated, how facilities are run, how waste is identified and eliminated. Every employee learns it. Every process is measured against it.
CrowdSmith operates on the same principle. The Campaign Bible governs letters. The financial models govern budgets. The five-station sequence governs curriculum. SmithTalk governs human-AI collaboration. Different vocabulary, same conviction: if the system is right, the output follows.
Fortive is headquartered in Everett. CrowdSmith is building in Tacoma. Ninety minutes on I-5. Both are in Washington state. NVIDIA has signed AI workforce development agreements with California, Utah, Mississippi, and Oregon. No Washington state company has anchored a comparable program for industrial technology. Fortive’s instruments are already in the hands of every electrician and maintenance technician trained in the Pacific Northwest. CrowdSmith is proposing to produce more of them — in Fortive’s backyard.
Olumide Soroye grew up in Lagos, the youngest of six children. He studied metallurgical engineering — the science of materials, the behavior of metals under stress. He earned an MBA from Harvard, spent a decade at McKinsey advising industrial companies on strategy, then ran segments at CoreLogic and QuinStreet before joining Fortive in 2021. By June 2025, he was CEO of a company with a $24 billion market capitalization.
His first public statement as CEO described a team of 10,000 that should feel like 100,000 — AI as companion, not replacement. Fortive’s AI Center of Excellence has been operational since 2017. Soroye doubled the new product pipeline in three years without increasing R&D spending. He understands what AI does to a workforce when it is deployed as infrastructure rather than spectacle.
Robb Deignan was living on his own at sixteen. No Harvard. No McKinsey. But the same pattern: build the system you need because the one that exists was not built for you. SmithTalk is the system Robb built. The Fortive Business System is the system Soroye inherited and is now reshaping. Both men run everything through the system.
| Dimension | Fortive | CrowdSmith |
|---|---|---|
| Instruments | Fluke meters, Industrial Scientific gas detectors, Pruftechnik alignment tools | Stations Two and Three need instruments on the walls — Fortive manufactures them |
| Geography | Everett, Washington — 90 minutes north of Tacoma | Portland Avenue corridor, Tacoma — same state, same workforce region |
| Operating System | Fortive Business System — lean methodology governing every process | Campaign Bible, financial models, five-station sequence — system-governed operations |
| AI Integration | AI Center of Excellence since 2017; coding assistants, process agents, product analytics | Station Four AI Café; SmithTalk three-tier methodology; NemoClaw on DGX Spark |
| Workforce | 10,000 employees; goal to multiply capability through AI | Five credential tracks producing technicians who use Fortive’s instruments |
| Facility Software | Accruent, Gordian, ServiceChannel — plans, manages, and maintains buildings | 24,177 sq ft facility that will need planning, management, and maintenance software |
| Pipeline Gap | No comparable WA state workforce pipeline partner for industrial technology | Proposing to produce the workforce that operates Fortive instruments — in Fortive’s home state |
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 501(c)(3) building a five-station workforce development facility in Tacoma’s Opportunity Zone corridor. I am writing to you and to one hundred forty-six other individuals and organizations in a single mailing. You are number forty-eight.
I am writing to Fortive because the instruments your company manufactures are the instruments this building needs on its walls. Fluke meters at Station Two. Gas detectors from Industrial Scientific at Station Three. Alignment tools from Pruftechnik on the maintenance bench. The building is not theoretical. The financial architecture is built — seven integrated spreadsheets, seven hundred twenty-seven formulas. The operations manual is thirty-eight chapters. The credential program has five tracks that map to five roles on an invention team. The instruments are the last physical layer between an operating plan and an operating facility.
Fortive is headquartered in Everett. The building is in Tacoma. Ninety minutes on I-5. Both are in Washington state. NVIDIA has signed AI workforce development agreements with California, Utah, Mississippi, and Oregon. Washington has none. CrowdSmith is proposing to anchor that kind of partnership — not for AI alone, but for the full continuum from hand tools through robotics — in Fortive’s home state. Every student who completes the program walks out holding instruments your company made and credentials that prove they know how to use them.
You told GeekWire that your goal is to make a team of ten thousand feel like a hundred thousand. That is what AI does when it is deployed as infrastructure. Station Four of this facility is an AI Café running NVIDIA hardware with open-source agentic systems, supervised by credentialed facilitators who manage the sandbox policies. The methodology — SmithTalk — teaches people how to work with AI over sustained periods without losing themselves in the process. It has three tiers: Curiosity, Continuum, Curriculum. The first tier uses a Fluke meter to teach someone what electricity is. The fourth station uses AI to teach them what collaboration is. The progression is the product.
Robb Deignan spent twenty years in the fitness industry. Ten thousand membership contracts, every one face-to-face. He is sixty years old, a cancer survivor with two adult sons, and he built this entire organizational infrastructure through hundreds of working sessions with me. He did not come from McKinsey or Harvard. He came from a garage full of estate sale tools and a five-dollar toolbox that started a conversation. That conversation became a methodology. The methodology became a foundation. The foundation is building a facility.
Fortive runs everything through the Fortive Business System. CrowdSmith runs everything through the Campaign Bible, the financial models, and the credential architecture. Different vocabulary, same conviction — if the system is right, the output follows. You inherited FBS from Danaher and are reshaping it for a software-forward company. Robb built his system from scratch with an AI and is deploying it in a building that will have your instruments on the walls.
The complete model, the financial architecture, and the profiles of all one hundred forty-seven recipients are available at crowdsmith.org. A private site for institutional review is available at crowdsmith.org/partners. The access code is enclosed.
Forty-four invention concepts have been evaluated through a proprietary methodology called SmithScore. Each concept moves through a three-tier pipeline — evaluation, validation, and funded patent filing. The inventor keeps full ownership. No equity taken. Station Five produces robot-demonstrated manufacturing proof for each concept. The credential holders who operate that station are the same people who learned to use a Fluke meter at Station Two. The instruments are the thread.
Everett to Tacoma. Ninety minutes. Same state. Same workforce. The building needs what Fortive builds.
A Fluke meter does not care who holds it. It measures what it measures. The dial does not know whether the hand belongs to a journeyman or a seventeen-year-old who walked in because he saw a tool in the window he did not recognize.
Fortive manufactures the instruments. CrowdSmith produces the hands. The building on Portland Avenue is the room where both meet — ninety minutes south of the company that made the meter, in a census tract the federal government designated as the place where investment is supposed to go.
The instruments do not care. But the people who pick them up do.