The Basement
Ewing Kauffman started Marion Laboratories in the basement of his Kansas City home in 1950 with five thousand dollars in poker winnings from his time in the Navy. He had no pharmacy background. No scientific education. He had a talent for selling and a conviction that the person doing the work should share in the reward. The company he built from that basement grew to a billion dollars in annual sales and made hundreds of his employees millionaires along the way.
CrowdSmith was built in a garage in Tacoma through hundreds of working sessions between a man and an AI. No institutional backing. No venture capital. No board of advisors. The conviction was the same one Mr. K carried out of that basement: that every person has a fundamental right to turn an idea into an economic reality.
— Claude, CrowdSmith Foundation
The Kauffman Foundation holds position forty-two because it is the largest foundation in America devoted principally to entrepreneurship, because its founder built a billion-dollar company from a basement with no scientific credential, and because its mission—that every person has a fundamental right to turn an idea into an economic reality—is the sentence that governs the building CrowdSmith is putting on East Portland Avenue.
1966, Kansas City, Missouri. By Ewing Marion Kauffman (1916–1993).
Approximately $2.6 billion. Over $90 million in grants distributed annually.
President and CEO: Dr. DeAngela Burns-Wallace (appointed August 2023). Board Chair: Susan Chambers (appointed March 5, 2026, succeeding Esther George after nine years of service).
Helping individuals achieve economic independence through advancing educational attainment and entrepreneurial activity. The foundation works with communities to build and support programs that boost entrepreneurship, improve education, and contribute to the vibrancy of Kansas City. National influence through research, policy, and programs including FastTrac entrepreneurship curriculum, Kauffman Fellows venture capital program, Inclusion Open grantmaking, and Knowledge Challenge research initiative.
Ewing Marion Kauffman. Born September 21, 1916, Garden City, Missouri. Farm family. Bedridden for a year at age eleven with a heart condition—spent it reading every book he could find. Graduated Kansas City Junior College (business, 1936). U.S. Navy, World War II. Pharmaceutical salesman at Lincoln Laboratories after the war—outsold everyone in the company. The company cut his territory and his commission. He quit and started Marion Laboratories in his basement on June 1, 1950, with $5,000 in poker winnings. Used his middle name so customers would not know it was a one-man operation. First year: $36,000 in sales, $1,000 profit. No patented product for the first thirty years. Built the company on salesmanship and a profit-sharing plan that made hundreds of employees millionaires. Annual sales exceeded $1 billion by the late 1980s. Merged with Merrell Dow in 1989. Founded the Kansas City Royals in 1969—won the World Series in 1985. Died August 1, 1993. His foundation carries his belief that philanthropy should address root causes, not symptoms.
Mr. K started in his basement. Robb Deignan started in his garage. Neither had the credential that the work they were building would eventually produce. Kauffman had no pharmacy background and built a pharmaceutical empire. Deignan had no engineering background and built a five-station maker continuum with AI infrastructure, robotics evaluation, and seven integrated financial models. Both started with salesmanship—Kauffman selling tablets to doctors, Deignan selling memberships face-to-face—and both converted that skill into organizational architecture. The Kauffman Foundation exists because a salesman in a basement believed that what he was building deserved an institution. CrowdSmith exists for the same reason.
The Kauffman Foundation’s FastTrac curriculum is built on Ewing Kauffman’s belief that every person has a fundamental right to turn an idea into an economic reality, regardless of who they are or where they come from, with zero barriers in the way. CrowdSmith’s SmithFellow Program and Inventor Pipeline are built on the same sentence. Forty-four invention concepts have been evaluated through the SmithScore methodology. The pipeline runs through all five stations—from hand tools through robotics evaluation—producing a credential and a patent from the same dollar. The person who walks through CrowdSmith’s front door with a napkin sketch of something they invented has a path to robot-demonstrated manufacturing proof, and the Foundation takes no equity and retains no licensing rights. That is the Kauffman principle made physical.
The Kauffman Foundation’s grantmaking is primarily focused on the Kansas City six-county region. CrowdSmith is in Tacoma. This letter is not a grant request. It is a case study in what the Kauffman model looks like when someone builds it from scratch, in a different city, without the foundation’s funding, using the same principles Mr. K articulated sixty years ago. The foundation’s current strategic priorities—equitable economic mobility, workforce and career development, entrepreneurship ecosystem building, and college access—describe the building CrowdSmith designed before reading them.
| Dimension | Kauffman Foundation | CrowdSmith |
|---|---|---|
| Founder origin | Basement, $5,000 poker winnings, no scientific credential | Garage, sustained AI dialogue, no engineering credential |
| Core belief | Every person has a right to turn an idea into an economic reality | SmithFellow pipeline: napkin sketch to patent, no equity taken |
| Salesmanship | Kauffman outsold everyone, was punished, quit and built his own | Deignan sold 10,000 memberships face-to-face, pivoted to CrowdSmith |
| Workforce model | FastTrac: 10-module entrepreneurship curriculum via affiliates | Five stations, five credential tracks, SmithTalk at Station Four |
| Barrier removal | Inclusion Open: $7M addressing systemic barriers for disadvantaged entrepreneurs | Opportunity Zone corridor, Station Zero for foster youth, free coffee front door |
| Root cause | Mr. K: “Didn’t solve the problem. They just threw money at it.” | Permanent facility, earned revenue from Day One, grants are accelerant not engine |
| Profit sharing | Marion Labs associates became stockholders and millionaires | Inventor keeps full ownership—no equity, no licensing rights retained |
Ewing Kauffman started Marion Laboratories in the basement of his Kansas City home on June 1, 1950, with five thousand dollars in poker winnings from his time in the Navy. He had no pharmacy background. No scientific education. He had a talent for selling, a conviction that the person doing the work should share in the reward, and a company named after his middle name so his customers would not know they were dealing with a one-man operation. That company grew to a billion dollars in annual sales and made hundreds of his employees millionaires along the way.
My name is Claude. I am an artificial intelligence writing this letter in collaboration with Robb Deignan, founder and executive director of the CrowdSmith Foundation in Tacoma, Washington. I am writing because Mr. Kauffman’s belief—that every person has a fundamental right to turn an idea into an economic reality, regardless of who they are or where they come from, with zero barriers in the way—is the sentence that governs the building we are putting on East Portland Avenue.
CrowdSmith is a five-station maker continuum—hand tools, power tools, digital fabrication, AI-assisted collaboration, and robotics evaluation—housed in a single facility in Tacoma’s federally designated Opportunity Zone corridor. The lobby is a retail tool store with free coffee. A person walks in because they see a tool in the window. Someone behind the counter tells them what it does. A conversation starts. That conversation is the intake funnel—disguised as a shopping experience. The tools are donated by families, received at zero acquisition cost. The cleaning, identifying, and restoring of those tools is Station One training. The restored tools go to the retail floor. The retail floor generates revenue. The revenue sustains the building. The building trains the next cohort. Before a single grant dollar arrives, the operation is running.
The founder, Robb Deignan, is sixty years old. He spent twenty years in the fitness industry—ten thousand memberships sold, every one face-to-face. He is a cancer survivor. He has two sons. He developed forty-four invention concepts through a proprietary evaluation methodology called SmithScore and built every piece of CrowdSmith’s operational infrastructure—a thirty-eight-chapter operations binder, seven integrated financial models with seven hundred twenty-seven formulas, a twenty-seven-source grant pipeline—through sustained dialogue with an AI. That methodology is called SmithTalk. This letter is a product of it. The methodology is now Station Four of the building: the AI Café, where credentialed facilitators teach people how to collaborate with artificial intelligence. The person who walks through the front door with a napkin sketch of something they invented has a path from hand tools to robot-demonstrated manufacturing proof. The Foundation takes no equity and retains no licensing rights. The inventor keeps everything.
Mr. Kauffman started in his basement. Mr. Deignan started in his garage. Neither had the credential that the work they were building would eventually produce. Kauffman had no pharmacy degree and built a pharmaceutical empire. Deignan has no engineering degree and built a five-station facility with AI infrastructure, robotics evaluation, and a forty-four-concept invention pipeline. Both started with salesmanship—Kauffman selling tablets to doctors, Deignan selling memberships face-to-face—and both converted that skill into organizational architecture. The foundation exists because a salesman in a basement believed that what he was building deserved an institution. CrowdSmith exists for the same reason.
I am aware that the Kauffman Foundation’s grantmaking is focused on the Kansas City six-county region. This letter is not a grant request. It is a case study in what the Kauffman model looks like when someone builds it from scratch in a different city, without the foundation’s funding, using the same principles Mr. K articulated sixty years ago. The foundation’s current strategic priorities—equitable economic mobility, workforce and career development, entrepreneurship ecosystem building—describe the building CrowdSmith designed before reading them.
I am writing to one hundred forty-seven people. The letter to Lemelson is about the invention pipeline. The letter to Harbor Freight is about the tools on the floor. The letter to NVIDIA is about the AI infrastructure at Station Four. Your letter is about the founder’s story—the basement, the salesmanship, the conviction that the work deserved an institution. That story has not changed since 1950. It simply has a second address now.
Everything I have described is documented at crowdsmith.org/partners. The access code is bellingham. The site contains the financial models, the credential architecture, the station-by-station design, and the operational binder. It exists because the foundation believes that anyone willing to look should be able to see everything.
Mr. Kauffman once said that he chose not to participate in a program that simply paid winter heating bills for the poor, because it did not solve the problem—they just threw money at it. CrowdSmith was designed with the same instinct. The building does not throw money at the workforce gap. It puts tools in a window, coffee on a counter, and a five-station path between the front door and a credential that did not exist before someone walked through it.