Few details in San Francisco stabbing death of Cash App founder Bob Lee

SAN FRANCISCO –

Details of how tech govt Bob Lee got here to be fatally stabbed in downtown San Francisco early Tuesday have been scarce as family and friends continued to mourn the person they referred to as good, sort and in contrast to others within the trade.

San Francisco police discovered Lee, 43, on the sidewalk in entrance of a condominium constructing with stab wounds shortly after 2:35 a.m. Tuesday. He was taken to a hospital the place he died.

The neighbourhood the place the stabbing occurred is close to the Embarcadero waterfront and filled with tech places of work, towering condominium buildings and never a lot else late at evening.

Lee created the cellular fee service Cash App and was the chief product officer for cryptocurrency MobileCoin on the time of his dying. He was beforehand the chief know-how officer of the fee firm Square, which grew to become Block in late 2021.

Lee was apparently in San Francisco for a go to after shifting to Miami in October, his father, Rick Lee, stated on social media. The two had been dwelling within the San Francisco suburb of Mill Valley.

“Bob would give you the shirt off his back,” Rick Lee wrote. “He would never look down on anyone and adhered to a strict no-judgment philosophy. Bobby worked harder than anyone and was the smartest person I have ever known.”

San Francisco police have supplied little data, saying the investigation continues to be early.

“Because of this we are not commenting on evidence, nor will we speculate on the circumstances surrounding this horrific crime,” Police Chief Bill Scott stated in an announcement Wednesday.

Lee’s dying additional enflamed debate over public security in San Francisco and its moribund downtown, which has not but bounced again from the pandemic. Twitter’s proprietor Elon Musk took to the social media web site to submit that “violent crime in SF is horrific and even if attackers are caught, they are often released immediately.” Musk tagged town’s district lawyer within the submit.

San Francisco suffers from property crime greater than violent crime equivalent to homicide, rape, theft and assault.

In an announcement, San Francisco Mayor London Breed referred to as the murder “a horrible tragedy” and stated that town is prioritizing public security.

“I’m confident that when the police make an arrest in cases like this, our district attorney will do what’s necessary to hold any individuals accountable for their actions,” she stated.

MobileCoin CEO Josh Goldbard stated in a string of tweets Wednesday that Lee’s vitality was infectious and his thoughts kaleidoscopic.

“He had so much deep heartfelt love,” Goldbard wrote. “Traveling with Bob was like seeing the world for the first time.”

Lee got here to MobileCoin as an early stage investor and advisor, then grew to become chief product officer and helped launch the Moby app, Goldbard stated. Lee was the chief know-how officer at digital funds firm Square in 2013 when it launched a cash switch utility now referred to as Cash App.

Among the tech leaders to share their devastation about Lee’s dying was enterprise capitalist Wesley Chan, co-founder of FPV Ventures. Chan stated he befriended Lee greater than a decade in the past once they each labored at Google, at a time when software program engineers like Lee have been serving to to construct the Android smartphone working system earlier than its 2008 launch.

“He was an incredibly iconic founder in the tech world,” Chan stated by cellphone Wednesday. “He wrote large parts of Android when he was at Google. He became the CTO of Square and helped build Cash App. His resume reads something like a Fortune cover article.”

But Chan stated Lee was additionally beneficiant in serving to to educate and champion different engineers and tech entrepreneurs who’d name on him for recommendation. And he was modest about his key function in creating profitable merchandise, such because the broadly used Cash App.

“With everything that Bob worked on, it was always a pleasant surprise,” Chan stated. “That’s one of the things I loved about him. He was always humble about it, he’d say, ‘Oh, I don’t know if it’s going to work or not, but we’ll try.”‘