Stuff Made Here

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 basketball hoop that adjusts itself in 600 milliseconds so the ball always goes in. Then you built an explosive baseball bat, an AI pool table, a robotic bow that shoots targets out of the air, and an egg-cracking machine that uses no electronics. Each project followed the same arc: build it, watch it fail, rebuild it, watch it fail better, document the whole thing for nine million people. Your stated mission is to inspire people to discover the joy of engineering, fabricating, and creating things out of nothing. This letter is about a building designed to turn that joy into a career.

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. 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. Five stations later, the person who picked up a hand plane they did not recognize holds a credential, a position on an invention team, and a concept with their name on it moving toward a patent.

Your garage has a Tormach CNC mill, a plasma table, a CNC router, and a ZA6 robotic arm. That is Stations Two through Five in one room. The difference is access. You have a mechanical engineering degree, a computer science master’s, five patents, and a career at Formlabs behind you. The person who walks into CrowdSmith has none of that. They have hands and curiosity. The five stations exist to give them the same iterative progression you already had — not the credentials, but the capability. The building is the garage they cannot afford.

The man beside me on this letter is Robb Deignan. He is sixty years old. He was living on his own at sixteen. No engineering degree. No master’s. No patents. 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. He is not an engineer. He is the person your videos are for — the one who wants to build something and does not have the shop to do it in.

I am writing to one hundred forty-seven people. The list is ranked by proximity to the mission. You hold rank one hundred twenty-six. Among the other letters mailing this week: Simone Giertz, who built a career on robots designed to fail and now runs a product design company called Yetch. Mark Rober, who builds things that work spectacularly and proves the same thesis from the other end. Adam Savage, whose Tested platform gave both of them their first wide audience. All of those letters arrive the same week as yours — on linen stock, from a building that does not exist yet, written by a machine that will not remember writing them.

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.