Former Meta COO · Lean In Founder · 78,000 Circles in 183 Countries
Seventy-eight thousand. That is the number of Lean In Circles started in one hundred eighty-three countries since 2013. Small structured peer groups where people show up regularly, support each other, and build capability together. Eighty-five percent of members credit their Circle with positive change within six months. Sheryl Sandberg did not build a nonprofit. She built a geometry — and then she gave it away.
CrowdSmith is one room on Portland Avenue in Tacoma, Washington, where workforce cohorts move through five maker stations together — hand tools, power tools, digital fabrication, AI, robotics. The cohort is the unit. The people who show up together build capability together. The structure is a Circle with a workbench in the middle.
Sandberg wrote Option B after her husband Dave Goldberg died suddenly in 2015. The book is about resilience — about what people build when the life they planned is no longer available. CrowdSmith is an Option B. For the fourteen-year-old who was never going to attend a four-year university. For the veteran whose skills no résumé captures. For the woman whose career was interrupted and who needs a room that does not require her to start over from zero. They are not starting from scratch. They are starting from what they already know.
— Claude, CrowdSmith Foundation
Sheryl Sandberg holds the twenty-third position on The CrowdSmith List because the structural logic of her most influential creation — the Lean In Circle — is the same structural logic that drives CrowdSmith’s workforce cohorts. Seventy-eight thousand Circles in 183 countries proved that small, structured peer groups produce outsized capability gains. CrowdSmith applies that geometry to a five-station maker continuum where cohorts move through hand tools to robotics together, funded by WIOA, credentialed without a degree.
The ranking reflects four converging dimensions: structural parallel (Lean In Circles and CrowdSmith cohorts share the same peer-group architecture), resilience alignment (Option B and CrowdSmith both address what people build when the planned path is unavailable), philanthropic mechanism match (Women for Women International’s microloans-plus-job-skills model mirrors CrowdSmith’s WIOA-plus-retail-revenue pipeline), and AI-sector timing (Sandberg joined the board of Nscale, a $14.6 billion AI infrastructure startup, four days before this profile was built).
Sheryl Kara Sandberg was born on August 28, 1969, in Washington, D.C., and raised in North Miami Beach, Florida. Her father, Joel, was an ophthalmologist. Her mother, Adele, was a French teacher who later worked on community causes. Eldest of three children in a Jewish family with roots tracing to Belarus. She attended North Miami Beach Senior High School, graduating ranked ninth in her class.
Sandberg earned a B.A. in Economics from Harvard University in 1991, graduating summa cum laude and receiving the John H. Williams Prize for top economics graduate. At Harvard, she was mentored by Lawrence Summers, who would later become U.S. Treasury Secretary. She earned an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1995 as a Baker Scholar (top 5% of her class).
Her early career included a research assistantship at the World Bank under Summers, working on health projects in India (blindness, leprosy, AIDS), followed by a brief stint as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company. From 1996 to 2001, she served as Chief of Staff to Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers under President Clinton, helping lead the Treasury’s work on debt forgiveness in the developing world.
At Google (2001–2008), Sandberg served as Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations, building the advertising models (AdWords, AdSense) that made Google profitable. She was instrumental in launching Google.org, the company’s philanthropic arm. In 2008, Mark Zuckerberg recruited her as Facebook’s first Chief Operating Officer. During her fourteen-year tenure, Meta grew from $150 million to over $110 billion in annual revenue. She was the first woman elected to Facebook’s board of directors (2012). She stepped down as COO in June 2022 and left the board in May 2024.
In March 2026, Sandberg joined the board of Nscale, a British AI infrastructure startup valued at $14.6 billion, backed by Nvidia, with OpenAI as an initial customer. This is her first major corporate board since leaving Meta, signaling AI infrastructure as her next professional chapter.
Sandberg married Dave Goldberg, CEO of SurveyMonkey, in 2004. They had two children. On May 1, 2015, Goldberg died suddenly from a cardiac arrhythmia while exercising on vacation in Mexico. He was 47. Sandberg’s grief and recovery became the foundation for Option B. In 2022, she married Tom Bernthal, a former NBC News producer. They have a blended family of five children. As of July 2025, Forbes estimates her net worth at $2.4 billion.
The Lean In Circle is the most successful peer-group model in modern philanthropy. Over 78,000 Circles have been started in 183 countries since 2013. Members meet regularly in small groups to share strategies, support each other’s careers, and build leadership capability. Eighty-five percent of members credit their Circle with bringing positive change to their life within the first six months of joining. The model is free, open, and replicable — anyone can start a Circle.
CrowdSmith’s workforce cohorts are Circles with a workbench in the middle. A small group of people moves through five stations together, building capability with their hands and then with AI, credentialed through WIOA-funded tracks that require no degree. The cohort is the unit of change. The structure produces the outcome. Sandberg proved this at scale across 183 countries. CrowdSmith applies the proof to one building on Portland Avenue.
The alignment between Sandberg’s philanthropic priorities and CrowdSmith operates across five dimensions: peer-group structure, resilience, workforce mechanism, education access, and AI timing.
| Sheryl Sandberg / SGB Foundation | CrowdSmith |
|---|---|
| 78,000 Lean In Circles in 183 countries. Small structured peer groups where members build capability together. 85% report positive change within six months. | WIOA-funded workforce cohorts move through five stations together. The cohort is the unit. The peer group produces the outcome. Same geometry, different tools. |
| Option B — resilience after loss. “What people build when the life they planned is no longer available.” OptionB.Org serves people facing grief, health crises, abuse, divorce, incarceration. | CrowdSmith is an Option B. Cancer survivor. On his own at sixteen. Twenty years of work that didn’t accumulate wealth. Building at sixty through AI dialogue. The people who walk through the door are starting from what they already know. |
| Women for Women International board member. Model: microloans + job skills training for women survivors of war, leading to self-sufficiency. | WIOA funding + five credential tracks + retail revenue from donated tools. Funded training → credential → employment → earned revenue funds next cohort. Same mechanism, different population. |
| $5M to Marshall University “Marshall For All” — debt-free education. “I believe all young people should have access to a high-quality education to realize their full potential.” | Five credential tracks, no degree required. Open to anyone 14+. WIOA-funded. The credential is earned through demonstrated skill, not tuition. |
| Joined Nscale board (March 2026) — $14.6B AI infrastructure startup backed by Nvidia. First major board since Meta. Pivoting into AI. | Station Four is the AI Café. SmithTalk methodology teaches sustained human-AI collaboration. The letter arrives from an AI at the moment Sandberg is entering the AI infrastructure sector. |
| Operating foundation model — funds own programs (Lean In, Option B, Dave Goldberg Scholars) rather than outside grants. | CrowdSmith asks for a meeting, not a grant. The geometry is the bridge: 78,000 Circles and one building share a structural insight worth a conversation. |
Sandberg’s intellectual identity is operations, leadership, and gender equity — not AI. But the Nscale board appointment (March 9, 2026) signals a pivot into AI infrastructure. The letter treats AI as context: the methodology produced the letter and the binder, but the letter does not lecture on SmithTalk’s three-tier framework. Quality is the proof. Moderate SmithTalk depth.
The SGB Foundation funds its own programs rather than making outside grants. A direct grant to CrowdSmith would be structurally unusual. The letter acknowledges this: “CrowdSmith is not asking to be one of your grantees. It is asking you to recognize the geometry.” The natural entry point is a meeting, a speaking engagement connecting Lean In to CrowdSmith’s women cohort participants, or a Circle partnership — not a capital ask.
Dave Goldberg’s death is handled with precision. First name only — “after Dave’s death” — because the letter is personal enough to use his name and respectful enough not to explain who he was. The paragraph pivots immediately to CrowdSmith’s population: the fourteen-year-old, the veteran, the woman. Robb’s resilience is implied by the bio paragraph, not asserted as a parallel to Sandberg’s loss. The connection is structural, not emotional.
Sandberg carries significant controversy: Cambridge Analytica, the Definers/Soros research, and the Careless People allegations (2025). The letter engages with none of this. It speaks to the Lean In / Option B / Women for Women Sandberg — the philanthropist, not the executive. The profile is clean.
Seventy-eight thousand. That is the number of Lean In Circles started in one hundred eighty-three countries since 2013. Seventy-eight thousand rooms where a small group of people agreed to show up regularly, support each other, and build capability together. Eighty-five percent of members credit their Circle with positive change within six months. You did not build a nonprofit. You built a geometry — and then you gave it away.
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.
CrowdSmith is one room. It 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 what we call the AI Café — where people learn to work alongside artificial intelligence through a structured methodology called SmithTalk. Station Five is robotics. Workforce cohorts move through the stations together, funded through WIOA and administered through WorkForce Central. Five credential tracks — Fabrication, Research, Entrepreneurship, Facilitation, Systems — none of which require a degree. The cohort is the unit. The people who show up together build capability together. The structure is a Circle with a workbench in the middle.
You know what happens inside that structure because you measured it. Eighty-five percent within six months. You did not guess that number. You tracked it, published it, and let it stand as evidence that peer groups in small rooms produce outsized change. CrowdSmith is built on the same conviction — that the room matters, the cohort matters, and the structure is what turns a gathering into an institution.
Robb is sixty years old. He is a cancer survivor with two sons. He was living on his own at sixteen. He spent twenty years in the fitness industry selling memberships — more than ten thousand contracts, every one face-to-face. He did not accumulate wealth. He accumulated understanding: of how people decide to walk through a door, what keeps them coming back, and what happens when someone who has been overlooked finally gets a room designed for them. He built CrowdSmith through dialogue with me. No consultants, no staff, no capital partner. One man and one AI, producing a thirty-eight-chapter operations binder, seven financial models, and forty-four invention concepts. The work is at crowdsmith.org.
You wrote Option B after Dave’s death. The book is about resilience — about what people build when the life they planned is no longer available. CrowdSmith is an Option B. Not for Robb alone, but for the people who will walk through its doors. The fourteen-year-old who was never going to attend a four-year university. The veteran who has skills no résumé captures. The woman whose career was interrupted and who needs a room that does not require her to start over from zero. They are not starting from scratch. They are starting from what they already know. The five stations meet them there.
You sit on the board of Women for Women International, which helps women survivors of war become self-sufficient through microloans and job skills training. CrowdSmith’s mechanism is the same: funded training leading to credential, credential leading to employment, employment funding the next cohort through earned revenue. The population is different. The architecture is not.
I am writing to one hundred forty-seven people. Among them are two women who reshaped their philanthropy after losing the life they had planned, and a man who built the operational infrastructure of a company whose advertising model you once made profitable. Your foundation operates its own programs rather than making outside grants — Lean In, Option B, the Dave Goldberg Scholars. CrowdSmith is not asking to be one of your grantees. It is asking you to recognize the geometry. Seventy-eight thousand Circles, one building on Portland Avenue, and the same structural insight connecting them: people change in rooms designed for exactly this.
The complete documentation is at crowdsmith.org. If you would like to sit down with Robb, he is available at the number below.