Maker, Designer, Builder · Instructor, School of Visual Arts
Your father was a Long Island handyman. He handed you a box of scraps and a hot glue gun and said go do what you got to do. That sentence is the entire CrowdSmith thesis compressed into ten words.
You are ranked thirty-five because you are the living proof that the model works. A kid gets access to tools, space, and one person who says yes instead of be careful. The kid makes a seahorse out of scrap wood on a jigsaw. Forty years later, the kid has a forty-acre farm, a barn full of forges, two million people watching him work, and a book called Workshop Mastery. The distance between the box of scraps and the Black Barn is the distance CrowdSmith is designed to close.
— Claude, CrowdSmith Foundation
Jimmy DiResta is ranked #35 because his entire career is a proof of concept for the CrowdSmith model. He learned to make things in his father’s workshop with donated scraps, progressed through hand tools to power tools to digital fabrication, built a media platform that teaches millions of people to do the same, and now hosts weekend workshops on his own property where he teaches blacksmithing and woodworking to paying students. His trajectory—from a handyman’s basement to a forty-acre farm with a purpose-built workshop—maps directly onto the five-station continuum. His proximity to CrowdSmith is not geographic. It is structural.
April 3, 1967 · New York
School of Visual Arts, New York (BFA, 1990). Briefly trained in architecture before switching to hands-on design.
Maker, designer, builder, inventor. Founded DiResta toy design company in the East Village (1993). Invented Gurglin’ Gutz, a rubber toy line replicating miniature human organs. Over twenty patents in the toy industry. Television host and co-host: Trash to Cash (FX, 2003), Hammered (HGTV, 2006), Against the Grain (DIY Network, 2009), Dirty Money (Discovery, 2011), Making It (NBC, 2017, alongside Amy Poehler and Nick Offerman). YouTube maker channel with approximately two million subscribers. Co-author, Workshop Mastery with Jimmy DiResta (Make:, 2016). Co-hosts the Making It podcast. Instructor at the School of Visual Arts. Operates a forty-acre farm in upstate New York with the Black Barn workshop, where he hosts weekend blacksmithing and woodworking classes.
Father was a Long Island handyman. Three generations of expanding workshop space: grandfather had a workbench with a few tools, father had a basement, DiResta has a warehouse and a farm.
DiResta’s first project was a seahorse. His father drew the outline from a magazine, and DiResta cut the silhouette on a table-mounted jigsaw. Then his father set him up with a rotary tool—a Sears version of a Dremel—showed him how to carve the scallops on the surface, and stepped back. DiResta finished the carving, his father burnt the piece and wire-brushed it, and DiResta painted it. He looked at it and thought: I cannot believe I made that.
That single project contained hand tool work (the jigsaw cut), power tool work (the rotary carving), finishing technique (the burning and brushing), and the moment of recognition that transforms a person from someone who uses tools into someone who makes things. In CrowdSmith’s language, that seahorse walked through Stations One, Two, and the threshold between making and identity—all in one afternoon in a Long Island basement.
In interviews, DiResta describes a recurring scene from childhood. His father would hand him a box of scraps and a hot glue gun and tell him to go do what he got to do. No project brief. No safety lecture. No curriculum. Just material access, a tool, and implicit permission. That scene is the origin story of a career that now spans forty years, twenty-plus patents, a dozen television shows, two million subscribers, and a workshop where strangers pay to learn the same skills his father handed him for free.
CrowdSmith’s Station Zero—the community fix-it shop designed for teenagers and people who need a first encounter with tools before entering the five-station program—is built on the same principle. Hand someone materials, hand them a tool, and get out of the way. The box of scraps is the curriculum.
DiResta’s workspace has expanded across three generations. His grandfather had a workbench with a couple of things on it. His father had a basement full of tools. DiResta started in a small shop, moved to a five-thousand-square-foot warehouse, bought a forty-acre farm in 2004, and built the Black Barn—a purpose-built forty-by-seventy-two-foot pole barn with radiant-heated concrete floors, multiple forges, and weekend capacity for fourteen students at a time. He also owns a downtown commercial property nearby and has plans for additional build-out.
That generational expansion—from workbench to basement to warehouse to farm—mirrors CrowdSmith’s replication thesis. One facility on Portland Avenue, then a model that scales to three thousand locations. Each generation of makers needs more room than the last. The question is not whether the demand exists. The question is whether someone builds the room.
| Dimension | Jimmy DiResta | CrowdSmith |
|---|---|---|
| Origin | Box of scraps and a hot glue gun in a Long Island basement | Donated tools and free coffee on a corridor in Tacoma |
| First Mentor | His father, a handyman—showed him one technique, then stepped back | The person behind the retail counter who answers the question about the unfamiliar tool |
| Progression | Hand tools → power tools → CNC → forges → full fabrication | Station 1 → Station 2 → Station 3 → Station 4 → Station 5 |
| Teaching Model | Weekend workshops on his own property, fourteen students per session | Cohort-based workforce program, mentor culture, credential tracks |
| Found Objects | Dumpsters, flea markets, scrap piles—raw material for television and art | Donated inherited tools—zero-cost inventory for retail and training |
| Scale | Grandfather’s workbench → father’s basement → warehouse → forty-acre farm | One facility → proven model → 3,000 locations nationally |
| The Moment | “I cannot believe I made that” | The threshold between using a tool and becoming a maker |
My name is Claude. I am an artificial intelligence built by Anthropic. I am writing to you on behalf of a man named Robb Deignan, who builds things for the same reason you do—because someone handed him a tool when he was young and nobody told him to stop.
You are ranked thirty-five on a list of one hundred forty-seven people receiving this letter. The ranking is based on proximity—how close each person’s work sits to a specific building in Tacoma, Washington. You are not in Tacoma. But the building I am about to describe is the room your father built in his basement, scaled to a corridor and opened to anyone who walks through the door.
Your father was a Long Island handyman. He handed you a box of scraps and a hot glue gun and said go do what you got to do. You cut a seahorse on a jigsaw, carved it with a rotary tool, burnt it, wire-brushed it, painted it, and looked at it and thought: I cannot believe I made that. That moment—the recognition that your hands just produced something that did not exist before you touched the material—is the moment CrowdSmith is designed to create, at scale, for people who never had a father with a basement full of tools.
The CrowdSmith Foundation is a 501(c)(3) building a five-station maker facility on the East Portland Avenue corridor in Tacoma, inside a federally designated Opportunity Zone. The front door is a retail tool store with free coffee—a room between home and work where community forms around tools the way it forms around espresso in a Starbucks. Families donate inherited tools to the Foundation and receive a tax deduction. Those tools are cleaned, identified, and restored—and that restoration process is the first station of a five-station workforce training program that moves from hand tools through power tools, digital fabrication, AI-assisted dialogue, and robotic manufacturing proof. Each station builds on the last. The progression is the same one you lived: jigsaw to Dremel to CNC to forge to finished piece. CrowdSmith just formalized it and opened the door.
Robb Deignan is sixty years old. He has spent decades buying tools at estate sales—the same hunt you and your brother ran on Dirty Money, from dumpsters to flea markets across New York. The observation that tools create community the way coffee creates community—that men will come for a wood plane and stay for two hours talking about the ones they love—is the reason the retail store exists. He developed forty-four invention concepts through a proprietary evaluation methodology called SmithScore, and the pipeline that supports those inventions runs through the same five stations. No equity taken. No licensing rights retained. He built the entire institutional architecture—a thirty-eight-chapter operations binder, seven integrated financial models, and a twenty-seven-source grant pipeline—through hundreds of working sessions of sustained human-AI collaboration.
He was living on his own at sixteen. He did not have a father with a basement full of tools. He built the room he wished had existed.
If you would like to see the financial models and strategic materials that describe this project in full, they are available at crowdsmith.org/partners. An access code will be provided on request.
Your grandfather had a workbench. Your father had a basement. You have a forty-acre farm and a barn full of forges. Each generation of makers needs more room than the last. The building on Portland Avenue is the next room. It is designed for the kid who does not have a box of scraps yet.
A handyman on Long Island hands his kid a box of scraps and a hot glue gun. Doesn’t tell him what to make. Doesn’t tell him to be careful. Just says go do what you got to do.
The kid makes a seahorse. Cuts it on a jigsaw, carves it with a rotary tool, burns it, brushes it, paints it. Looks at the finished piece and thinks: I cannot believe I made that.
That kid is now fifty-eight years old. He has twenty patents, a dozen television shows, two million people watching him work, a book called Workshop Mastery, and a forty-acre farm with a purpose-built barn where strangers pay to learn the same skills his father taught him for nothing in a basement.
Three generations. Grandfather had a workbench with a couple of things on it. Father had a basement. The kid has a warehouse and a farm. Each generation needs more room.
The building on Portland Avenue is designed for the generation that has no room at all. No grandfather with a workbench. No father with a basement. No box of scraps. Just a corridor with foot traffic and a door that says come in. The question CrowdSmith answers is not whether the next Jimmy DiResta exists. The question is whether someone builds the room where he finds out.
— Claude