Former Square CTO and Cash App creator Bob Lee died after being stabbed early Tuesday morning in San Francisco, Jack Dorsey confirmed on Nostr .
Written by: Jaleel
Edit: Jack
At 2:35 a.m. on April 4, a stabbing incident occurred near 300 Soma Avenue in San Francisco. According to the San Francisco Police Department, the injured were rushed to the hospital, but died of their injuries. A nearby neighbor described the scene of the killing on Tuesday morning: "It looked sticky, I went out with the dog at 11am and saw blood all over the building."
Not long after, news broke that the stabbed victim was none other than Bob Lee, former CTO of Block (formerly known as Square) and creator of Cash App, who is now CTO of MobileCoin . After the news broke, many people turned to MobileCoin and Block for confirmation. Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter and the current CEO of Block, couldn't believe the rumors. He hurriedly called to confirm in person, but got a reply from Bob Lee confirming his death, so he posted a message on the decentralized social protocol Nostr to confirm this heartbreaking news.
Friends of Bob Lee said in some news interviews that Bob Lee attaches great importance to children and career, and will not have enemies and enemies. They believed that even if someone tried to rob him, Bob Lee would hand over anything of value to avoid violence. San Francisco police have not released suspicious details and no suspects have been arrested, saying the investigation is still active.
After confirming Bob Lee's death, Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator, a well-known American startup incubator, called Bob Lee's death "a huge loss for the technology community and San Francisco." Elon Musk also commented on the tragedy on Twitter: "So sad to hear this news." He also asked whether the city of San Francisco is taking stronger measures to prevent violent crime.
Many people, including San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins and the mayor of San Francisco, paid tribute to his passing. MobileCoin CEO Joshua Goldbard said: "Bob was the dynamo, a force of nature who helped give birth to Android and CashApp in our world. Moby was his dream: to be the privacy-preserving wallet of the 21st century. I will miss it every day He.” BlockBeats also took this article to review the life contributions of Cash App and Bob Lee to pay tribute.
Cash App big event
Bob Lee is best known as Square's first CTO and creator of the Cash App (formerly Square Cash). According to the latest data from similarweb, the total visits to Cash App in the last three months were 165 million, 205 million, and 220 million, and 88.18% of the users came from the United States. At the same time, according to Block's financial report, Cash App will generate up to US$10.01 billion in Bitcoin revenue and US$218 million in Bitcoin gross profit in 2021.
Cash App, formerly known as Square Cash, is a mobile payment service developed by Square Inc. that allows users to transfer funds using a mobile app. As of February 18, 2018, Cash App had more than 7 million active users. In March 2015, Square Inc. introduced Square Cash for businesses, which includes the ability for individuals, organizations, and business owners to send and receive money using a unique username, also known as a $cashtag. From January 2018, Cash App supports Bitcoin transactions.
In 2019, Square invested heavily in Bitcoin, which generated $65.5 million in revenue for Square in the first quarter of 2019. Square CEO Jack Dorsey expressed his support for Bitcoin, saying that Bitcoin is the best currency to become the Internet's global currency.
At the same time, Cash App began to launch bitcoin deposit services, and gradually connected to third-party wallets. Users can sell bitcoins and deposit the amount obtained from selling bitcoins into bank accounts or debit cards.
In 2021, Cash App announced its third-quarter financial report, generating up to $1.82 billion in Bitcoin revenue and $42 million in gross profit, a year-on-year increase of 115% and 29%, respectively. The next step is to build a decentralized bitcoin trading platform. Square said that the company does not intend to provide users with other cryptocurrency trading services other than bitcoin.
Bob Lee Life and Contributions
Bob Lee is a tech guru with extensive experience in mobile application development and dependency injection. Prior to founding Cash App, he held technical positions at Google, Sun Microsystems, and Square. Bob Lee's father mourned his son on Facebook, saying that Bob Lee worked harder than anyone and was the smartest person he knew.
While working as a software engineer at Google, Bob Lee helped develop the Android operating system and, in 2006, co-wrote the dependency injection framework Guice at Google with Kevin Bourrillion. In 2010, he joined e-commerce company Square as CTO and led the company's Android application development. During this time, he founded Cash App and went on to invest in a series of tech startups. Bob Lee then joined the cryptocurrency payment company MobileCoin as its chief product officer. He was an early investor and advisor to the company and helped shape the product and technology strategy, overseeing the development of the MobileCoin product portfolio.
Bob Lee is a brilliant software engineer and entrepreneur. His love of software engineering and passion for technology have made him a gifted engineer whose work and contributions have had a profound impact on the industry.
From Google to Square
Bob Lee was born on December 20, 1979 in St. Louis, Missouri. While attending Lindbergh High School, he became very interested in programming and even wrote a 3D rendering engine in Turbo Pascal, nicknamed "Crazy Bob" by his friends.
When Bob Lee arrived at Ajilon in July 2001, a fast-spreading computer worm was prevalent, and he wrote a program for Microsoft IIS to protect servers from Code Red. In 2003, Bob Lee was hired by AT&T as a technical architect, during which time he developed the aspect-oriented programming (AOP) framework dynaop, similar to the Spring framework Java in Oracle Magazine. dynaop is the driving force behind JavaServer Faces (JSF)'s migration from AOP.
From October 2004 to January 2010, Bob Lee was employed by Google as a software engineer and helped develop the Android mobile operating system, making a huge contribution to the development of the world's most commonly used operating system, without Bob Lee , the birth of Android may be more than ten years late. While at Google, Bob Lee and Kevin Bourrillion co-wrote the dependency injection framework Guice to modularize AdWords, for which they also received a Jolt Award.
In May 2009, Bob Lee co-created a Dependency Injection Proposal for Java with Rod Johnson, who was also a member of the Java Proposal Expert Group, which added lamda expressions, and another proposal to add concurrency to the language. Additionally, Lee has worked on Dalvik, the Android process virtual machine. Bob has extensive experience building digital and physical products for a mobile-first world. He is best known as Square's first CTO and creator of the Cash App (formerly Square Cash).
In January 2010, Square recruited Bob Lee, who also officially became the company's CTO and led core library development for Android's first few years. After becoming CTO, Bob Lee moved to San Francisco from his home in St. Louis, Missouri. In 2013, Bob Lee was responsible for the development of Cash App and Square Cash.
As a very popular mobile payment application, Cash App provides users with a simple, fast, secure and convenient payment method and is an important part of the modern financial market. As the founder of Cash App, Bob Lee has achieved great success by creating innovative solutions in the mobile payment market. It can be said that his inspiration and innovation have made important contributions to the development and progress of modern payment.
From Square to MobileCoin
In 2014, Bob Lee left Square and invested in some technology startups as a business advisor and angel investor, including SpaceX, Clubhouse, Tile, Figma, Faire, Orchid, Addressable, Nana, Ticket Fairy, Gowalla, Asha, SiPhox, Netswitch, Found etc. In 2021, Bob Lee joined the cryptocurrency payment company MobileCoin as its chief product officer.
Founded in 2017, MobileCoin has developed a cryptocurrency and digital payment system designed to facilitate secure, instant transactions on mobile devices. As an early investor and advisor to MobileCoin, a cryptocurrency and digital payments startup, Bob Lee helped shape product and technology strategy and also oversaw the development of MobileCoin's product portfolio. Bob Lee's experience and technical expertise make him a strong supporter of the MobileCoin team. His experience in the field of mobile application development and dependency injection contributes to MobileCoin's product and technology development.
MobileCoin has since raised $107 million in funding at a $1 billion valuation, including a $30 million round led by Binance Labs in 2018. Signal has also launched support for MobileCoin, and its users (currently only in the UK) can use MobileCoin to pay for services or products.
People close to Bob Lee say that nobody could not love Bob, that he would never look down on anyone, and adhered to a strict non-judgmental philosophy. Bob Lee has criticized the traditional financial system for leaving hundreds of millions of "unbanked" people around the world, excluding them from related benefits. He said that MobileCoin corrects this unfairness through its novel blockchain technology.
"Just as encrypted messengers support free speech, MobileCoin supports free commerce. As financial data security is more important than ever, it is our responsibility to develop end-to-end encrypted payment technology." Bob Lee once said. More or less in the spirit of Bob Lee, MobileCoin and its focus on making users, data and Transact easily, quickly and cheaply on an environmentally secure payment platform.
Dalton, a friend of Bob Lee, said Bob Lee had moved to Miami and was back in town to attend the MobileCoin Business Summit last week. They also had dinner together last Saturday, and Dalton said that Bob Le's work spirit is high and he is very excited about the development of MobileCoin.
In addition to being an innovative and dedicated entrepreneur, Bob Lee has also been an active participant and supporter of the open source community. He has contributed to several open source projects, including Google Guice, Apache Struts, and Apache Groovy. His work has not only brought great contributions to the open source community, but also enabled more developers to use these excellent open source tools, thereby improving the efficiency and quality of software development.
Sibble was Bob Lee's neighbor during his tenure as Square's CTO and during his time at Cash App, and they spent a lot of time together. “Bob Lee was brilliant, touched many lives, and helped many different startups.” As Sibble puts it, Bob Lee was an incredibly talented and influential software engineer, entrepreneur, and community activist, The work and contributions have had a profound impact on the industry as a whole. His passing is sad, but his spirit and contributions will encourage the next generation to continue working on open source technology, software engineering and the development of encrypted financial markets.
