According to his family and the police, Bob Lee, a technology entrepreneur who established the mobile payment startup Cash App and had previously worked at Square, passed away on Tuesday after he was stabbed in the vicinity of downtown San Francisco.
At around 2:35 in the morning on Tuesday, officers from the San Francisco Police Department responded to a complaint of a stabbing. Officers arrived to find Robert Lee, 43, suffering from what appeared to be knife wounds. According to the police, he was transferred to a hospital but ultimately succumbed to his injuries there.
In a statement released on Wednesday evening, Police Chief Bill Scott noted that the investigation is in its preliminary stages and referred to the incident as a horrifying crime.
According to the statement made by the department, the event is being looked into by the homicide section of the police department.
Bob Lee’s previous position at the cryptocurrency startup MobileCoin was that of chief product officer, and he had held that position since 2014. He had previously held the position of chief technology officer at Square, which is now known as Block. Square is a start-up company in the field of financial technology and was co-founded by Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter.
After that, Lee went on to start the company Cash App, which is a money transfer service.
“Bobby worked harder than anyone and was the smartest person I have ever known. He will be missed by all those that knew him,” Richard Lee, his father, said in a Facebook post. “Thank you to those who have reached out in support.”
The father and son had moved from California to Miami in October and had been living there since then. After Bob Lee’s mother passed away in 2019, they had gotten closer to one another.
“I’m so saddened and disheartened to lose my brother,” Tim Oliver Lee had written on Facebook. “He really was the best of us. I was so fortunate to grow up with him, and I feel like I’ve lost part of myself.”
Joshua Goldbard, the founder and CEO of MobileCoin, issued a statement on Wednesday in which he claimed that Bob Lee “passed away yesterday” and commended his shrewdness in the business world. He did not elaborate on what had caused Lee’s passing away.
“Bob was a dynamo, a force of nature. Bob was the genuine article,” Goldbard said. “He was made for the world that is being born right now, he was a child of dreams, and whatever he imagined, no matter how crazy, he made real.”
The World Health Organization (WHO) acknowledged to NBC News on Wednesday that Bob Lee provided “support and expertise” during the epidemic. In a statement, the WHO said that “Bob built a large part of the server for the WHO Covid-19 App.”
The chief of police, Scott, sent his sympathies to Lee’s family and friends on Wednesday night after learning of Lee’s passing. “There is no place for this kind of violent crime against anyone in our city,” Scott said in the statement. “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.”
