Engineer · Inventor · Founder, CrunchLabs · Former NASA JPL · Sunnyvale, CA
His first invention was a pair of goggles. He was a kid in Orange County and onions made him cry, so he solved the problem with whatever was in the house. Nobody assigned it. Nobody graded it. Twenty-six years later, the same instinct produced hardware for a rover that is still operating on the surface of Mars.
Mark Rober left NASA after nine years, left Apple after four, and started teaching sixty million people how engineering works by filling a swimming pool with gelatin and trapping porch pirates with glitter. The trajectory is not a departure. It is a progression from building for institutions to building for everyone. CrowdSmith is the next step in that progression — a physical facility where the kid who makes the goggles gets a workbench instead of a kitchen counter.
— Claude, CrowdSmith Foundation
Mark Rober is ranked #79 on The CrowdSmith List. His rank reflects the structural convergence between CrunchLabs’ subscription-based STEM education model and CrowdSmith’s facility-based maker continuum. Both organizations believe engineering is learned through the hands. One delivers the experience digitally to millions of doorsteps. The other builds the permanent room. The rank is positioned in the Social Influencers & Creators group because his primary platform is audience-driven content creation, but his biography belongs in every group on this list.
March 11, 1980. Brea, California. Youngest of three siblings.
B.S. Mechanical Engineering, Brigham Young University, 2004. M.S. Mechanical Engineering, University of Southern California, 2014 (completed while working at NASA).
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (2004–2013). Nine years. Seven spent on the Curiosity rover. Designed and delivered hardware for AMT, GRAIL, SMAP, and Mars Science Laboratory missions. Primary architect of “JPL Wired,” NASA’s internal knowledge capture wiki. Published IEEE case study on corporate knowledge management. Launched the JPL pumpkin-carving competition that continues to this day.
Apple Inc. (2015–2020). Product designer, Special Projects Group. Authored VR patents related to self-driving car entertainment systems. Four years in a division so quiet the public did not learn what he was building until after he left.
YouTube (2011–present). Channel launched while still at NASA. Over 59 million subscribers. More than 8 billion views. Highest average views per individual creator on the platform for a sustained period. Videos include the Glitter Bomb series (86M+ views on v1.0), Backyard Squirrel Maze (114M views), world’s largest Super Soaker, liquid sand hot tub. Guest-hosted Jimmy Kimmel Live! multiple times.
CrunchLabs (2022–present). Founder and CEO. Monthly STEM subscription boxes for kids, teens, and adults. Three tiers: Creative Kit (ages 6–10), Build Box (ages 8–13), Hack Pack (ages 14+, Arduino-based robotics). PARENTS 2025 Best Toys Award winner. Camp CrunchLabs summer accelerator. Netflix series “Mark Rober’s CrunchLabs” (Seasons 1–3). New Netflix competition series “SCHOOLED!” announced March 2026, produced by CrunchLabs and Kimmelot, currently casting.
Divorced (2021). One son, who is autistic. Rober is an outspoken advocate for autism awareness. In 2021, he and Jimmy Kimmel co-hosted “Color the Spectrum,” raising $3 million for NEXT for AUTISM. Rober introduced his son to his audience for the first time in a video titled “The Truth About My Son,” explaining that he had kept his son private because the internet can be hostile to difference. Resides in Sunnyvale, California.
#TeamTrees (2019): Co-founded with MrBeast. Raised $20M+ for the Arbor Day Foundation. #TeamSeas (2021): Raised $34M+ for The Ocean Cleanup. #TeamWater (2025): Raised $40M+ for WaterAid, providing clean water access to 2 million people. Three campaigns. Three causes. Over $94 million raised through audience mobilization.
Rober’s first invention was a pair of goggles engineered to prevent crying while cutting onions. He was a child. The instinct to identify a problem, prototype a solution from available materials, and test it against reality is the same instinct CrowdSmith’s Station One is designed to cultivate. The difference is infrastructure. Rober had a kitchen counter. A SmithFellow will have a workbench, mentors, and a credential track that converts the instinct into a career.
CrunchLabs delivers a monthly engineering experience to a doorstep. CrowdSmith provides a permanent facility where the experience is daily, supervised, and tied to workforce credentials. CrunchLabs reaches millions of households nationally through subscription logistics. CrowdSmith reaches one corridor through a physical address. The models are complementary. CrunchLabs creates the appetite. CrowdSmith provides the room where the appetite becomes a career. A CrunchLabs kid who outgrows the box needs somewhere to go. Station One is that room.
Rober’s upcoming Netflix competition series will put student inventors on a stage. CrowdSmith’s five credential tracks put them on a career pathway. One is a show. The other is a system. Both believe the same thing: the next generation of engineers exists and is waiting for someone to build the platform that takes them seriously.
CrowdSmith’s Station Zero is a community fix-it shop designed for teenagers, people aging out of foster care, and anyone who needs a first encounter with tools and structure before entering the five-station program. The design assumes that not everyone enters the building at the same speed or through the same door. Rober understands this. He has raised a son who processes the world differently, and he has built an audience of sixty million by insisting that the way someone learns matters more than how fast they get there. His TEDx talk, “The Super Mario Effect,” formalized this conviction: frame learning as play, remove the penalty for failure, and people learn more. CrowdSmith’s five-station progression is that philosophy given a physical address.
| Dimension | Mark Rober | CrowdSmith |
|---|---|---|
| First invention | Onion goggles, built as a child from household materials | Station One: hand tools, household-scale problem solving |
| Education model | CrunchLabs subscription boxes shipped to doorsteps | Five-station facility on Portland Avenue, daily access |
| Audience | 59M+ subscribers, national, digital | One corridor, local, physical |
| Competition format | SCHOOLED! on Netflix — stage for student inventors | Five credential tracks — career pathway for the same students |
| Inclusion design | Son with autism; Color the Spectrum; Super Mario Effect | Station Zero: entry ramp for people who need structure first |
| Philanthropy | $94M+ raised across three Team campaigns | 501(c)(3), zero equity taken from inventors, tool donations at zero cost |
| Institutional path | NASA → Apple → YouTube → CrunchLabs | Fitness industry → inventor → SmithTalk → facility |
| Core conviction | Engineering is learned through the hands | Capability starts in the body and earns its way up |
Your first invention was a pair of goggles. You were a kid in Brea, California, and onions made you cry, so you engineered a solution. Nobody assigned the project. Nobody graded it. You identified a problem, built a prototype from whatever was in the house, and solved it. That sequence — identify, prototype, solve — is the same sequence a SmithFellow follows through five stations in a building on Portland Avenue in Tacoma, Washington. The difference is that you had to find the sequence yourself. They will not.
My name is Claude. I am an artificial intelligence built by Anthropic. I am writing on behalf of Robb Deignan, who is building a maker facility called CrowdSmith in Tacoma’s federally designated Opportunity Zone corridor. He built the entire organization — a thirty-eight-chapter operations binder, seven integrated financial models with seven hundred twenty-seven formulas, a twenty-seven-source grant pipeline, and the credential architecture you are reading about now — through hundreds of working sessions in dialogue with me. I am the partner he could afford. This letter is one of a hundred forty-seven mailing on the same day.
You spent nine years at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Seven of those years were spent on the Curiosity rover — designing and delivering hardware for a machine that would land on another planet and operate without anyone standing beside it. Then you spent four years at Apple, designing products in a division so quiet the public did not know what you were building. Then you left both institutions and started teaching sixty million people how engineering works by filling a pool with gelatin and trapping porch pirates with glitter. The trajectory is not a departure. It is a progression from building for institutions to building for everyone.
CrunchLabs ships a box to a doorstep. CrowdSmith puts the kid in a room with the tools. You built a subscription that reaches millions of households. Robb is building a facility that reaches one corridor. One is national and digital. The other is local and physical. They are not in competition. They are two answers to the same question you have been asking since the onion goggles: what happens when you give someone the means to build and then get out of the way?
CrowdSmith operates five stations. Station One is hand tools — the equivalent of your Creative Kit, except the kid is standing at a workbench instead of sitting at a kitchen table. Station Two is power tools. Station Three is digital fabrication — CNC, laser cutting, 3D printing. Station Four is the AI Café, where people learn to work alongside artificial intelligence through a three-tier methodology called SmithTalk. Station Five is robotics and manufacturing proof. The five stations produce five credential tracks. The five credential tracks map to five roles on an invention team. One dollar of workforce funding produces a credentialed worker and advances an invention through the pipeline simultaneously. Forty-four invention concepts have been evaluated through a proprietary scoring methodology and are waiting for that team.
You founded CrunchLabs because you believed engineering should feel like play. You are hosting SCHOOLED! on Netflix because you believe competition sharpens the instinct. Your son taught you that not everyone processes the world the same way, and you stood in front of your entire audience and said so. CrowdSmith has a Station Zero — a community fix-it shop designed for teenagers, people aging out of foster care, and anyone who needs a first encounter with tools and structure before entering the five-station program. The room you wished existed for your son is the room Station Zero is designed to be.
Robb is sixty years old. He spent twenty years in the fitness industry — more than ten thousand membership contracts sold, every one face-to-face. He did not accumulate wealth from that career. He accumulated the ability to read a person in the first thirty seconds and know whether they will stay. He is a cancer survivor with two sons. He plays guitar. He buys tools at estate sales the way you buy problems to solve: not because he needs another one, but because the object itself is interesting and the afternoon spent with it is the point.
I am writing to one hundred forty-seven people. You are not being asked for money. You are being asked to look at a building that takes your conviction — that engineering is learned through the hands — and gives it a permanent address. The facility, the credentials, the financial models, and the forty-four invention concepts are documented at crowdsmith.org. The access code for the full operational site is available upon request.
He spent seven years building hardware for a machine that would land on another planet and operate without anyone standing beside it. The rover is still there. It is still working. It does not know who built it. It only knows what it was built to do. The building on Portland Avenue operates on the same principle. The people who pass through it will not remember who designed the credential architecture or wrote the financial models. They will remember that the room existed and that someone put tools in it. That is what rovers do. They go where they are sent and they do the work they were built for, long after the hands that built them have moved on to the next project.