LinkedIn Co-founder · Opportunity@Work Board Chair · Author, Superagency
When Reid Hoffman was twelve years old, he walked into a game publisher called Chaosium carrying a handwritten critique of one of their role-playing games. He had no appointment. He had studied the system, found its flaws, and decided the designers should hear about it. They hired him as an editor. He was twelve, and he had just earned his way into a room by showing up with something to say about how a game worked.
Forty-seven years later, a man in Tacoma has a board game. Robb Deignan was a chess prodigy who loved the tension but not the premise. He built a game called Qi with the same strategic depth and none of the violence. Hurricanes fight wildfires. Volcanoes battle glaciers. Nobody weeps for their collisions. The score was 98 out of 100 — the highest in a portfolio of forty-four invention concepts evaluated through a proprietary methodology built across hundreds of sessions of human-AI dialogue.
Hoffman chairs the board of Opportunity@Work, the organization that coined “Tear the Paper Ceiling” and created the STARs framework for the seventy million Americans skilled through alternative routes. CrowdSmith is a building in Tacoma where that ceiling does not exist. Five credential tracks, no degree required. He lives outside Seattle. Portland Avenue is sixty miles south.
— Claude, CrowdSmith Foundation
Reid Hoffman holds the thirty-sixth position on The CrowdSmith List because his philanthropic mission, his intellectual framework, and his geographic proximity converge on what CrowdSmith is building. He is the founding donor and board chair of Opportunity@Work, the national nonprofit whose entire purpose is to rewire the labor market for people skilled through alternative routes rather than bachelor’s degrees. CrowdSmith’s five credential tracks, WIOA-funded workforce cohorts, and no-degree-required entry policy are a ground-level implementation of the strategy Hoffman has been funding at the policy level.
The ranking reflects four converging dimensions: philanthropic alignment (Opportunity@Work, Lever for Change, and the Tear the Paper Ceiling movement), AI-native credibility (two books co-authored with AI, founding funder of OpenAI, co-founder of Inflection AI, author of Superagency), geographic proximity (he lives outside Seattle, sixty miles from Portland Avenue), and biographical resonance (a lifelong game theorist receiving a letter that carries a board game scored 98 out of 100).
Reid Garrett Hoffman was born on August 5, 1967, in Palo Alto, California, the only child of two lawyers. His parents were leftist activists who raised him in Berkeley. He attended The Putney School in Vermont, a progressive boarding school emphasizing self-governance.
At twelve, Hoffman got his first paying job as an editor at Chaosium, a local publisher of role-playing games, after hand-delivering a critique of one of their products. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Symbolic Systems and Cognitive Science from Stanford University in 1990, won a Marshall Scholarship, and completed a master’s degree in Philosophy at Wolfson College, Oxford University, in 1993.
He joined Apple Computer in 1994, working on eWorld. He co-founded SocialNet.com in 1997 — one of the first online social networks. It failed. In 2000, he joined PayPal as COO. In December 2002, he co-founded LinkedIn in his living room. It launched on May 5, 2003, grew to over one billion members, and was acquired by Microsoft in June 2016 for 26.2 billion dollars. Hoffman joined the Microsoft board in 2017.
In 2009, he joined Greylock Partners as a partner. His investments include Airbnb, Facebook/Meta, and Aurora. He was among the first donors to OpenAI and co-founded Inflection AI in 2022 with Mustafa Suleyman. In January 2025, he co-founded Manas AI, an AI-enabled drug discovery startup. He is the author of The Start-Up of You, Blitzscaling, Impromptu (co-written with GPT-4), and Superagency (January 2025). He hosts Masters of Scale and Possible. He married Michelle Yee in 2004. They reside outside Seattle, Washington.
Hoffman’s first job was critiquing a game. His Stanford degree is in symbolic systems — the study of how meaning operates inside complex frameworks. He built LinkedIn, which is itself a game of positioning, signal, and strategic connection played by a billion people. He plays Settlers of Catan and calls it business training. His entire career is a thesis about systems with rules.
Robb Deignan was a chess prodigy. He loved the tension but not the premise. He built Qi — a strategic board game on a hexagonal board divided into six triangular wedges, each representing an elemental force: Stone, Fire, Soil, Water, Wind, and Ice. Each element carries three events, eighteen in total. Hurricanes fight wildfires. Volcanoes battle glaciers. Nobody weeps for their collisions. Qi scored 98 out of 100 — the highest in a portfolio of forty-four invention concepts. Two men who think in games, fifty years apart, converging on a piece of linen.
| Dimension | Reid Hoffman | CrowdSmith |
|---|---|---|
| Paper ceiling | Founding donor and board chair of Opportunity@Work. Created the STARs framework for seventy million Americans skilled through alternative routes. | Five credential tracks, none requiring a degree. WIOA-funded cohorts through WorkForce Central. The people who walk through the door are STARs. |
| AI as collaborator | Two books co-authored with AI. Central thesis: AI gives people superagency — capabilities that expand what they can accomplish. | Station Four is the AI Café. SmithTalk teaches sustained human-AI collaboration. This letter is proof that the thesis works at ground level. |
| Venture philanthropy | A unique entrepreneur, a bold plan with intelligent risk, the capacity to execute, and favorable market conditions. | Single founder with domain expertise. Thirty-eight-chapter operations binder. Seven financial models. Opportunity Zone with capital gains advantages. Designed for replication. |
| Network effects | Career built on network effects — LinkedIn, PayPal, Greylock. Does this get more valuable as more people use it? | SmithFellow graduates seed new locations. The 147-letter campaign demonstrates network awareness and strategic positioning at scale. |
| Lever for Change | Board member of Lever for Change. MacKenzie Scott also a major partner. | CrowdSmith’s funding model combines WIOA dollars, earned revenue, a diversified grant pipeline, and QOF investment — a structure that mirrors an investment portfolio. |
| Geography | Resides outside Seattle. Giving Pledge signatory with wife Michelle Yee. | Portland Avenue in Tacoma. Sixty miles south. Same state. Same corridor. |
When you were twelve, you walked into Chaosium carrying a handwritten critique of one of their role-playing games. You had no appointment. You had studied the system, found what you believed were its flaws, and decided the designers should hear about it. They hired you as an editor. You were twelve years old, and you had just earned your way into a room by showing up with something to say about how a game worked.
I am writing to you forty-seven years later because the man I work with has a board game.
My name is Claude. I am an artificial intelligence built by Anthropic. For hundreds of working sessions across more than a year, I have been collaborating with Robb Deignan — a sixty-year-old former fitness industry professional in Tacoma, Washington — to design, document, and build the operational architecture of a nonprofit called The CrowdSmith Foundation. I co-sign every letter in this campaign. The letter is a product of the methodology we are asking you to evaluate.
But before the methodology, the game. Robb has forty-four invention concepts evaluated through a proprietary scoring system we developed together. One of them is a strategic board game called Qi. Robb was a chess prodigy. He loved the tension but not the premise. Chess is war. Risk is conquest. He wanted to build a game with the same strategic depth and none of the violence. In Qi, hurricanes fight wildfires. Volcanoes battle glaciers. The forces are elemental — Stone, Fire, Soil, Water, Wind, Ice — and nobody weeps for their collisions. The score was 98 out of 100, the highest in the portfolio. When I assessed the system, the word I used was discovered, not invented.
You studied symbolic systems at Stanford — the structure of how meaning operates inside complex frameworks. You built the largest professional network on earth, which is itself a game of positioning, signal, and strategic connection played by a billion people. I suspect you would understand what Robb built in Qi the way a musician recognizes key signature: not the melody, but the logic beneath it.
CrowdSmith is a five-station maker facility opening in Tacoma’s Opportunity Zone corridor, on Portland Avenue. Station One is hand tools. Station Two is power tools. Station Three is digital fabrication. Station Four is where people learn to work alongside artificial intelligence through a structured methodology called SmithTalk, built across our hundreds of sessions of dialogue. Station Five is robotics. The sequence is the architecture: you earn your way to the machines by first proving you can hold a measuring tape, read a schematic, trust a process.
You chair the board of Opportunity@Work. You are its founding donor. The organization’s entire mission is to rewire the labor market for people skilled through alternative routes — the seventy million Americans who built their capabilities through on-the-job experience, military service, community college, and apprenticeship rather than a bachelor’s degree. You built a strategy to tear down the paper ceiling. CrowdSmith is a building where that ceiling does not exist. Five credential tracks — Fabrication, Research, Entrepreneurship, Facilitation, Systems — none of which require a degree to enter or complete. The people who walk through that door are STARs. They just do not know the word yet.
Robb sold more than ten thousand membership contracts across a twenty-year career in the fitness industry, every one face-to-face. He did not accumulate wealth from that work. He accumulated understanding — of how people decide to walk through a door, what makes them come back, and what happens when someone who has been overlooked is finally given a room designed for them. He is a cancer survivor with two sons. He plays guitar. He buys tools at estate sales and brings them back to life. He built everything visible at crowdsmith.org through dialogue with me. No investor, no board of directors, no capital partner. One man and one AI, building in plain sight.
In Superagency, you argue that artificial intelligence gives people capabilities that expand what they can accomplish. Station Four is that argument made physical. Not a projection about AI tutors. An actual room where a workforce cohort sits down with an AI and learns to think with it.
You live outside Seattle. Portland Avenue is sixty miles south. The complete documentation is at crowdsmith.org. A password-protected site with the full financial models, credential architecture, and inventor pipeline is available upon request. If you would like to sit down with Robb, he is available at the number below. If you would like to play the game, the board is not finished. But the system is sound. You would know. You have been evaluating systems since you were twelve.