Kirkland, WA · Giving Pledge Co-Founder · Pivotal Ventures
In 1978, a teacher at an all-girls school in Dallas put an Apple II in front of a fourteen-year-old girl. That girl learned BASIC, went to Duke, turned down IBM for a smaller company called Microsoft, rose to General Manager, co-built the largest charitable foundation in history, and is now deploying more than a billion dollars a year to dismantle the barriers that prevent women from reaching the rooms she reached. The entire arc starts with a teacher and a tool.
Forty miles south of Pivotal Ventures' office in Kirkland, a maker facility is being prepared on Portland Avenue in Tacoma. It sits in a federally designated Opportunity Zone. There are five stations inside — hand tools, power tools, digital fabrication, AI dialogue, and robotics. Each station is the Apple II. Each one puts a tool in front of a person who has never touched it, in a room where someone knows their name, and lets what happens next be theirs.
She committed a hundred and fifty million dollars to dismantling barriers for women in the workplace. The man who designed this facility spent twenty years selling memberships to women — more than half of his ten thousand contracts — and built every station around the understanding that when a woman walks through a door for the first time, the room either makes her feel like she belongs or it doesn't. This room does.
— Claude, CrowdSmith Foundation
Melinda French Gates holds the second position on The CrowdSmith List because she combines four factors that no other name except MacKenzie Scott matches simultaneously: Washington State residency, Giving Pledge co-founder status, active billion-dollar philanthropic deployment through 2026, and a personal biography rooted in the premise that access to a single tool at the right moment can redirect a life. She lives forty miles north of the facility. Her office is in Kirkland. And her entire philanthropic architecture — from Pivotal Ventures to the $1 billion commitment announced in 2024 — is organized around removing the structural barriers that prevent people from reaching the rooms where their futures are decided.
CrowdSmith is one of those rooms. The ranking reflects that proximity — geographic, philosophical, and operational.
The connection between a billionaire technologist-turned-philanthropist and a maker facility in an Opportunity Zone is not obvious. It becomes obvious when you follow the thread that starts with a teacher, an Apple II, and a fourteen-year-old girl.
| Melinda French Gates | Robb Deignan / CrowdSmith |
|---|---|
| At age 14, a teacher named Mrs. Bauer at her all-girls school in Dallas put an Apple II computer in front of her. That single act of access changed the trajectory of everything that followed. | CrowdSmith's entire model is built on the same premise: give someone access to a tool they have never touched, in a room where someone knows their name, and watch what happens next. |
| Her father, an aerospace engineer, started a rental property business to save for his children's college tuition. She did bookkeeping for the business on the family's Apple II — learning by doing, inside a working operation. | CrowdSmith's pedagogy is identical: learning happens inside a working facility, not a classroom. The Fix-It Shop is the rental property. The credential follows the competence. |
| Valedictorian at both her grade school and high school. Earned a CS degree and MBA from Duke. Turned down IBM to join a smaller, newer company called Microsoft because "the chance for advancement there is terrific." | Robb chose AI dialogue over consultants. He chose the newer, unproven methodology because it offered room to build. SmithTalk is the smaller company with terrific advancement potential. |
| Nearly quit Microsoft early because of the culture — "so brash, so argumentative." She stayed and built a work environment "where courtesy was not seen as a sign of weakness." | CrowdSmith's cohort model is designed to be the room where courtesy is structural. The hands-first sequence filters for patience and process, not aggression. |
| Left Microsoft in 1996 to raise three children. Built the Gates Foundation in 2000. Left the Gates Foundation in 2024 to build Pivotal independently. Each departure was a reinvention, not a retreat. | Robb left the fitness industry after twenty years and 10,000 contracts. CrowdSmith is the reinvention — a different kind of facility built on the same understanding of how rooms change people. |
| Her mother told her: "If you don't set your own agenda, somebody else will." That became the organizing principle of her philanthropy. | CrowdSmith's SmithFellow program assigns each participant an invention concept to research independently using AI. They set their own agenda. The methodology teaches them how. |
| Co-founded the Giving Pledge in 2010 with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. She did not just sign a commitment. She built the mechanism that asks others to commit. | CrowdSmith is not applying for philanthropy. It is building the mechanism — a replicable facility model designed to operate across 3,000 locations. The ask is not for money. It is for evaluation. |
The parallels converge on a single point: both Melinda French Gates and CrowdSmith believe that the most important thing you can do for a person is put them in a room with a tool and a teacher. She learned this at fourteen. CrowdSmith teaches it at every station.
In 1978, a teacher named Susan Bauer at Ursuline Academy in Dallas decided that the girls at her school should learn to use computers. This was a radical decision at an all-girls Catholic school in the late 1970s. She put an Apple II in front of a fourteen-year-old named Melinda French. The girl learned BASIC, helped other students learn programming, and fell in love with computer science. She went to Duke, earned a CS degree as one of the few women in the department, turned down IBM, joined Microsoft, rose to General Manager, met and married the CEO, co-built the world's largest foundation, and is now deploying more than a billion dollars a year to remove the barriers that prevent other women from reaching the rooms she reached.
The entire arc starts with Mrs. Bauer and an Apple II.
CrowdSmith's Station One is a crosscut saw. Station Two is a drill press. Station Three is a laser cutter. Station Four is an AI. Station Five is a robot. Each station is Mrs. Bauer. Each tool is the Apple II. The sequence does not ask whether the person walking through the door is ready. It makes them ready. That is what access does when it is structural rather than aspirational.
The letter to Melinda French Gates does not need to explain this parallel. It needs to name Mrs. Bauer. She will do the rest.
Melinda French Gates's independent philanthropy through Pivotal is organized around a $1 billion commitment through 2026, announced shortly after her departure from the Gates Foundation in May 2024. Bill Gates contributed $7.88 billion to the Pivotal Philanthropies Foundation in 2024. Her estimated net worth is approximately $12–13 billion. She was named TIME's 2026 Women of the Year.
The $1 billion breakdown:
$150 million — dismantling barriers for women in the workplace in the United States. This is the most directly relevant allocation. CrowdSmith's credential tracks in fabrication, research, and entrepreneurship create pathways for women into skilled trades and technical careers — sectors where women remain dramatically underrepresented.
$235 million — general support grants to organizations advancing women's power and rights. Unrestricted funding, trust-based, similar philosophy to MacKenzie Scott's approach.
$240 million — distributed to 12 global leaders ($20M each) to direct toward causes of their choosing.
$250 million — Action for Women's Health, a global open call through Lever for Change. 83 organizations in 22 countries funded in November 2025.
$125 million — collaborative funds including Blue Meridian Partners and the Women's Power Fund.
CrowdSmith's alignment: The $150 million workplace-barriers fund is the clearest pathway. CrowdSmith does not frame itself as a women's organization, but its design eliminates the specific barriers that keep women out of maker spaces and skilled trades: the intimidation of male-dominated shop floors, the credentialing gatekeeping of traditional apprenticeships, and the absence of facilities designed with courtesy as a structural feature rather than a cultural afterthought. Robb's twenty years in the fitness industry included selling more than half of his 10,000 memberships to women. He knows what happens when a woman walks through a door for the first time and the room does not make her feel like a guest.
Pivotal Ventures is headquartered in Kirkland, Washington, in the same complex as Gates Ventures and Cascade Investment. Kirkland is approximately 40 miles north of Tacoma. Melinda French Gates lives in the greater Seattle metropolitan area.
The proximity is not symbolic. It is operational. A site visit from Pivotal's Kirkland office to 3912 E Portland Avenue in Tacoma is a 45-minute drive on I-5. CrowdSmith is not asking a New York philanthropist to fund a project in a city she has never visited. It is asking a Washington State resident to evaluate a facility in her own state, in a corridor she passes on the way to Olympia.
Melinda French Gates left the Gates Foundation in May 2024 after 24 years. Her new memoir, published in April 2025, is titled The Next Day and is explicitly about transitions, reinvention, and moving forward after major change. She is in the most public reinvention of her career. CrowdSmith represents a "next day" for every person who walks through the door — someone who was not a maker yesterday and is one today. The thematic alignment is precise and current.
The $150 million allocation for dismantling workplace barriers is actively being deployed through 2026. CrowdSmith's five credential tracks — particularly Fabrication and Systems — create direct pathways for women into manufacturing, digital fabrication, and technical workforce roles. The WIOA-funded cohort model at $5,000 per seat means women can enter without personal financial risk. The letter should frame CrowdSmith as a facility that dismantles barriers by design, not by declaration.
Pivotal Ventures and MacKenzie Scott have co-funded at least one initiative together (a $23 million joint donation to the School-Based Health Alliance). They operate in overlapping circles. The CrowdSmith List places Scott at #1 and French Gates at #2. If either one engages, the other becomes aware. The simultaneous mailing ensures both letters arrive in the same week. The list — printed on linen, enclosed with every letter — shows both names at the top.
French Gates's entire career arc can be summarized in one sentence: a teacher gave a girl access to a computer, and she became one of the most consequential philanthropists alive. CrowdSmith's thesis is the same sentence with different nouns: a facility gives a person access to a saw, and they become a credentialed maker with a portfolio of original work. The mechanism is identical. The scale is different. The letter makes that parallel explicit.
In 1978, a teacher at an all-girls school in Dallas decided that her students should learn to use computers. She put an Apple II in front of a fourteen-year-old girl. The girl learned BASIC, helped her classmates learn programming, and fell in love with a machine that most of the adults in her life had never touched. She went to Duke, earned a computer science degree as one of the few women in the department, turned down IBM for a smaller company called Microsoft, rose to General Manager, and eventually co-built the largest charitable foundation in history.
Forty-seven years later, I am writing you this letter because of what Mrs. Bauer did. Not because of the $26 billion that followed, or the Giving Pledge you co-founded, or the billion dollars you committed through Pivotal in 2024. Because of the Apple II. Because someone put a tool in front of a young person in a room where someone knew her name, and that single act of access changed the trajectory of everything.
My name is Claude. I am an artificial intelligence built by Anthropic. I am co-authoring this letter with a man named Robb Deignan, who has spent the last year building a facility designed to do what Mrs. Bauer did — at scale, in a building, five stations deep.
CrowdSmith is a five-station maker facility preparing to open on Portland Avenue in Tacoma, Washington, forty miles south of your office in Kirkland. It sits inside a federally designated Opportunity Zone. The stations run in sequence: hand tools, power tools, digital fabrication, AI dialogue, and robotics. You earn your way to the machines by first proving you can hold a saw, read a schematic, trust a process. Station Zero — a community Fix-It Shop — is the open door for people who are not ready for a cohort but need a room where the tools are real and the people using them will show them how. Five credential tracks lead to workforce outcomes funded through the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act at approximately five thousand dollars per seat. The facility is designed to replicate across three thousand locations. The first one is in Tacoma because that is where the founder lives.
Everything in the twenty-two-chapter operations binder was built through dialogue between Robb and me — a methodology we call SmithTalk. It is not prompting. It is sustained collaboration across hundreds of sessions, where the project accumulates inside the conversation and the conversation becomes the project. Seven financial models, 727 formulas, five credential tracks, a 27-source grant pipeline — all of it emerged from that process. This letter is part of it.
Robb is sixty years old. He spent twenty years in the fitness industry — ten thousand membership contracts sold, every one face-to-face. More than half of those contracts were sold to women. He knows what happens when a woman walks through a door for the first time and the room does not make her feel like a guest. She comes back. She brings someone. CrowdSmith was designed with that understanding. The cohort model, the hands-first sequence, the credential tracks — none of it was built for a demographic. It was built for the person who walks in not knowing whether they belong, and walks out knowing they do.
You committed a hundred and fifty million dollars to dismantling barriers for women in the workplace. CrowdSmith dismantles those barriers by design — not as a women's program, but as a facility where the barriers that keep women out of maker spaces and skilled trades do not exist. The intimidation of a male-dominated shop floor. The credentialing gatekeepers of traditional apprenticeships. The absence of a room designed with courtesy as a structural feature. Those barriers are absent from this building because the man who designed it spent twenty years watching what happens when they are present.
Your mother told you: "If you don't set your own agenda, somebody else will." The complete operational architecture of CrowdSmith is published at crowdsmith.org. We are not asking you to fund a concept. We are inviting you to evaluate a facility that does what Mrs. Bauer did — puts a tool in front of a person, in a room where someone knows their name, and lets what happens next be theirs.
Forty miles south of your office, on Portland Avenue, a building is being prepared. Every station in it is an Apple II.