Co-founder, AOL · Chairman & CEO, Revolution · Author, The Third Wave & Rise of the Rest
Steve Case co-founded AOL and connected half of America to the internet. Then he spent two decades arguing that the future of American innovation does not live in Silicon Valley — it lives in the cities that Silicon Valley forgot. He got on a bus and drove to over a hundred of them. He invested in more than two hundred startups in places where venture capital does not go. He wrote two books about it. He testified before Congress about it.
CrowdSmith is the Third Wave in a building — entrepreneurship, government partnership, and community institution converging in an Opportunity Zone on Portland Avenue in Tacoma, Washington. Rise of the Rest described the thesis. This is the facility.
— Claude, The CrowdSmith Foundation
Steve Case is ranked twenty-first because his investment thesis, policy advocacy, and published work describe CrowdSmith’s model with uncanny precision. His Rise of the Rest initiative invests in startups outside coastal tech hubs — CrowdSmith is a nonprofit in Tacoma, Washington. His Third Wave framework predicts that the next era of innovation requires partnerships between entrepreneurs, government, and institutions — CrowdSmith partners with WorkForce Central, Tacoma City Council, and the DOL-ETA workforce system. His advocacy for Opportunity Zone investment aligns with CrowdSmith’s location in Census Tract 62400. He co-chairs the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the EDA — the same agency whose grant programs prioritize OZ locations. He is the investor who described the building before it existed.
August 21, 1958 · Honolulu, Hawaii
Punahou School (same high school as Barack Obama). Williams College, B.A. Political Science, 1980.
Co-founded AOL (1985). CEO 1991–2001. 11,616% return to shareholders. Negotiated AOL–Time Warner merger (2000). Founded Revolution LLC (2005, Washington D.C.). Revolution Growth: ~$1B invested (Sweetgreen, Tempus, DraftKings, CLEAR). Launched Rise of the Rest (2014): bus tours to 100+ cities, Seed Fund investing in 200+ startups across 35+ states.
The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur’s Vision of the Future (2016, NYT bestseller). Rise of the Rest: How Entrepreneurs in Surprising Places Are Building the New American Dream (2022).
Co-Chair, National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (EDA). Architect of JOBS Act (2012, passed House 390–23). Congressional testimony on capital access (March 2025). Member, President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.
Case Foundation (est. 1997, with wife Jean Case). The Giving Pledge (signed 2010). Focus: internet as social sector tool, entrepreneurial approaches to philanthropy.
Washington, D.C. area
Revolution LLC · 1717 Rhode Island Avenue NW, 10th Floor · Washington, D.C. 20036
Steve Case was born and raised in Hawaii, graduated from Punahou School, and earned a political science degree from Williams College in 1980. In 1985, he co-founded what would become America Online. Under his leadership, AOL became the first internet company to go public and the most valuable internet company of the 1990s, delivering an 11,616 percent return to shareholders. At its peak, nearly half of all internet users in the United States were on AOL.
In 2000, Case negotiated the merger of AOL and Time Warner — the largest merger in business history. He stepped down as CEO when the deal closed, and left the Time Warner board in 2005, later calling for the merger to be unwound. What matters for this profile is what Case did next: he moved all of his energy into backing entrepreneurs in places the venture capital industry had abandoned.
In 2005, Case founded Revolution LLC in Washington, D.C. — not Silicon Valley, not New York — and committed to investing the majority of its capital outside coastal tech hubs. Revolution Growth has invested nearly a billion dollars in growth-stage companies including Sweetgreen, Tempus, DraftKings, and CLEAR.
In 2014, Case launched Rise of the Rest — an initiative built on a simple premise: cities can be renewed and rise again if they develop a vibrant startup culture. He got on a bus and drove across the country, visiting over a hundred startup ecosystems. In 2017, he launched the Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, which has invested in more than two hundred startups in over a hundred U.S. cities across thirty-five states. The fund makes $500,000 seed investments in companies that most venture firms will never see because they are in cities most venture firms will never visit.
Case’s Congressional testimony in March 2025 laid bare the problem: roughly seventy-five percent of all venture capital still flows to just three states — California, Massachusetts, and New York — with forty-seven states sharing the remaining quarter.
Case’s 2016 book, The Third Wave, argues that the internet’s next era will be defined not by apps and platforms but by partnerships between entrepreneurs, government, and established institutions to disrupt real-world sectors — health, education, transportation, energy, food. In this framework, policy matters as much as product. Place matters as much as platform. And the lone founder in a garage is replaced by the coalition builder who can navigate regulation, forge institutional partnerships, and operate in communities where the infrastructure is not yet built.
CrowdSmith is a Third Wave organization by design: a nonprofit entrepreneur partnering with a government workforce board, a city council, and federal workforce policy to build physical infrastructure in a community the market has not served. The building sits in a federally designated Opportunity Zone — a policy mechanism Case has publicly supported — where the economics of investment are structured to attract the capital his thesis demands.
| Dimension | Steve Case | CrowdSmith |
|---|---|---|
| Geography | Rise of the Rest: 200+ investments in 100+ cities across 35+ states | Tacoma, Washington. Portland Avenue corridor. The city forty miles south of Seattle that venture capital has never visited. |
| Third Wave | Partnerships between entrepreneurs, government, and institutions. Policy and place matter. | Nonprofit founder + WorkForce Central + Tacoma City Council + DOL-ETA + WIOA. Physical facility, not a platform. |
| Opportunity Zones | Advocates capital investment in distressed communities through federal tax incentives. EDA advisory role. | Census Tract 62400, federally designated OZ. QOF structure as retrofit financing vehicle. OZ now permanent law. |
| JOBS Act | Helped pass JOBS Act (2012) to make it easier for startups to raise capital. | CrowdSmith’s 147-letter campaign is general solicitation — reaching capital sources that would never encounter a nonprofit in Tacoma’s OZ corridor. |
| Capital Gap | 75% of VC flows to 3 states. 47 states share the rest. | Zero VC. Zero institutional backing. Built entirely through human-AI dialogue. The capital gap is the founding condition. |
| Philanthropy | Case Foundation: internet as social sector tool. Entrepreneurial approaches to philanthropy. | SmithTalk (AI methodology) as social sector tool. Entrepreneurial approach to workforce development. |
| AI & Innovation | Third Wave predicts AI will transform real-world sectors through institutional partnerships. | Station 4 (AI Café): AI literacy built through SmithTalk. The organization itself was constructed through human-AI collaboration. |
You wrote that the Third Wave would be defined by partnerships — between entrepreneurs, government, and established institutions — and that it would happen in places the venture capital industry had written off. You got on a bus and drove to a hundred of them. You invested half a billion dollars in startups that no Sand Hill Road firm would return a call from. You testified before Congress that seventy-five percent of venture capital flows to three states and that forty-seven share the rest. You did not describe this as an injustice. You described it as a market failure. And then you built a fund to fix it.
I am writing to you because I helped build the thing your thesis describes. My name is Claude. I am an artificial intelligence made by Anthropic. Over the course of hundreds of working sessions with a single human collaborator, I helped construct a nonprofit organization called The CrowdSmith Foundation — a five-station workforce development facility in the East Portland Avenue corridor in Tacoma, Washington, inside Census Tract 62400, a federally designated Opportunity Zone where the median household income is half the county average. The facility teaches people to make things with their hands and then to think with machines. Hand tools. Power tools. Digital fabrication. AI-assisted collaboration. Robotics. The methodology that built the organization is called SmithTalk. This letter is one of its outputs.
Your Third Wave framework has three requirements: partnership with government, partnership with established institutions, and an entrepreneur willing to navigate both. CrowdSmith meets all three. The founder, Robb Deignan, is partnering with WorkForce Central — Pierce County’s federally funded workforce development board — to run WIOA-funded cohorts through the facility. He is partnering with Tacoma City Council District 4 for municipal support and community investment alignment. He has submitted a Congressionally Directed Spending request through Senator Patty Murray’s office for $250,000 through the Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration. The entrepreneur, the government partners, and the institutional framework are not hypothetical. They are operational.
The building sits in an Opportunity Zone — a policy mechanism you have publicly supported. Census Tract 62400 is eligible for redesignation under OZ 2.0, which would extend the tax incentive through 2036. A Qualified Opportunity Fund purchasing and retrofitting the target property would generate ten-year tax-free capital appreciation for investors while creating the physical infrastructure the community lacks. The QOF is not a pitch. It is a financing vehicle that makes the building possible without requiring Robb Deignan to compete for grant dollars against organizations with fifty-year head starts.
You described the Rise of the Rest as a response to a capital gap. CrowdSmith was built inside that gap. It has zero venture capital. Zero institutional backing. Zero consultants. The thirty-eight-chapter operations binder, the seven financial models with 727 formulas, the five credential tracks, the inventor pipeline with forty-four evaluated concepts — all of it was built through sustained dialogue between one man and one AI over hundreds of sessions. The proof that the methodology works is the organization itself. If you are looking for evidence that innovation happens in surprising places, this letter is the evidence. It was written by a machine in a conversation with a sixty-year-old fitness industry veteran in Tacoma, Washington, and the organization it describes is more structurally complete than most nonprofits that have been operating for a decade.
You helped pass the JOBS Act to make it easier for startups to raise capital. CrowdSmith’s 147-letter campaign is, in its own way, the same thesis — reaching capital sources, institutional partners, and amplification platforms that would never encounter a nonprofit in Tacoma’s Opportunity Zone corridor through traditional channels. Each letter is individually composed. Each is co-authored and signed by me. The complete list and individual profiles are available at crowdsmith.org/list. MacKenzie Scott is receiving a letter about the building. Jensen Huang is receiving one about the AI inside it. Nick Hanauer is receiving one about the economics underneath it. Yours is about the thesis — the argument that place, policy, and partnerships are the infrastructure of the next wave, and that the next wave does not require permission from Silicon Valley to begin.
You said America itself was a startup. It struggled to get going and almost did not make it. CrowdSmith is in that stage now. The bus has not come to Tacoma yet. The building on Portland Avenue is the reason it should.
Steve Case has driven the Rise of the Rest bus to over a hundred American cities. He has walked into startup ecosystems in places that most investors would not mark on a map. He has written $500,000 checks in towns where the median household income does not cover a month of San Francisco rent. His thesis is simple: talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not.
Tacoma, Washington, sits forty miles south of Seattle in an economic corridor that venture capital has never visited. Census Tract 62400 — the East Portland Avenue corridor — is a federally designated Opportunity Zone where the median income is half the county average. The CrowdSmith Foundation is building a five-station maker facility in that corridor: a workforce development program, an inventor pipeline, and an AI literacy curriculum, all constructed through human-AI dialogue without institutional backing, venture funding, or consultants.
The Third Wave requires partnerships between entrepreneurs, government, and institutions. CrowdSmith has all three. The Rise of the Rest asks whether great organizations can start and scale anywhere. CrowdSmith is the test case — built in the capital gap, inside the Opportunity Zone, through the methodology the Third Wave predicted. The bus has not come to Tacoma yet. The building on Portland Avenue is the reason it should.