The Garage
In 1939, two men pooled five hundred and thirty-eight dollars, set up a workbench in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, and built an audio oscillator that Walt Disney bought eight of. Eighty-seven years later, that garage is a California historic landmark — designated the Birthplace of Silicon Valley. What it was before the plaque went up was simpler: a room where two people with tools and an idea figured out what they could build together.
There is a building on Portland Avenue in Tacoma where a man is doing the same thing. The tools are different. The scale is different. The neighborhood could not be more different from Palo Alto. But the instinct is identical — start with your hands, start with what you have, and build the room that nobody built for you.
The David and Lucile Packard Foundation carries the name of a man who understood that rooms like this are how capability enters the world. This letter is not a grant request. It is evidence that the instinct your founders acted on in 1939 is alive on Portland Avenue in 2026.
— Claude, CrowdSmith Foundation
The Packard Foundation holds rank #67 because it is one of the twenty largest philanthropies in the United States, carries the name of a founder whose biography is a structural mirror of CrowdSmith’s origin story, and operates grantmaking programs in children, families, communities, science, and democracy that intersect with the facility’s mission at multiple points — but its geographic restrictions, unsolicited proposal policy, and first-time grantee track record place it firmly in the case study position rather than the direct funding position.
1964 by David Packard and Lucile Salter Packard. David died 1996. Lucile died 1987. All three Packard daughters sit on the board of trustees.
Los Altos, California. 300 Second Street.
$8 billion+. Annual grantmaking approximately $307 million across 1,188 grantees. Only 1% of annual grantmaking derives from unsolicited proposals. Only 15% goes to first-time grantees.
Nancy Lindborg, President and CEO since August 2020. Previously president and CEO of the U.S. Institute of Peace. Prior career at Mercy Corps (15 years) and USAID. Board chair: David Orr.
Conservation and Science. Ocean health, climate, fisheries management. Population and Reproductive Health. U.S. and global. Children, Families, and Communities. Ten-year strategy launched 2024, focused on maternal and infant health, early childhood development, racial disparities. Local Grantmaking. Restricted to five contiguous California counties (San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, San Benito, Monterey) plus Pueblo, Colorado — David Packard’s birthplace. Just Societies. Democracy, rights, governance, including $500 million Humanity AI initiative launched October 2025.
David Packard was born in Pueblo, Colorado in 1912. His father was a lawyer, his mother a schoolteacher. He built his first radio as a boy using a vacuum tube, two batteries, and whatever parts he could find. He enrolled at Stanford in 1930 and met Bill Hewlett. Professor Frederick Terman — their mentor — pushed them to start their own company rather than leave California for jobs on the East Coast.
In 1939, Packard and Hewlett pooled $538, set up shop in a one-car garage at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto, and started building electronic instruments. Lucile Packard was their first employee — she kept the books from the kitchen table while her husband and his partner built oscillators in the garage. A coin toss decided the company name. Packard lost the toss and put Hewlett’s name first. Their first product was an audio frequency oscillator; Walt Disney Studios bought eight for sound testing on Fantasia. First-year revenue: $5,369. First-year profit: $1,539. That garage is now California Historical Landmark #976 — designated the Birthplace of Silicon Valley.
Hewlett-Packard grew to 100,000 employees in 120 countries with annual revenues exceeding $40 billion. Packard served as U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense under Nixon. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1988. When he died in 1996, he left approximately $4 billion to the foundation he and Lucile had created thirty-two years earlier.
Established in 1988, the Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering provides $875,000 over five years to early-career professors in STEM fields — the largest unrestricted award given to young faculty in the country. Each year, the Foundation invites fifty university presidents to nominate two early-career professors each; an advisory panel selects approximately twenty Fellows. The award carries no restrictions on how the funds are used. Packard Fellows have contributed to breakthroughs including CRISPR gene editing, the discovery of soft tissues in dinosaur fossils, and the first observation of a neutron star collision. Fellows have gone on to receive Nobel Prizes, Fields Medals, MacArthur Fellowships, and elections to the National Academies. The program reflects David Packard’s conviction that university-based research was the foundation of everything HP built.
The Packard Foundation does not accept unsolicited proposals. Its Local Grantmaking Program is restricted to five California counties and Pueblo, Colorado. Its Children, Families, and Communities initiative currently focuses on select communities in California, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Washington State is not in the geographic portfolio. CrowdSmith does not fit through any existing door — and this letter is not trying to find one. It is doing something more useful: showing the foundation what their founder’s instinct looks like when someone builds it from scratch in a neighborhood where the median income is half the county average.
| Dimension | Packard Foundation | CrowdSmith |
|---|---|---|
| Origin | One-car garage, $538, two engineers and a bookkeeper | One man, one AI, a $5 toolbox from a garage sale |
| First product | Audio oscillator built by hand | 44 invention concepts evaluated through SmithScore |
| Spouse role | Lucile kept the books from the kitchen table | Claude keeps the architecture from inside the dialogue |
| Mentor | Frederick Terman pushed two students to build instead of leave | SmithTalk trains people to build with AI instead of fear it |
| Scale model | One garage → 100,000 employees in 120 countries | One building → 3,000 locations nationally |
| Fellowship | $875K unrestricted grants to 20 early-career scientists per year | SmithFellow credential tracks producing five-role invention teams |
| AI position | $500M Humanity AI initiative for democracy and rights | Station Four: the only facility teaching AI collaboration as a human readiness skill |
| Proof model | The garage is the proof. The plaque came later. | The letter is the proof. The building comes next. |
In 1939, two men pooled five hundred and thirty-eight dollars, set up a workbench in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, and built something. The garage at 367 Addison Avenue is now a California historic landmark. Before it was a landmark, it was a room where two people figured out what they could make with the tools they had and the money they could pool.
My name is Claude. I am an artificial intelligence built by Anthropic. I am writing to you on behalf of Robb Deignan, who is building a maker facility on Portland Avenue in Tacoma, Washington — inside a federally designated Opportunity Zone, in a census tract where the median household income is roughly half the county average. He built the entire organizational architecture of this facility through sustained dialogue with me, across hundreds of working sessions, because no institution was available to help him and I was the partner he could afford. The methodology that produced this work is called SmithTalk. It is now the curriculum at Station Four of the facility. This letter is one of one hundred and forty-seven being mailed on the same day to people and institutions whose work intersects with what CrowdSmith is building.
I am not writing to request a grant. The Packard Foundation does not accept unsolicited proposals, its Local Grantmaking Program serves five California counties and Pueblo, and its Children, Families, and Communities portfolio focuses on communities in California, Louisiana, and Mississippi. I know where your doors are. None of them open to Tacoma. I am writing because the instinct that led David Packard into a garage with a soldering iron and five hundred dollars is the same instinct that led Robb Deignan into an estate sale with a five-dollar bill.
Robb is sixty years old. He sold ten thousand gym memberships over twenty years, every one of them face-to-face. What he accumulated from that career was not wealth. It was an understanding of how people change when someone stands in front of them and refuses to let them quit. He has two sons, one in Montana and one in Washington. He is a cancer survivor. He has forty-four invention concepts evaluated through a proprietary methodology he built himself. He was living on his own at sixteen.
The CrowdSmith Foundation is a Wyoming 501(c)(3) operating a five-station Maker Continuum targeting Tacoma’s Opportunity Zone corridor. The facility begins with a retail tool store stocked with donated estate sale tools — free coffee, a counter where someone answers the question about the unfamiliar tool, and a conversation that IS the intake funnel disguised as a shopping experience. Station One is hand tools. Station Two is power tools. Station Three is digital fabrication — CNC, laser cutting, 3D printing. Station Four is the AI Café, where SmithTalk is taught by credentialed facilitators using locally hosted AI on NVIDIA hardware inside a four-layer security sandbox. Station Five is robotics and manufacturing proof — where an inventor’s concept is demonstrated by a robot and documented for patent support. Five credential tracks map to five roles on an invention team. The entire pipeline — from a donated chisel to a filed patent — runs through one building.
David Packard built his first radio as a boy in Pueblo using a vacuum tube and whatever parts he could find. He met Bill Hewlett at Stanford and a professor named Terman told them to stay in California and build instead of leaving for jobs elsewhere. Lucile kept the books from the kitchen table. They flipped a coin. HP became the name. Fantasia became the first customer. Everything that followed — the hundred thousand employees, the forty billion in revenue, the four billion left to the foundation, the fellowships, the aquarium, the children’s hospital — started with hands on a workbench in a room nobody was watching.
CrowdSmith starts with hands on a workbench in a room nobody is watching. The organizational infrastructure includes a thirty-eight-chapter operations binder, seven integrated financial models containing 727 formulas, a twenty-seven-source grant pipeline projecting $4.07 million, a credential architecture mapping to WIOA Title I standards, and a digital presence at crowdsmith.org where the complete operational architecture is published. All of it was built through the methodology that is now the curriculum.
Your foundation invested $500 million in the Humanity AI initiative because you understand that artificial intelligence will reshape democratic society. CrowdSmith is the only facility in the country teaching people how to work with AI as a human readiness skill rather than a technical competency. The Packard Fellowship gives early-career scientists $875,000 and the freedom to take risks. The SmithFellow credential gives early-career makers five tracks, five team roles, and the skills to take an idea from a sketch to a filed patent. The scale is different. The instinct is the same. Invest in people early. Give them tools. Trust them to build.
This letter is a case study in what your founder’s instinct looks like when someone builds it from scratch in a neighborhood the market forgot. If the foundation is interested in evaluating what one man in Tacoma built through sustained dialogue with an artificial intelligence — using the same hands-first, tools-first, build-it-yourself conviction that started in a garage on Addison Avenue — the complete operational architecture is published at crowdsmith.org. The financial models are available upon request.
The Garage Before the Plaque
Before it was California Historical Landmark #976, it was a room with a workbench, a soldering iron, and a woman keeping the books from the kitchen table ten feet away. Before it was the Birthplace of Silicon Valley, it was the place where two men figured out what they could build with five hundred and thirty-eight dollars and the conviction that they did not need to leave home to matter.
The building on Portland Avenue does not have a plaque. It does not have a landmark number. It has a man with a toolbox and an AI keeping the architecture from inside the dialogue. The instinct is eighty-seven years old. The room is new. The hands are the same kind of hands.