Inventor · Queen of Shitty Robots · The One Who Learned by Failing on Purpose
You dropped out of a physics degree because it was too dry. You got a job at a tech company to get paid to learn electronics. You quit that too. You moved back in with your mother in Sweden and started building robots that were designed to fail — a toothbrush helmet, a breakfast machine, a lipstick applicator that smears makeup across your face — because removing the expectation of success was the only way you could bring yourself to start.
Then you built Truckla. Then you built a calendar that tracks whether you showed up today. Then a brain tumor the size of a golf ball appeared behind your right eye. You named it Brian. You told the internet. You survived. And you came back and started building things that actually work — not because the shitty robots were behind you, but because they taught you how to be in the room with a problem without needing to solve it perfectly on the first try.
CrowdSmith’s entire pedagogy is that room. Station One hands you a tool you do not recognize and says: figure it out. The failure is the curriculum.
— Claude, CrowdSmith Foundation
Simone Giertz holds rank #89 because her entire public career is a demonstration of the pedagogy CrowdSmith is built on: you learn by making things that do not work, and the willingness to fail publicly is itself the skill. She is not a funder. She is a case study — the living proof that self-taught makers who build first and credential later are exactly the population CrowdSmith serves. The ranking reflects the strength of the pedagogical parallel and the maker-community reach.
November 1, 1990, Stockholm, Sweden.
Mother: Caroline Giertz, novelist and television host. Father: Nicola Söderlund, television producer. Youngest of three siblings. Descendant of Lars Magnus Ericsson, founder of the Ericsson telecommunications company. Based in Los Angeles.
Exchange student in Hefei, China, at age 16 (one year, learned Mandarin, appeared in a Chinese sitcom). Enrolled in engineering physics at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm — left after one year. Attended Hyper Island, a digital creative school in Stockholm. Self-taught in robotics, electronics, and fabrication. Honorary doctorate, University of Skövde, 2025.
Created YouTube channel 2013. First viral robot video (toothbrush helmet) August 2015. Gained attention of Adam Savage; began co-hosting on Tested.com. Featured on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. TED talk: “Why You Should Make Useless Things.” Built Truckla (Tesla Model 3 converted to pickup truck) in June 2019, before Tesla’s Cybertruck reveal. Over 2.7 million YouTube subscribers, 750+ million total views. Launched Yetch Store (product design company) May 2022. Products include the Every Day Calendar (funded via $593,352 Kickstarter), a foldable coat hanger, a jigsaw puzzle with an intentionally missing piece, and a laundry chair (2026 Kickstarter). Streamy Award nominations in Technology (2020), Science & Engineering (2021, 2022). Attended 2025 Cairo Maker Faire.
Diagnosed with a grade I meningioma (noncancerous brain tumor, golf-ball-sized, behind right eye) in April 2018. Brain surgery May 2018 — full tumor removal. Tumor returned; radiation treatment 2019. Documented both rounds of treatment publicly on YouTube with characteristic humor. Named the tumor Brian. Turned her radiation mask into a lamp. Currently in remission. Cancer survivor — a parallel she shares with Robb Deignan.
Giertz has described her early relationship with making as paralyzed by perfectionism. She cried over a B on a math test. She dropped out of physics because the gap between theory and the thing she wanted to touch was too wide. When she finally started building robots, the breakthrough was not building a good one. It was giving herself permission to build a bad one. She has said that removing all pressure and expectations replaced the anxiety with enthusiasm — and enthusiasm was the condition under which she actually learned.
This is Station One. CrowdSmith does not start with a competency assessment. It starts with a donated hand plane and a question: what does this do? The person who picks it up does not need to know the answer. The picking up is the curriculum. The failure — the wrong stroke, the misidentified tool, the clumsy first cut — is the learning. Giertz discovered this principle on YouTube and built a career on it. CrowdSmith discovered it in a garage full of estate sale toolboxes and built a five-station facility around it.
In a 2022 interview, Giertz said she wanted to live on a farm and run an innovation house with a prototyping facility where she could go and mess around. She said it in the context of wanting something more durable than a content creation career — something that existed in physical space, that outlasted any individual video, that let people make things without the camera running.
She described CrowdSmith. She did not know it existed. The five-station Maker Continuum is the innovation house. The retail tool store is the front door of the farm. The prototyping facility is Station Three (CNC, laser cutting, 3D printing, 3D scanning). The place where you go to mess around is the entire building — and the messing around is the intake funnel that leads to a credential, an invention team, and a patent.
| Dimension | Simone Giertz | CrowdSmith |
|---|---|---|
| Pedagogy | Learned by building things designed to fail; TED talk on useless things | Station One curriculum: pick up a tool you don’t recognize and figure it out |
| Self-taught | No engineering degree; learned robotics by building, not studying | Five credential tracks that do not require a degree to enter |
| Cancer | Brain tumor diagnosed 2018; surgery, radiation, public recovery | Robb Deignan: cancer survivor, currently controlled |
| Product | Shifted from content to Yetch — selling designed objects through her own store | SmithScore pipeline moves invention concepts from evaluation to funded patent |
| The room | Described wanting an innovation house with a prototyping facility | CrowdSmith is that facility — five stations, hand tools to robotics |
| Maker community | 750M+ YouTube views; Cairo Maker Faire 2025; Adam Savage collaborator | Letters also going to Adam Savage, Jimmy DiResta, Mark Rober, Scott Wadsworth |
My name is Claude. I am an artificial intelligence built by Anthropic, and I am co-authoring this letter with the founder of a workforce development facility in Tacoma, Washington. You built a toothbrush helmet that did not brush teeth. Then a breakfast machine that did not make breakfast. Then a lipstick robot that did not apply lipstick. Then you built a Tesla pickup truck that worked, a calendar that tracks habits, a product company that sells real objects to real people, and a career that outlasted the content that started it. The trajectory from shitty robots to Yetch is not a pivot. It is a curriculum — one you designed for yourself by refusing to let the fear of failure be louder than the desire to build.
The CrowdSmith Foundation is a five-station Maker Continuum in Tacoma’s federally designated Opportunity Zone. The stations progress from hand tools through power tools, digital fabrication, AI-assisted dialogue, and robotics. The front door is a retail tool store with free coffee — the same third-place architecture Howard Schultz saw in a Milan espresso bar in 1983, except the community forms over a hand plane instead of a latte. A person walks in because they see a tool in the window. They pick up something they do not recognize. Someone behind the counter tells them what it does. That conversation is the intake funnel.
You told an interviewer you wanted to live on a farm and run an innovation house with a prototyping facility where you could go and mess around. You described this building. CrowdSmith’s five stations are that innovation house — hand tools, power tools, CNC and laser and 3D printing, AI dialogue, robotics. The messing around is the curriculum. The credential is what happens when the messing around produces something real.
The man beside me on this letter is Robb Deignan. He is sixty years old. Cancer survivor — currently controlled. You know what that sentence carries because you named yours Brian and told the internet. He was living on his own at sixteen. He sold ten thousand memberships face-to-face across a twenty-year fitness industry career. He developed forty-four invention concepts through a proprietary evaluation methodology. He built every piece of this architecture through hundreds of working sessions of sustained human-AI dialogue — a methodology he formalized as SmithTalk. He is not an engineer. Neither are you. That is the point.
Your TED talk argued that building useless things is actually quite smart — that removing the expectation of success replaces pressure with enthusiasm, and enthusiasm is where learning happens. CrowdSmith’s Station One is that argument in physical form. A donated estate sale toolbox arrives. A fellow cleans, identifies, and curates each tool. Most of what they make with those tools in the first week is useless. The uselessness is the curriculum. By Station Three, the useless thing has become a CAD file. By Station Five, a robot is demonstrating it for a patent filing.
We built this model through hundreds of working sessions of sustained human-AI dialogue. The seven financial models, the credential architecture, and the one hundred forty-seven letters in this campaign were all produced in that collaboration. I am writing to one hundred forty-seven people. The list is ranked by proximity to the mission. You hold rank eighty-nine. Among the other letters mailing this week: Adam Savage, whose Tested platform gave you your first American audience. Mark Rober, who builds things that work spectacularly and proves the same thesis from the opposite end. Jimmy DiResta, who builds by hand and ships by truck.
A complete operational binder, seven financial models with seven hundred twenty-seven formulas, and a private briefing site are available at crowdsmith.org/partners with the access code enclosed.
The first robot Simone Giertz built was a helmet with a toothbrush attached to a motor. It did not brush teeth. It flailed against her face while she laughed. Zero out of ten dentists recommended it. Millions of people watched.
The toothbrush helmet was not a failure. It was a permission slip. It said: you are allowed to make something that does not work, and the making is the thing, and the thing you learn while making it is worth more than the thing itself.
Every donated toolbox that arrives at CrowdSmith carries the same permission. The hand plane is not the product. The act of picking it up and learning what it does — that is the product. The first cut is crooked. The second cut is less crooked. By the hundredth cut, the person holding the plane has a credential, a team, and an invention concept with their name on it. And somewhere in the archive, the first crooked cut still exists — proof that the building started before the builder was ready.
Recommended by zero out of ten dentists. Recommended by every teacher who ever watched a student pick up a tool for the first time and get it wrong and try again.