Chief Product Officer of MobileCoin Bob Lee was stabbed to death in San Francisco.
The San Francisco Police Department responded to a complaint of a stabbing along the 300 block of Main Street in SoMa around 2:35 a.m. on Tuesday. After being brought to a hospital, he passed away from his wounds.
Bob Lee, 43, was identified as the stabbing victim shortly after it was reported by NBC Bay Area. Bloomberg and ABC7 News received a statement from MobileCoin confirming the information.
Bob Lee worked at Google for the initial several years of Android, concentrating on core library development, before joining MobileCoin. After that, he started working on the Android app for Square, the payment startup that subsequently changed its name to Block. He developed Cash App and was appointed the company’s first CTO.
Crazy Bob, as Bob Lee, was an investor in tech startups as well. He has investments in SpaceX, Clubhouse, Tile, Figma, Faire, Orchid, Addressable, Nana, Ticket Fairy, Gowalla, Asha, SiPhox, Netswitch, Found, and other companies, according to his LinkedIn page.
Bob Lee, was an investor
In the computer community, there was an outpouring of mourning after the announcement. It’s true. Receiving phone calls. Tragic. Bob played a key role in Cash App and Square. Block CEO Jack Dorsey wrote on Nostr, “STL guy.”
“I’m so sorry to learn of @crazybob’s sudden passing. When I initially met him in the summer of 2006, we geeked out over programming and technology, and he didn’t seem to mind that I was just 14. He was one of the first people to support Figma, and we kept in touch throughout the years. “It’s truly unbelievable that he is no longer with us,” Dylan Field, CEO of Figma, tweeted.
How tragic. I still recall Bob’s code that produces specific numbers. Although Bob’s code is written in Java, it makes use of cunning backtracking methods to get the best results out of numerous solutions written in a variety of languages, as hintymad noted on Hacker News.
The San Francisco Police Department has not released any further information about the case, and no arrests have been made.
President of Y Combinator Garry Tan apologizes and removes a frightening tweet he posted, saying, “Die slow motherf*ckers.”
Once again, Garry Tan is making waves with his posts on social network X. It’s possible that many of the founders he teaches have been motivated by his success in Silicon Valley.
The head of Y Combinator, an investor, and a previous entrepreneur said something on Friday night that may have led some people to question whether his X account had been compromised. Tan wrote to the seven supervisors in San Francisco who manage the provision of local government services: “Motherfucking crew and label, fuck Chan Peskin Preston Walton Melgar Ronen Safai Chan…” And you too will be fucked if you are into Peskin Preston Walton Melgar Ronen Safai Chan as a crew. Slow motherfuckers, die.
The conversation was initially covered this past weekend by the publication Mission Local. It starts with a comment made by one of Tan’s X followers, “I think Garry is hammered.” Tan answered, “You’re right, and motherfuck our enemies. I’m here for it.”
Because of their harsh tone, the post and remark are startling. Later, Tan expressed regret for them in a letter, saying, “It wasn’t a good call, reference or not-sorry! I thought everyone would get the rap reference.”
Tan proposed “Hit ‘Em Up,” a 1996 song by well-known West Coast rapper Tupac Shakur that mocked his rival, the East Coast rapper Notorious B.I.G., as the rap allusion.
“There is no place, no excuse and no reason for this type of speech and charged language in discourse… I know the community will hold me accountable and keep focused on our true mission: making San Francisco a vibrant, prosperous and safe place,” Tan wrote in a more formal apology to the board of supervisors.
As a mother, Myrna Melgar, the supervisor for District 7, told Mission Local that the remarks were “rattling.” She told the outlet, “I don’t know what I did to get on this guy’s list.” “He’s not someone I’ve met.”
Tan was contacted by TechCrunch early this evening for comment, but they have not heard back. Paul Graham, a co-founder of Y Combinator, was also contacted by TechCrunch earlier this evening, but they have not heard back.
August 2022 saw Tan take over as Y Combinator’s newest president, following the brief tenure of Geoff Ralston.
Each of the men has a history with Y Combinator. After serving as a partner at YC for five years, Sam Altman, the organization’s more well-known president, left to take the helm at OpenAI, and Ralston was named president in 2019. (A more recent article in the Washington Post stated that Altman’s involvement was compelled due to worries about his individual investments in YC businesses and his increasing focus on initiatives beyond YC, such as OpenAI. Altman might have also realized what was coming when he said to this editor at a 2019 event, “If I could control the market, I would not have YC companies raise the amounts of money they raise or at the valuations they do. Obviously, the free market is going to do its thing.”
Tan completed the accelerator program in 2008 and went on to become a partner at YC from 2011 to 2015. Later, he and another former YC partner, Alexis Ohanian, founded Initialized Capital, and more recently, he went back to lead the company.
Tan has an inspiring personal narrative. The Canadian-born San Francisco resident claimed that throughout her childhood as an immigrant’s child, the family occasionally went without food and had bread and milk for supper. Tan claims that after “cold calling the Yellow Pages,” he discovered how to create web pages and was hired for the first time to do so for a client. After graduating from Stanford, he started his own company and became an investor with incredible success because of his early investments, which included Coinbase, for which he made his first payment in 2012.
In the background, Tan has long created educational YouTube videos for entrepreneurs, such as “Stop Wasting Your Life” and “How to Get Rich the Real Way.”
Tan portrays the sage in the videos. Tan, who is friendly in person, has been more aggressive on social media in the meanwhile, bringing attention to himself in unexpected ways and Y Combinator because of his position. For instance, Tan sparked a contentious discussion on X last fall with Neo, a smaller startup accelerator program that was established in 2017, has raised $600 million from investors, and has backed 175 firms. Some wondered why he would bother, thinking he was punching down. (Y Combinator was established in 2005 and has backed thousands of businesses while raising billions of dollars from investors.)
In addition, Tan has been vocal about his personal complaints with X and has grown resentful of San Francisco’s progressive leaders, whom he holds accountable for many of the city’s problems, both apparent and hidden.
All of this might be expected in a world where social media has turned into a poisonous wasteland.
However, it begs the question of whether Tan went too far this past weekend considering that he is the president of the most influential startup program in the world. Telling politicians to “die” is undoubtedly a controversial move within YC, especially if it comes after a purported drunken diatribe.
Alternatively, others seem to be choosing not to take him seriously at all, at least outwardly.
“This was dumb, but he’s human and deserves forgiveness,” stated an entrepreneur and investor who knows Tan and who defended Tan’s behavior on Friday night in a conversation with TechCrunch earlier today.
