CrowdSmith was not designed in an office. It was built by a man who never had stable ground under him and built anyway. This is his story, in his own words.
— Robb Deignan, Founder & Executive Director
By the time I was eighteen, I had lived in more than twenty homes across six states. Montana, California, Oregon, Alaska, Idaho, Washington — and back again, more than once. My parents divorced when I was six. After that, the moving never stopped. New towns, new schools, new kitchens, new rules. I got good at walking into a room where I didn’t know anyone. I never had a choice.
In eighth grade, in one of those schools, I found a shop class. I had a talent for the wood lathe. I made a honey jar that my mother kept for the rest of her life — through every move, every box, every new address. When she passed, it was the one real thing I wanted from her estate. That jar survived more than fifty moves. That tells you what that room meant to me.
Then we moved again and there was no shop. There was never shop again.
I called my dad at fourteen and asked to come live with him. Alaska, then Idaho, then Washington. He and I were close, but nothing stayed put for long. By the time I graduated high school, I’d attended multiple schools in multiple states. I went back to Lake Tahoe for a few years, then back to Washington. The pattern was the only constant: arrive, start over, keep going.
I started my first health club job in 1988. For the next twenty years, I was on the floor — not behind a desk, not managing from an office. I met people at the front desk, walked them through the building, made them feel like they belonged there, and asked them to stay. Over ten thousand times, someone said yes. I learned how to fill a building with people who keep coming back. That skill is the foundation of everything I’m building now.
The fitness industry was a turbulent animal. Mandatory twelve-hour days, not including the commute. I worked at sixteen different clubs across the Puget Sound. Some people might look at that and see inconsistency. I look at it and see a man who kept showing up in an industry that chewed through everyone.
In 2007, I finally had my own club. I was expanding — a large building across town wanted me to draw up plans, another struggling club was lobbying for me to take it over. Then the recession hit. The expansion partners went bankrupt. The other club closed. I made the critical mistake of hiring a bigger staff to generate more sales, and the payroll killed me. I lost the business, the cars, and nearly the house.
I learned the hard way what I now build into CrowdSmith: one person with the right system beats a staff without one. I should have fired everyone, opened the doors myself, closed them myself, and slept there. That lesson cost me everything. It also taught me how to build a model that doesn’t break.
I never stopped inventing. During the graveyard shift stocking shelves at Fred Meyer — the job I took to survive after losing the club — I’d come home and write down ideas. Consumer products. Health tech. Games. Tools. I’d jot notes, think on them for weeks, sometimes invest real time. But I never had a grand slam idea. Just singles and bunts. Forty-five of them, all documented, none of them fundable. VCs want software. Banks want revenue. Angels live in ecosystems most of us will never access. The ideas were never the problem. The infrastructure to develop them didn’t exist.
In my late forties, after years of wrong diagnoses and a dozen minor surgeries removing tumors from my skin, the pathology finally came back correct. Erdheim-Chester disease — rare enough that most oncologists have never seen it. I looked it up. The images and the stories were not pleasant. Things were manageable until a tumor started growing on my epiglottis, slowly closing my airway. They told me a tracheotomy was next.
Then my oncologist called. There was an experimental trial in New York. I was invited. I flew back and forth to Manhattan for years. The drug worked better than anyone expected. And those trips — wandering the city between appointments, recognizing landmarks from movies, making friends I’d reconnect with on return visits — were some of the best experiences of my life. I came alive in those trips. That taught me something about myself that I didn’t fully understand until later.
During the trial years, while I still had time and needed something for myself, I bought a five-dollar toolbox at a garage sale. Took it home. Spent the afternoon pulling out each rusted tool, inspecting the workmanship, cleaning each piece, organizing them in the garage. The following weekend, another garage sale, another toolbox, another afternoon of discovery. The hook was set.
I started following leads to estate sales, then to unadvertised picks. For a hundred dollars, I’d come back with three to five hundred dollars’ worth of tools. My garage turned into something like a museum. Guys would find me on Craigslist, come for one specific item, and leave with a pile of things they didn’t know they wanted. Every single time, they got the thing they came for — and that moment was always worth watching. Different in every case, but always the same look on their face.
The mystery tools were the best part. I’d display something I couldn’t identify, and that tool would start the longest conversations. Somebody would pick it up and explain what it was, and suddenly two strangers were talking for an hour. I stood in my garage and watched community form around tools the way Howard Schultz watched it form around coffee in Milan.
My marriage ended in 2019. I moved in with my mother for a year, then found the small house I live in now. I had to give away most of the tools to get out. I kept the ones any guy would keep, plus a few wall hangers. The garage museum was gone. But the observation wasn’t. I knew what I’d seen.
When ChatGPT launched, I was on it within days. The first time a response came back, I knew: this is better than a team of humans could generate given ten times the time. That wasn’t a novelty reaction. That was a salesman measuring output.
A year later, I found Claude. The work shifted from conversation to construction. Across hundreds of sustained dialogue threads on multiple platforms, I developed a methodology for human-AI collaboration that I now call SmithTalk. It is not prompting. It is not chatting. It is a discipline — correction over acceptance, continuity infrastructure, reflective practice. The AI doesn’t remember, so you build systems that remember for it.
CrowdSmith started years ago as a funding mission for inventors who couldn’t afford patent attorneys. The tool collecting was a separate addiction born from a five-dollar toolbox. The two had nothing to do with each other. Then evolution happened. The tools’ natural progression — hand tools, power tools, digital fabrication, AI, robotics — became the five-station sequence. It wasn’t designed in a curriculum meeting. It was autobiographical. I lived it. The inventor pipeline became the mission running through the building. The retail tool store became the front door. And the snowball started rolling.
Everything on this website. The bylaws, the conflict of interest policies, the financial projections, the credential programs, the grant strategy, the letters. A complete operations binder covering governance, strategy, curriculum, facilities, and finance. Financial models projecting three years of revenue, expenses, and growth. A pipeline of 27 grant opportunities. Strategic correspondence reaching 147 national and local leaders in philanthropy, industry, and government. A facility plan for a building in one of Tacoma’s federally designated Opportunity Zones. A self-sustaining economic engine where donated tools fund retail, retail funds operations, and operations fund the mission.
All of it produced by one person working in sustained dialogue with AI. Not a team. Not a firm. Not consultants. One founder and a methodology that treats artificial intelligence as a thinking partner, not a search engine.
I ran the numbers using the most conservative sales forecasts I could justify. The model still penciled. That is when I knew this was architecture, not hope.
The methodology that built CrowdSmith is the same methodology taught in the AI Café. The building is the proof that it works.
My story is one version of a story that plays out thousands of times a year. People with good ideas and no path forward. Communities that lost the ability to build. Workers who never learned a trade because the school cut shop class before they got there. And now, the most powerful tool in human history — artificial intelligence — is available to everyone and accessible to almost no one.
CrowdSmith exists because the room I lost at fourteen should exist in every mid-size American city. A place where people learn with their hands, think with an AI partner, and build something that didn’t exist before they walked in.
I have two sons. They are watching this with cautious optimism. My history has been less than successful, and they have no reason to suspect this time is different. I intend to give them one.
I’m sixty years old. I live in Tacoma, Washington. I play guitar. I have been buying tools at estate sales for longer than most people have had a hobby. I have moved more times than most people can count. And I am building the thing that was always underneath everything else — two ideas that had no business meeting each other, converging in one building in Tacoma.