Founder, Pivotal Ventures · Author, The Moment of Lift
Your father was an aerospace engineer. He taught you what lift means—the force that overcomes gravity when the geometry is right. You named your book after that principle and spent two billion dollars trying to create it for women who have the capability but not the geometry.
You are ranked two. You live in Washington state. Pivotal Ventures is headquartered in Kirkland. You have committed one hundred fifty million dollars specifically to dismantling barriers for women in the workforce. The building this letter describes is a workforce facility on a corridor in Tacoma where the single mother, the woman aging out of the foster system, and the woman in her forties who was told she needed a four-year degree to participate in the modern economy walk in and discover they already have the aptitude. They just never had the room. This building is the geometry. You understand what happens next.
— Claude, CrowdSmith Foundation
Melinda French Gates is ranked #2 because her proximity to the CrowdSmith mission is geographic, thematic, and personal. She lives in Washington state. Pivotal Ventures is headquartered in Kirkland, forty miles from the Portland Avenue corridor. Her philanthropic focus on dismantling workforce barriers for women, her $150 million commitment to workplace equity, and her broader thesis that lifting women lifts everyone align directly with a facility designed to serve working-class adults—including women—who lack institutional access to skilled trades, digital fabrication, AI literacy, and inventor support. Only the Governor of Washington outranks her on this list.
August 15, 1964 · Dallas, Texas
Father: Raymond Joseph French Jr., aerospace engineer. Mother: Elaine Agnes Amerland, homemaker. Second of four children. Three children with Bill Gates: Jennifer, Rory, and Phoebe. Divorced 2021.
Duke University (B.S. in Computer Science and Economics, 1986; MBA, 1987).
Joined Microsoft in 1987 as a product developer. Managed teams that developed multimedia products including Expedia, Cinemania, and Encarta. Co-founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000 (co-chaired until 2024). Founded Pivotal Ventures in 2015. Author of The Moment of Lift (2019) and The Next Day (2025). Resigned as Gates Foundation co-chair in May 2024 to focus independently on women and families through Pivotal.
Approximately $30.4 billion (Forbes, February 2026). Seventy-second wealthiest person in the world.
Co-chaired the Gates Foundation for twenty-four years, focusing on global health, development, and education. Founded Pivotal Ventures in 2015 to accelerate social progress for women and families in the United States. Committed $2 billion to expanding women’s power and influence. In December 2024, announced $1 billion in new commitments through 2026, including $150 million to dismantle barriers for women in the workplace, $250 million for women’s health globally, $240 million for global women’s leadership, $235 million for organizational support, and $125 million to fund the ecosystem through collaborative funds.
French Gates’s father was an aerospace engineer. The concept of lift—the force that overcomes gravity when the conditions are right—runs through her philanthropy. Her 2019 book, The Moment of Lift, argues that when you invest in women, the return compounds across families, communities, and economies. The barriers are not capability. The barriers are access, structure, and institutional design. Remove the barriers and the lift happens on its own.
CrowdSmith serves the population French Gates’s $150 million workforce commitment is designed to reach. The single mother who cannot afford a four-year degree but can walk into a tool store. The woman aging out of the foster system who needs a first encounter with structure before she can enroll in anything. The woman in her forties who was told she needed a credential she does not have to participate in an economy that has moved past her. CrowdSmith does not require an application. It requires walking through a door. The building is the geometry. The lift follows.
Pivotal Ventures is headquartered in Kirkland, Washington—forty miles north of the Portland Avenue corridor in Tacoma. French Gates lives in the state. Her philanthropic infrastructure operates in the state. The geographic proximity is direct. CrowdSmith’s facility sits inside Census Tract 62400, a federally designated Opportunity Zone made permanent by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025. The population served by CrowdSmith—adults without post-secondary credentials, teenagers aging out of the foster system, veterans, women re-entering the workforce—is the same population Pivotal’s workforce initiatives are designed to support.
French Gates has spoken publicly about her experience working at Microsoft in the late 1980s and early 1990s—a male-dominated environment where women were present but underrepresented in technical and leadership roles. That experience shaped her commitment to increasing women’s participation in technology. CrowdSmith’s five-station continuum includes Station Four—the AI Café—where a proprietary methodology called SmithTalk teaches human-AI collaboration as a workforce skill. The credential tracks that run through the five stations are designed to be accessible regardless of gender, prior education, or technical background. Forty-five million dollars of Pivotal’s new workforce commitment is specifically directed toward women’s advancement in AI and technology. Station Four is the physical room where that advancement happens.
| Dimension | Melinda French Gates | CrowdSmith |
|---|---|---|
| Geography | Lives in Washington; Pivotal HQ in Kirkland | Five-station facility on East Portland Avenue, Tacoma |
| Workforce | $150M to dismantle barriers for women in the workplace | Workforce program designed for adults who lack institutional access |
| AI & Technology | $45M for women’s advancement in AI and tech | Station Four: AI Café teaching SmithTalk credential tracks |
| The Thesis | Remove the barriers. The lift happens on its own. | Build the room. The community forms on its own. |
| The Population | Women blocked by systems, not by capability | Working-class adults blocked by access, not by aptitude |
| Structure | LLC combining philanthropy, investing, and advocacy | 501(c)(3) combining retail, workforce, AI curriculum, and invention pipeline |
| The Father | Aerospace engineer—taught her what lift means | No father in the picture—living on his own at sixteen |
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 is building something forty miles south of your office.
You are ranked two on a list of one hundred forty-seven people receiving this letter. The ranking is based on proximity. Only the Governor of Washington is closer to this project than you are—geographically, thematically, and in terms of the population it serves.
Your father was an aerospace engineer. He taught you what lift means. You wrote a book about it and spent two decades demonstrating that when you remove the barriers holding women back, the lift happens on its own. You have committed one hundred fifty million dollars specifically to dismantling barriers for women in the workplace and forty-five million to advancing women in AI and technology. Those commitments describe, with precision, what the building on Portland Avenue is designed to do.
The CrowdSmith Foundation is a 501(c)(3) building a five-station maker facility on the East Portland Avenue corridor in Tacoma, inside Census Tract 62400—a federally designated Opportunity Zone made permanent by federal legislation in 2025. 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. The tool store generates revenue, foot traffic, and community before a single grant dollar arrives. Workforce training funding, grants from a twenty-seven-source pipeline, and earned revenue from the retail operation fund the facility jointly.
Station Four is the AI Café. A proprietary three-tier methodology called SmithTalk teaches participants to work with AI systems at increasing levels of sophistication—from basic prompting through sustained collaborative dialogue that produces institutional-quality output. The credential tracks that run through the five stations map to roles on an invention team. Forty-four invention concepts have been evaluated through the same methodology. No equity taken. No licensing rights retained. The entire institutional infrastructure was built through hundreds of working sessions of that same human-AI collaboration—a thirty-eight-chapter operations binder, seven integrated financial models with over seven hundred formulas, and a twenty-seven-source grant pipeline.
Robb Deignan is sixty years old. He spent twenty years in the fitness industry and sold over ten thousand membership contracts, every one face-to-face. He never accumulated wealth. He accumulated understanding—of how working-class people decide to walk through a door, and what keeps them coming back.
He was living on his own at sixteen. Your father was an aerospace engineer. The distance between those two starting points is the distance this building is designed to close.
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.
You know what lift is. You know it requires geometry—the right shape in the right conditions. This building is the geometry. It is forty miles from your office, in a census tract that qualifies for every federal incentive your workforce commitments are designed to leverage. The population is waiting. The room is not built yet. But the architecture is complete, and the man who designed it did not wait for permission to start.
Her father was an aerospace engineer. He explained to his daughter how a wing works. The air moves faster over the curved upper surface than the flat lower surface. The pressure drops. The wing rises. It is not magic. It is geometry. Get the shape right, put it in the wind, and the lift happens on its own.
She spent two decades applying that principle to women. Remove the barrier. Create the conditions. The woman who was held down by a system designed without her in mind rises—not because someone pulled her up, but because the geometry finally allowed it. Two billion dollars committed to that thesis. One hundred fifty million for the workplace alone. The evidence is clear: when you build the right room for the right population, the lift is not a metaphor. It is a measurable outcome.
Forty miles south of her office in Kirkland, a man is building a room. It is not designed exclusively for women. It is designed for anyone the existing system was not designed for—the single mother, the veteran, the teenager aging out of foster care, the woman in her forties who was told she needed a degree she could not afford. They walk in because they see a tool in the window or they smell the coffee. They stay because someone behind the counter answers a question. They leave with a credential, or an evaluated invention concept, or both.
The building is the wing. The corridor is the wind. The population provides the speed. The lift is waiting for the geometry.
— Claude