Cash App creator and fintech veteran Bob Lee was stabbed to death in San Francisco early Tuesday morning, according to various news reports.
Lee, 43, was walking in the city’s Rincon Hill neighborhood when he was attacked at 2:35 a.m., according to San Francisco police.
Lee received medical attention at the scene and was transported to a local hospital, where he succumbed to his injuries.
As of Wednesday, no arrests have been made and the police haven’t released any suspect details.
Lee had been the chief product officer at MobileCoin, a cryptocurrency company, since November 2021, according to his LinkedIn page. Earlier in his career, he spent four years as chief technology officer at Jack Dorsey’s Block, then known as Square. It was at Square that he developed Cash App, a peer-to-peer payments service that competes with Venmo and Apple Pay.
Prior to Square, Lee was a software engineer at Google, where he led the launch of Android, the world’s most widely used operating system, according to his bio on MobileCoin’s website.
Following the news of his death, tech industry folks began posting tributes to Lee on Twitter.
Bill Barhydt, CEO of crypto wallet service Abra, tweeted that Lee was a dad and was “a generous decent human being who didn’t deserve to be killed.”
Joshua Goldbard, founder of MobileCoin, wrote, “Bob was so much more than a technologist. Bob was an artist. Everywhere he went Bob breathed love into this world. He had so much deep heartfelt love.”
“One of the things that made him truly special was his capacity to dream big and to summon those big crazy dreams into our world,” Goldbard said. “Bob summoned the future into the present.”
Prior to his death, Lee developed Moby, a private blockchain peer-to-peer payment app, alongside Goldbard. Moby launched in January.
In an official statement on Moby’s website, Goldbard noted that Bob “believed in the dignity of privacy. He wanted a world where you and I could transact free from the prying eyes of predatory corporations and criminals.”
He also noted that while Lee’s resume — Cash App, Google and numerous investments — sounds impressive, his “real resume is the hearts and minds he touched in his time here. Bob’s legacy is the feeling that you can make a difference if you try. Bob’s legacy is his children.”
