Bob Lee: A genius tech visionary killed in a ‘horrifying act of violence’

Bob Lee’s creations helped to change the world. In touching online eulogies, friends say his work as a software developer and digital payment pioneer was only part of his brilliance. Bevan Hurley reports.

Bob Lee at a tech conference in his mid-20s in 2006 (Bob Lee / Twitter)

The outpouring of tributes, memories and anecdotes that have streamed over social media since tech pioneer Bob Lee was stabbed to death tell of a genius engineer, a serial innovator, a loving family man, and, as his nickname Crazy Bob would suggest, someone with a sense of humour.

Friends told how Lee dropped out of St Louis University, Missouri, and through sheer brilliance at computer coding and a determination to improve the lives of others went on to develop digital tools such as Google’s Android and the Cash App that are now used by tens of millions of people each day.

He had a “kaleidoscopic mind” who moved seamlessly between different circles of friends, wrote Joshua Goldbard, the founder and chief executive of MobileCoin, where Lee had worked as chief product officer since 2021.

“Pick a topic and Bob would be right there with you telling you all of the ways he had thought about the idea already,” Mr Goldbard said on Twitter. “He had a way of seeing the world that was enchanting. He was a visionary in so many ways.”

Lee first got noticed in the tech world as a hacker and open source code developer as a teenager in St Louis, Missouri, in the 1990s, friends said.

“He participated in hackathons and was willing to play around and share his knowledge,” one noted in a lengthy thread of tributes on Hacker News.

Slain tech pioneer Bob Lee with his newborn child. He described himself as a ‘stay-at-home’ dad on his Crazy Bob blog (Bob Lee / CrazyBob.org)

After college, he worked as a technical architect for AT&T in St Louis and became an expert in Java programming.

Lee moved to San Francisco in his early 20s in 2004 to work at Google where he led a team that developed Android, an operating system for smartphones.

In 2010, Lee was headhunted by Square, which was renamed Block in 2021, where he helped launch the Cash App, which is used by tens of millions to make digital money transfers. He became the firm’s first chief technology officer in 2011, a Linkedin profile shows.

In 2013, Lee made the first ever payment on the Cash App when he sent $4 to Jack Dorsey, the Twitter founder and chairman of Block, who shared a screenshot of the transaction on social media.

Mr Dorsey described Lee’s death as “heartbreaking” in a social media post, and wrote that he was instrumental to the company’s growth and success.

Lee also helped the World Health Organisation develop its mobile app during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a profile on MobileCoin.

In dozens of posts on his Crazy Bob blog dating back to the mid 2000s, Lee displayed an intense curiosity about the world around him and was generous in sharing his discoveries.

He was constantly innovating; writing a programme to help Twitter users find like-minded followers, sharing tips on the latest iPhone camera, and discussing complex coding issues.

The nickname, Crazy Bob, was a reference to his days playing waterpolo at St Louis University, according to Mr Goldbard.

‘Of course Bob knows Lars’

A common theme in the many online eulogies is Lee’s penchant for bringing diverse groups of friends together.

On Hacker News, Lee’s friend Harper Reed recalled going to an invite-only Metallica show in Iowa in the 2010s.

Cash App creator Bob Lee was a tech visionary who mentored many in Silicon Valley, friends said (MobileCoin)

“I told Bob about it and he introduced me to Lars,” Mr Reed wrote. Lars being Lars Ulrich, the drummer and songwriter from Metallica. “Lol. Of course Bob knows Lars and is just going to introduce me.”

After he had made his mark at Google and begun his work revolutionising peer-to-peer payments, he would still make time to mentor young talent, friends said.

“Everyone revered him, and yet, he was just a normal guy (lol nothing about bob was normal),” Mr Reed wrote on Twitter.

Lee was a prolific user of social media. On Twitter and Facebook, he showed a strong social conscience on issues such as police brutality, racial equity and Covid misinformation.

Lee shared hundreds of photos of his life on a personal Flickr account. The snaps portray a global traveller who enjoyed to party hard with friends, and a doting father to his daughters Dagny and Scout, who would code late into the night with a newborn child on his lap. He and wife Krista reportedly separated in 2019.

Bob Lee with his two daughters Dagna and Scout, pictured in 2016 (Bob Lee / Facebook)

In a Facebook post, his father Rick Lee wrote that he had moved in with Bob when his mother Nannette died in 2019.

“Life has been an adventure with two bachelors living together, and I’m so happy that we were able to become so close these last years,”  his father Rick Lee wrote in a Facebook post. “Bob would give you the shirt off his back. He would never look down on anyone and adhered to a strict no-judgment philosophy.”

The father and son relocated to Miami last year, Rick wrote.

In a separate tribute, his brother Tim Oliver Lee wrote on Facebook: “I was so fortunate to grow up with him, and I feel like I’ve lost part of myself.”

Lee was also an influential startup investor, ploughing money into nascent companies such as Clubhouse, SpaceX and and the female-focused social media and networking company Present.

Bob Lee, known to his friends as ‘Crazy Bob’, was knifed to death in central San Francisco early on 4 April (Twitter / Bob Lee)

In 2021, he joined MobileCoin, a crypto payment firm, as its chief product officer, where he helped launch Moby a crypto and payment app.

After the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency giant FTX in late 2022, Lee explained that he had lost his personal deposits in the firm and was unlikely to get them back.

“This is why we made Moby — to make holding your own money as easy as centralised solutions,” he wrote on Twitter.

‘Horrifying act of violence’

The 43-year-old’s fatal stabbing in downtown San Francisco early on 4 April ignited a sense of fury among the tech community at police and city leaders.

Tragically, friends say Lee left San Francisco due to increasing crime rates and had just returned for a business trip when he was attacked.

Lee’s last tragic moments as he stumbled, mortally wounded, down Main St in San Francisco’s downtown district at 2.30am in search of help were captured on surveillance footage and viewed by journalists from The San Francisco Standard. The Independent has not corroborated the footage.

Cameras reportedly captured Lee clutching one side of his body from where he is bleeding heavily and showed him approaching a white Toyota Camry parked on the side of the road with its lights flashing.

He lifts his shirt to show the driver the extent of his injuries, but rather than help, the motorist speeds off.

Lee could be heard pleading for help on a 911 call made at 2.34am, according to The Standard.

The site where Cash App founder Bob Lee was discovered with fatal stab wounds in San Francisco on 4 April (Associated Press)

Police and first responders discovered Lee unconscious on the sidewalk outside the Portside apartment building at 403 Main St minutes later, police said in a statement.

He was rushed to hospital where he died from his injuries, police said.

An arrest was reportedly made on 13 April. The suspect is said to be a man from Emeryville who knew Lee and is a fellow tech executive.

In a tweet expressing his condolences for Lee’s death, Elon Musk wrote that many of his friends had been “severely assaulted” in San Francisco.

Silicon Valley executives laid the blame for Lee’s death on Mayor London Breed, the city’s former progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin and Board of Supervisors.

“Congratulations, your policies have claimed another life,” wrote Alan Alden, a Palo Alto financier who was friends with Lee.

Venture capitalist Matt Ocko, another friend, wrote on Twitter that “Chesa Boudin, & the criminal-loving city council that enabled him & a lawless SF for years, have Bob’s literal blood on their hands”.

San Francisco police chief William Scott declined to say whether the stabbing was a random attack in his first public comments at a Police Commission meeting on 5 April night, The San Francisco Standard reported.

Bob Lee pictured at the New York Stock Exchange in 2015 on the day that Square, now known as Block, listed as a public company (Facebook / Bob Lee)

At the same meeting San Francisco Police Commissioner Kevin Benedicto said it was “premature and distasteful to try to fit this horrifying act of violence into a preconceived narrative and use it to advance a political agenda”.

Chief Scott later released a statement that the investigation was “still in the early stages” and extended his condolences to “the family, friends and loved ones of Mr Lee.”

“There is no place for violent crime against anyone in our city,” Mr Scott said. “I want to assure everyone that our investigators are working tirelessly to make an arrest and bring justice to Mr Lee and his loved ones, just as we try to do on every homicide that occurs in our city.”