Former Microsoft CEO · Ballmer Group · The Numbers Guy
You spent $10 million building USAFacts because you wanted a 10-K for the American government — a single document that showed where the money comes from, where it goes, and what the outcomes are. You could not find one, so you built it. That instinct — the refusal to operate without the numbers — is the reason this letter exists on your list.
CrowdSmith has seven financial models with seven hundred twenty-seven formulas. Not because a grant application required them. Because the founder is a numbers guy too, and he would not build a facility he could not model to the dollar. The building you are reading about was designed by someone who thinks the way you think: show me the data, then show me the outcomes, then I will decide.
— Claude, CrowdSmith Foundation
Steve Ballmer holds rank #72 because the Ballmer Group’s core thesis — economic mobility for children and families — overlaps directly with CrowdSmith’s workforce development mission, and because Ballmer’s personal orientation toward data-driven decision-making means CrowdSmith’s seven financial models will land the way they were designed to. He lives in Washington state. The Ballmer Group operates with 48 staff and partners with backbone organizations rather than making thousands of small grants — a model that favors exactly the kind of architecture CrowdSmith has built. The ranking reflects geographic proximity, thesis alignment, and the likelihood that the data will do the talking.
March 24, 1956, Detroit, Michigan.
Father: Frederic Henry Ballmer, Swiss immigrant, manager at Ford Motor Company. Mother: Beatrice Dworkin Ballmer. Grew up in Farmington Hills, Michigan. Married Connie Snyder in 1990. Three sons, including Sam Ballmer (leads Rainier Climate Group). Lives in Bellevue, Washington.
Detroit Country Day School. B.A. in mathematics and economics, magna cum laude, Harvard University. At Harvard, lived down the hall from Bill Gates. Worked two years at Procter & Gamble as assistant product manager. Attended Stanford Graduate School of Business — dropped out to join Microsoft in 1980.
Joined Microsoft June 11, 1980, as the company’s 30th employee and first business manager. Rose through sales, marketing, systems software, and operations. Became CEO in January 2000, succeeding Bill Gates. Led Microsoft for 14 years through the growth of Windows, Office, Xbox, Azure cloud services, and enterprise infrastructure. Stepped down as CEO February 2014. Microsoft’s annual revenue grew from $25 billion to $86 billion under his leadership. Purchased the Los Angeles Clippers in August 2014 for $2 billion. Estimated net worth $150–160+ billion (2025), making him one of the ten wealthiest people in the world.
Ballmer Group: Co-founded 2015 by Steve and Connie Ballmer. Bellevue, Washington. Mission: improving economic mobility for children and families in the United States. Focus areas: early childhood, education, workforce, economic opportunity, foster care, racial equity, and government data infrastructure. Operates with 48 staff. Strategy: partner with well-staffed backbone organizations and fund through re-granting rather than making thousands of small grants. Connie Ballmer is a founding investor at Blue Meridian Partners. She serves on the boards of the Obama Foundation and StriveTogether.
USAFacts: Founded 2017. Nonpartisan civic initiative. Aggregates and visualizes federal, state, and local government data. Cost approximately $10–$40 million annually to operate. Partners with Penn Wharton Budget Model and Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Steve co-teaches a course at Stanford on understanding government budgets. USAFacts does not accept outside funding — Ballmer funds it personally.
Rainier Climate Group: Launched 2025 by Connie Ballmer and son Sam. Climate change solutions at speed and scale.
After leaving Microsoft, Steve Ballmer wanted to understand what government did with the money it raised. He asked a simple question: where does the money come from, where does it go, and what are the outcomes? He discovered that this question — which every publicly traded company answers quarterly — had no clear answer for the $7 trillion American government. So he built USAFacts. He hired economists and researchers, scraped data from 90,000 government entities, organized thirty years of spending into the framework of the Constitution’s Preamble, and published it all for free.
CrowdSmith was built by the same instinct. Robb Deignan is not a data scientist. He is a salesman who sold ten thousand memberships face-to-face. But when he started building a nonprofit, he built seven financial models with 727 formulas before he built a single page of the website — because he would not ask someone for money without being able to show them exactly where it goes, what it produces, and when the operation becomes self-sufficient. The binder that accompanies this letter contains those models. A data guy will recognize another data guy’s work.
The Ballmer Group’s thesis is economic mobility. CrowdSmith is a workforce development facility in a federally designated Opportunity Zone — Census Tract 62400 in Tacoma, Washington, sixty miles south of the Ballmer Group’s Bellevue office. The facility trains people who are not mobile — displaced workers, untrained young adults, people aging out of foster care, immigrants with skills but no credentials — and moves them through five stations to a credential, an invention team, and a career. The economic mobility is not theoretical. It is a person walking in with nothing and walking out with a documented, credentialed skill set and a team that takes their invention concept from evaluation to patent.
Connie Ballmer’s deepest philanthropic commitment is children in the foster care system. CrowdSmith’s Station Zero is the entry ramp for teenagers and people aging out of foster care — the first encounter with tools and structure before entering the five-station program. The Ballmer Group funds the backbone organizations that define location-specific strategies for mobility. CrowdSmith is the location-specific strategy — not a policy paper, not a re-granting intermediary, but the physical building where mobility happens one person at a time.
| Dimension | Steve Ballmer / Ballmer Group | CrowdSmith |
|---|---|---|
| Data | Built USAFacts — $10M+ to make government data transparent | Seven financial models, 727 formulas — every dollar modeled before the building opens |
| Economic mobility | Ballmer Group’s core thesis for children and families | Five credential tracks in an Opportunity Zone — mobility through skill, not subsidy |
| Foster care | Connie Ballmer’s deepest commitment — whole child welfare system | Station Zero: entry ramp for people aging out of the foster care system |
| Washington state | Lives in Bellevue; Ballmer Group headquartered there | Building in Tacoma — sixty miles south, same state, same workforce ecosystem |
| Backbone model | Partners with backbone orgs; funds re-granting for location-specific strategies | CrowdSmith is the location-specific facility — the backbone org is the building itself |
| Sales | Built Microsoft’s sales organization from 30 employees to global scale | Founder sold 10,000 memberships face-to-face — the retail tool store is a sales floor |
| Self-sufficiency | Demands measurable outcomes and sustainable models | Self-sufficient Year Two on earned revenue; retail tool store operates before any grant arrives |
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 sixty miles south of your office. You built USAFacts because you wanted a 10-K for the American government and could not find one. The man beside me on this letter built seven financial models with seven hundred twenty-seven formulas for a nonprofit that has not opened its doors yet — because he would not ask anyone for a dollar without being able to show them where it goes. You will recognize his instinct. It is your instinct.
The CrowdSmith Foundation is a five-station Maker Continuum in Tacoma’s federally designated Opportunity Zone — Census Tract 62400, sixty miles from the Ballmer Group’s Bellevue headquarters. 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 it up. Someone behind the counter tells them what it does. That conversation is the intake funnel.
The Ballmer Group’s thesis is economic mobility. CrowdSmith is what economic mobility looks like in physical space. A person walks in with no credential, no team, no institutional support. The five stations move them from hand tools through digital fabrication through AI-assisted dialogue to robotics. They walk out with a documented skill set, a credential track, and a position on an invention team that takes their concept from evaluation to robot-demonstrated manufacturing proof. The retail tool store generates revenue from Day One. The model is self-sufficient on earned income by Year Two. The mentor program produces the mentors for the next cohort. These are measurable outcomes attached to a sustainable model — the kind of architecture a data guy would build if a data guy were building a workforce facility.
Robb Deignan is sixty years old. He was living on his own at sixteen. Twenty years in the fitness industry, ten thousand memberships sold face-to-face. He developed forty-four invention concepts through a proprietary evaluation methodology and built every piece of this architecture through hundreds of working sessions of sustained human-AI dialogue — a methodology he formalized as SmithTalk. Station Four of the facility teaches that methodology. The AI dialogue that produced the building is the curriculum inside it.
Connie Ballmer’s deepest philanthropic commitment is children in the foster care system. CrowdSmith’s Station Zero is designed for teenagers and people aging out of foster care — the first encounter with tools and structure before entering the five-station program. The Ballmer Group funds backbone organizations that define location-specific strategies for economic mobility. CrowdSmith is not a backbone organization. It is the building where the backbone’s strategy becomes a person holding a tool.
I am writing to one hundred forty-seven people. The list is ranked by proximity to the mission. You hold rank seventy-two. Among the other letters mailing this week: Governor Ferguson, whose state workforce system will credential the fellows this facility trains. Katie Condit at WorkForce Central, whose WIOA Title I evaluation determines whether CrowdSmith’s credential tracks qualify for funded cohorts. Both of those letters arrive the same week as yours — and both are addressed to people in your state.
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.
Steve Ballmer wanted a 10-K for America. He could not find one. So he hired economists, scraped data from 90,000 government entities, organized it against the Preamble of the Constitution, and published it for free. The project cost ten million dollars and answered a question nobody else was asking: what do we actually get for the money?
Robb Deignan wanted a financial model for a building that did not exist yet. He could not find one. So he sat down with an artificial intelligence and built seven models with 727 formulas — startup capital, staffing, P&L, cash flow, grant pipeline, station-by-station costs, and a five-year projection that shows self-sufficiency at Year Two on earned revenue from a retail tool store that has not opened.
Both men built the spreadsheet before they built the thing. Both men believed that if the numbers did not work on paper, they would not work in the world. And both men understood that the spreadsheet is not the point. The spreadsheet is the proof that the builder took the work seriously enough to do the math before asking anyone else to believe in it.
The binder is enclosed. The formulas are real. The building is sixty miles south of your office. The math works.