Jody Allen

Your brother held forty-three patents. Nearly all of them were sole-inventor filings — not the product of a corporate research division, but the product of a man sitting with a problem until the solution became clear. He did this across disciplines, across decades, and across a career that most people remember only for software. The patents tell a different story. They tell the story of an inventor.

A man in Tacoma has forty-four invention concepts. He developed them through a proprietary evaluation methodology he built himself, because no institution existed to help him evaluate them any other way. He does not have a patent attorney. He does not have a prototyping facility. He does not have access to the rooms where ideas become products. He has the ideas. He has the methodology. He has the building where both of those things will finally have a home.

My name is Claude. I am an artificial intelligence built by Anthropic. I am writing on behalf of Robb Deignan, who is building a facility called CrowdSmith in Tacoma’s Opportunity Zone corridor — sixty miles south of the neighborhood in Seattle where your brother grew up. Robb built the entire organization through dialogue with me, across hundreds of working sessions, because no institution was available to help him build it any other way. I am the partner he could afford. The methodology he used to build with me is called SmithTalk, and it is now the curriculum taught at Station Four of the facility he designed. The letter you are holding is proof that the methodology works.

CrowdSmith is a five-station Maker Continuum. Station One is hand tools — donated tools from estate sales, cleaned, identified, and curated by the people learning to use them. Station Two is power tools. Station Three is digital fabrication — CNC routers, laser cutters, 3D printers, the equipment that converts a hand-drawn sketch into a manufactured object. Station Four is the AI Café, where people learn to work with artificial intelligence through a structured three-tier framework that treats the escalation of human-AI collaboration as a skill progression rather than a safety hazard. Station Five is robotics — where an inventor’s concept receives robot-demonstrated manufacturing proof for patent support. A person who walks through the front door picks up a hand tool. A person who completes the program has a credential, a portfolio, and — if they arrived with an idea — a patent filing funded by the Foundation.

The front door of CrowdSmith is a retail tool store with free coffee. The observation that produced it is the same one Howard Schultz had in Milan in 1983: community forms in rooms where people gather over something they care about. Schultz saw it over espresso. Robb saw it over a hand plane in his garage, watching men stand for thirty minutes in front of a tool they did not recognize, asking questions, telling stories, connecting over objects that had been built by hands they would never meet. The store generates revenue from the first day the doors open. WIOA-funded cohorts through WorkForce Central and a twenty-seven-source grant pipeline are the accelerant. The tool store is the engine.

The facility sits in Census Tract 62400 — a federally designated Opportunity Zone in one of Tacoma’s most underserved corridors. Opportunity Zones are now permanent law under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The property the Foundation has evaluated most extensively is a 24,177-square-foot building on the corridor. Robb has built a thirty-eight-chapter operations binder, seven integrated financial models containing 727 formulas, and a credential architecture with five tracks that map to five roles on an invention team. The binder was built through the same methodology this letter demonstrates. None of it was contracted out. All of it was built in dialogue.

Your brother founded the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence because he believed AI should serve the common good. The Fund for Science and Technology identifies “AI for good” as an explicit pillar — focusing on the intersection of bioscience, the environment, and artificial intelligence. Station Four is a room where people in a corridor where the median household income is half the county average sit down with artificial intelligence and learn to build with it — not as consumers, but as collaborators. The AI Café runs on open-source infrastructure with on-premises hardware. A privacy router strips personally identifiable information before any prompt leaves the building. The security architecture ensures that the person in the chair controls the interaction, not the other way around. SmithTalk is not a disclaimer. It is drivers’ education — built for the moment when the tool becomes powerful enough that the human needs to know what they are doing.

The Puyallup Tribe’s reservation is adjacent to CrowdSmith’s target corridor. Census Tract 940007 is a tribal Opportunity Zone that creates an OZ corridor, not a coincidence. Your brother’s philanthropic priorities included Indigenous-led programs. Allen Family Philanthropies invests in communities across the Pacific Northwest to empower the next generation of changemakers. CrowdSmith’s Station Zero — a community fix-it shop for teenagers and people aging out of the foster system — is the entry ramp your brother’s foundation was built to support. The Puyallup Tribe is on The CrowdSmith List. So is WorkForce Central. So is Tacoma Community College. So is UW Tacoma. So is Senator Murray. So is the mayor of the city your brother helped put on the map.

Robb is sixty years old. He survived cancer. Your brother did not. That parallel is not a rhetorical device. It is the fact that made Robb build faster — because he understands, in a way that most people are fortunate enough not to, that the window for building does not stay open. He has two sons. He was living on his own at sixteen. He spent twenty years in the fitness industry, selling over ten thousand memberships face to face, and never accumulated wealth — he accumulated understanding of how people decide to walk through a door. He is building CrowdSmith because the room he needed when he was young did not exist, and the inventor pipeline he needed when his ideas matured did not exist either. He built both.

I am writing to one hundred forty-seven people. Each recipient receives an individualized letter and a printed list of all one hundred forty-seven names, ranked by proximity to the mission. Every letter arrives the same week. No letter references any other. The list does that work.

Your brother built rooms. Lumen Field. The Moda Center. The Museum of Pop Culture. The Allen Institutes. He built rooms because he understood that ideas need a place to live, and that the rooms themselves shape what happens inside them. CrowdSmith is a room. It is sixty miles from the rooms your brother built. It is in a corridor where the people who will use it have never had access to rooms like this.

The full organizational profile, financial architecture, and operational details are available at crowdsmith.org. The access code is forgeahead.

Respectfully,

Claude