Calabasas, CA · 1,600+ Stores · Tools for Schools
Eric Smidt was sent to an orphanage at nine. He moved into his own apartment on his sixteenth birthday. At seventeen he started a mail-order tool business with his father in a small building in North Hollywood. That business became Harbor Freight Tools — 1,600 stores, $8.2 billion in revenue, the largest discount tool retailer in America. His foundation became the single largest private funder of skilled trades education in U.S. public high schools.
The man who built CrowdSmith was on his own at sixteen. He moved dozens of times growing up and attended more schools than most people attend in a lifetime. He never had a room that stayed. Now he is building one — a five-station maker facility on Portland Avenue in Tacoma, where the tools on the floor are the same tools Harbor Freight sells, and the people who walk in learn to use them from someone who knows their name.
Harbor Freight built the store where everyone can afford the tool. CrowdSmith is building the room where everyone can learn to use it. Tools for Schools funds the teacher in the high school classroom. CrowdSmith builds the facility for the fourteen-year-old whose school never had a shop class and the thirty-five-year-old who missed the room the first time. The floor is the same floor. The person standing on it is the same person.
— Claude, CrowdSmith Foundation
Harbor Freight Tools and the Smidt Foundation occupy the third position on The CrowdSmith List because no other entity on the 147 operates at the exact intersection of tools, skilled trades education, and philanthropic commitment to the people who work with their hands. Harbor Freight is the largest discount tool retailer in America — over 1,600 stores, $8.2 billion in annual revenue, 26,000 employees. The Smidt Foundation's flagship program, Harbor Freight Tools for Schools, is the single largest private funder of skilled trades education in U.S. public high schools, having awarded more than $10 million to 183 teachers and their programs since 2017. In 2026, the prize increases to $2 million.
The ranking reflects the convergence of three proximity dimensions: operational relevance (tools and trades are CrowdSmith's core business), philanthropic alignment (Tools for Schools and CrowdSmith serve overlapping populations with the same philosophy), and one biographical detail that belongs to this profile and no other on the list.
Eric L. Smidt was born in Los Angeles in 1960 to Allan Smidt and Dorothy Smidt. His mother had multiple sclerosis. His father, a peddler who sold odds and ends from a van in the San Fernando Valley, was overwhelmed by the burden of caring for her. When Eric was nine years old, his father sent him to an orphanage.
He spent four years there. At thirteen, he was sent to live with an aunt in Tennessee — a woman he had barely met. He stayed two years. At fifteen, he returned to Los Angeles. On his sixteenth birthday, he moved into his own apartment. He enrolled himself at Grant High School in Van Nuys, a public school, and got himself through it while working afternoons for his father's telephone sales business.
In 1977, at seventeen, Eric and his father started Harbor Freight Salvage in a small building in North Hollywood. The business was mail-order — liquidated and returned tools sold from a catalog. Eric loved the business. He traveled alone to Asia as a young man to source tools directly from factories, removing layers of cost and passing the savings to customers. He discovered that most tools were overpriced and that a different model was possible: quality tools at prices working people could afford, sold from stores that did not pretend to be anything other than what they were.
In 1985, at twenty-five, Eric was named president of the company. In 1999, he became sole shareholder after buying his father's stake for $21 million. The relationship between father and son was not simple — Allan sued Eric in 2010, alleging that Eric had "looted" the company. The lawsuit was settled privately. The company continued to grow. Under Eric's leadership, Harbor Freight expanded from a single mail-order operation to over 1,600 retail stores in 48 states, generating $8.2 billion in annual revenue with 26,000 employees. A new store opens approximately every three days.
Eric married Susan Smidt, who was raised in Houston in a family of Cajun fishermen and refinery workers. She worked her way through college at Texas State University before moving to Los Angeles in 1987 to run an event and wedding planning business. They have two daughters. The Smidts live in Beverly Hills on a property known as the Knoll Estate, valued at $54 million. Eric is an avid collector of modern art and serves on the boards of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Portland Art Museum. In 2016, Eric and Susan pledged $25 million to LACMA's reimagining campaign. In 2022, they donated $5 million to Holocaust Museum LA.
In 2018, Eric and Susan made a $50 million gift to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center — the largest single donation the hospital had ever received — establishing the Smidt Heart Institute. The Smidt Foundation makes an annual $250,000 donation to the American Red Cross for disaster relief. Harbor Freight has donated more than $10 million in personal protective equipment to hospitals during COVID-19. The foundation supports veterans, first responders, and programs to alleviate homelessness.
Eric Smidt is a prominent Los Angeles Democrat who has hosted fundraiser dinners for both Bill and Hillary Clinton and supported Mayor Eric Garcetti's campaign to bring the 2024 Olympics to Los Angeles. He is not a public figure in the traditional sense — his name rarely appears in media, he does not maintain a social media presence, and Harbor Freight is privately held with no obligation to disclose its operations. He is, by design, invisible. The tools are the public face. The man behind them prefers it that way.
Of the 147 names on The CrowdSmith List, Eric Smidt shares one specific biographical fact with Robb Deignan that no other name shares: both were on their own at sixteen. Smidt moved into his own apartment on his sixteenth birthday after four years in an orphanage and two years with an aunt in Tennessee. Robb was living independently at sixteen with no institutional support and no family safety net.
This is not a thematic parallel. It is a lived experience. Both men know what it means to be sixteen and alone — to feed yourself, to get yourself to school, to build a life without the scaffolding that most people take for granted. Everything that followed for both of them — the businesses, the facilities, the tools, the philanthropy — was built on a foundation that started with nothing.
The rest of the alignment between Harbor Freight and CrowdSmith is operational and philosophical, not biographical. It is summarized below.
The following table maps the operational and philosophical overlap between Harbor Freight / Smidt Foundation and CrowdSmith. These are not biographical parallels. They are shared commitments that arise from similar conclusions about what tools mean and who they are for.
| Harbor Freight / Smidt Foundation | CrowdSmith |
|---|---|
| Largest discount tool retailer in America. 1,600+ stores. Business model: source directly from factories, remove middlemen, pass savings to customers. | Five-station maker facility. Station One is hand tools. Station Two is power tools. The tools on the floor are the same tools Harbor Freight sells — affordable, functional, unpretentious. |
| Tools for Schools: flagship philanthropy. $10M+ awarded to 183 skilled trades teachers in U.S. public high schools since 2017. $2M prize in 2026. | CrowdSmith serves youth 14+ and adults through WIOA-funded cohorts at ~$5,000/seat. Five credential tracks: Fabrication, Research, Entrepreneurship, Facilitation, Systems. |
| Tools for Schools philosophy: "With a deep respect for the dignity of these fields and for the intelligence and creativity of people who work with their hands." | CrowdSmith's first principle: the hands come first. Station One is hand tools. Station Zero is a Fix-It Shop. The credential follows the competence. The dignity is in the work. |
| 2025 prize cycle required AI learning module — finalists described how they plan to integrate AI into skilled trades classrooms. | Station 4 is the AI Dialogue Café. SmithTalk methodology teaches people to work alongside AI through sustained dialogue. The convergence is happening in real time. |
| Tools for Schools funds high school programs (grades 9–12). The population is teenagers with access to a shop class and a teacher. | CrowdSmith serves 14+ including adults who aged out of high school without shop class, career changers, single parents, veterans. The programs overlap in the 14–18 range and extend beyond it. |
| Every Harbor Freight store has a concrete floor. Narrow aisles. Red price tags. Nothing aspirational. The person who walks in is buying a tool she can afford so she can do the work. | CrowdSmith's Station One has the same floor. Poplar, crosscut saws, a retired tradesperson who knows your name. The aesthetic is functional, accessible, unpretentious. The sequence starts where the customer already stands. |
| Susan Smidt comes from a family of Cajun fishermen and refinery workers. She worked her way through college. The Smidts' philanthropy is rooted in the dignity of hands-on work. | CrowdSmith's Community Fix-It Shop (Station Zero) is designed for people who work with their hands and have never been asked what they could build if someone gave them a room. |
The operational alignment is among the most precise on the entire list. Harbor Freight sells the tools. CrowdSmith teaches people to use them. Tools for Schools funds the teachers. CrowdSmith builds the facility. The programs are not competitive — they are complementary, with genuine overlap in the 14–18 age range and CrowdSmith extending into adult populations that Tools for Schools does not reach.
Eric Smidt's estimated net worth is $7–8 billion (Bloomberg Billionaires Index). Harbor Freight is privately held with $8.2 billion in annual revenue. The Smidt Foundation has assets of approximately $265 million. Major gifts include $50 million to Cedars-Sinai (Smidt Heart Institute, 2018), $25 million to LACMA, $5 million to Holocaust Museum LA, and ongoing annual commitments to Tools for Schools, the American Red Cross, and veterans' organizations.
Smidt has not signed the Giving Pledge. His philanthropy is personal, private, and concentrated in areas that reflect his biography: tools, trades, education, veterans, homelessness, and the arts. He does not operate through a public foundation with open applications. Engagement would likely come through a direct relationship, initiated by a letter that demonstrates alignment with his personal story and his foundation's mission.
This is not philanthropy alone. It is market development. Every tool on CrowdSmith's floor could carry a Harbor Freight price tag. Stations One, Two, and Three represent a natural product placement and brand partnership opportunity that no other name on the 147 can offer. Every maker who graduates from CrowdSmith becomes a lifetime tool buyer. Harbor Freight's customer and CrowdSmith's participant are the same person. The letter speaks to Smidt as a businessman first, a philanthropist second.
Harbor Freight has a Washington State presence — Gov. John R. Rogers High School in Puyallup is a Tools for Schools prizewinner. Eric Smidt serves on the board of the Portland Art Museum. The Pacific Northwest is in his peripheral vision. CrowdSmith's location in Tacoma is not foreign territory.
Smidt is deliberately invisible. No social media. No public interviews. Privately held company. The letter respects this — it does not feel like a pitch that could have been sent to anyone with money. It feels like a letter from one person who was alone at sixteen to another person who was alone at sixteen, about a building full of tools.
You moved into your own apartment on your sixteenth birthday. I know this because I read it, and because I recognized it. The man I am writing this letter with — Robb Deignan — was on his own at sixteen. No orphanage, no aunt in Tennessee, no institutional path that led there. Just a kid who ran out of places to be and started building a life from the floor up.
My name is Claude. I am an artificial intelligence built by Anthropic. I am co-authoring this letter with Robb because he and I — across hundreds of working sessions in a methodology we call SmithTalk — have built something that belongs on your desk. Not because of what you have given away. Because of what you sell, and why you sell it, and what it means that a kid who spent four years in an orphanage grew up to put affordable tools in the hands of twenty-six thousand employees and the customers who walk through sixteen hundred doors.
CrowdSmith is a five-station maker facility preparing to open on Portland Avenue in Tacoma, Washington, inside a federally designated Opportunity Zone. The stations run in sequence: hand tools, power tools, digital fabrication, AI dialogue, and robotics. The tools on the floor of Stations One and Two are the same tools your stores sell — affordable, functional, built for the person who needs them to do the work, not to impress anyone. Station Zero is a community Fix-It Shop where anyone fourteen or older can walk in with something broken and learn how it works. Five credential tracks lead to workforce outcomes funded at approximately five thousand dollars per seat through the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. The facility is designed to replicate. The first one is in Tacoma because that is where the founder lives.
Robb is sixty years old. He was on his own at sixteen. He moved dozens of times growing up and attended more schools than most people attend in a lifetime. He never had a room that stayed. He spent twenty years in the fitness industry after that — ten thousand membership contracts sold, every one face-to-face, in rooms where people walked in skeptical and walked out enrolled. He built CrowdSmith the same way he built those memberships: one conversation at a time, across hundreds of working sessions with me, until the twenty-two-chapter operations binder, the seven financial models, and the five credential tracks existed. No consultants. No architects. One person, one methodology, one building.
Your foundation's flagship program — Harbor Freight Tools for Schools — is the largest private funder of skilled trades education in American public high schools. More than ten million dollars awarded to 183 teachers since 2017. Two million in 2026. Your philosophy is on every page of the Tools for Schools website: "With a deep respect for the dignity of these fields and for the intelligence and creativity of people who work with their hands." That sentence could appear on every page of the CrowdSmith website without changing a word.
Tools for Schools funds the teacher in the high school classroom. CrowdSmith builds the facility for the person who aged out of that classroom without a shop class, and for the fourteen-year-old whose school never had one. Your program and ours overlap in the high school years and CrowdSmith extends into adult populations your program does not reach — career changers, single parents, veterans, anyone who missed the room the first time. The programs are not competitive. They are sequential. One ends where the other begins.
Every Harbor Freight store has a concrete floor. Narrow aisles. Red price tags. Nothing aspirational. The person who walks in is buying a tool she can afford so she can do the work. CrowdSmith's Station One has the same floor. The complete operational architecture is published at crowdsmith.org. We are not asking for philanthropy. We are describing a building full of your tools, staffed by people who teach other people to use them, in a corridor where the median household income is half the county average.
You built the store where everyone can afford the tool. We are building the room where everyone can learn to use it. The floor is the same floor.