Who Was Bob Lee?
Who Was Bob Lee?
Google Android, Square, Cash App, venture capital, Internet of Things, COVID-19 testing, MobileCoin
Rounding the Earth
The following article serves as the show notes for the video presentation of the same name released through the Rounding the News series, presented by Rounding the Earth. It is provided to allow RTE listeners to verify my sources and conduct their own due diligence, and is intended as a supplement to the video. As such, I highly encourage readers of this Substack to watch the full episode and support Rounding the Earth, whose founder Mathew Crawford has provided me the platform and resources to conduct this important work. Thank you, Rounding the Earth!
Big tech entrepreneur Bob Lee has died
On Tuesday, April 4, it was announced that tech entrepreneur Bob Lee had been stabbed to death in San Francisco, California. From the BBC:1
The California's San Francisco Police Department said officers responded to reports of a stabbing on Tuesday at around 02:35 local time (10:35 BST).
They found Mr Lee unconscious on the ground with two stab wounds to his chest, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, and started to administer aid before rushing him to San Francisco General Hospital.
Mr Lee's father posted a message on Facebook on Wednesday confirming the circumstances surrounding his son's death.
My deepest sympathies go out to Lee’s friends and family, and all who are mourning his death.
The news came to my attention after several of my peers sent around a thread discussing the incident on the forum of Y Combinator, a technology startup accelerator based in Mountain View, California.2
A quick glance at the thread reveals that Lee’s death has sparked heated debate about if he is the victim of a larger increase in violent crime in San Francisco, with some accusing others of playing politics at a sensitive time. Some in the latter camp have expressed desire to focus on celebrating who Lee was as a person, and marking his place in history as a highly successful contributor to big tech innovation, changing the way people all around the world interact with their technology and each other.
Who was Bob Lee?
Lee’s early years are not exactly clear to me in my initial research. Wikipedia’s writeup on him cites various sources, including his own personal blog, detailing his early ventures into coding:
In high school, Lee wrote a 3D rendering engine in Turbo Pascal. Lee attended Saint Louis University, where he became known as "Crazy Bob" from water polo, and pledged Sigma Chi. In July 2001, Lee wrote a program for Microsoft IIS to defend servers from Code Red, a rapidly spreading computer worm around the time.
From 1997-2000, Lee worked as a web developer for several organizations including Red Rock Consulting, Southeast Missouri State University, and D’Arcy.3 He then took on senior consulting positions at Capgemini; Ajilon Consulting (where he “developed MasterCard's member bank web site”); and OCI (where he built a stock trading system for A.G. Edwards, a defunct and reorganized financial services firm).
Lee worked at AT&T from September 2003 to October 2004, then jumped to a longer-term position at Google as a staff software engineer. There, he “led the core library development for Android,” the company’s mobile operating system.4
Square
In January 2010, Lee was headhunted by e-commerce startup Square, where he went to work as Chief Technology Officer.5
Square is a payment processing platform originally developed in 2009 by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and his friend Jim McKelvey. Four months after Lee was recruited, the first version of the service went live for public use.6
Early investors in Square during Lee’s tenure included Citi Ventures, GGV Capital, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Rizvi Traverse, Sequoia Capital, Starbucks, Tuesday Capital, Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, Visa, and VMware.7
Lee led the development of Square’s Cash App,8 launching in October 2013 under the named Square Cash.9
Notably, Square secured a debt financing agreement in April 2014 with several major banks: Barclays, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Silicon Valley Bank (SVB).10
SV Angel
Lee left Square in May 2014, taking a job the following month as a limited partner at SV Angel, another of Square’s investors.11 SV Angel founder, Ron Conway, went on to serve as co-chair of the COVID-19 Technology Task Force alongside other high-powered American tech executives.12
News reports coming out this week note that during this period, Lee invested in a number of notable startups including Clubhouse, Figma and SpaceX.13 It is not clear to me at this point if these particular investments were made in association with SV Angel, or independently.
Some additional investments he made are Leo, a disappearing message app purchased by Lyft; and Tile, a company that “creates devices connected to a mobile app, helping users locate their personal items.”14
Tile is interesting and alarming for several reasons. The “tiles” can be attached to items, connecting them by Bluetooth to a network that allows them to be tracked and located by their rightful owners. They can also, however, be used by stalkers to track individuals carrying the tags — a very real problem the company has had to address.15 Furthermore, they’re a rather obvious precursor to more widespread connectivity as envisioned by proponents of “Internet of Things” (IoT) systems.16
It’s not just an add-on product, however. Tile’s technology is already being deployed built-in to an array of widely-used devices from brands such as Bose, Dell, FitBit, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Lenovo, Skullcandy, and Smile Direct Club — as well as Apple's Siri, Google Home and Amazon Alexa smart home devices.17
Lee’s fellow Tile investors include Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), Nicholas Woodman (founder of GoPro), and Tencent Holdings, parent company of TikTok.18
Lee started working as an advisor at real estate services company GoldenKey in March 2015. In April 2015, he became CEO of Present Company, a social media company focused primarily on women.19
In May 2017, Lee became a limited parter at SignalFire, another venture capital firm based in San Francisco. Companies in SignalFire’s portfolio include Clubhouse, along with a number of startups in the sectors of virtual healthcare, driverless trucks, cybersecurity and financial services.20
Patents
According to his now-defunct LinkedIn profile, Lee was the inventor of at least eight patents. The first three are visible on the main page of his profile (which I managed to capture on Wednesday, prior to its deletion).
The first is titled “Card reader emulation for cardless transactions.” The patent was filed on April 17, 2017 by Square Inc. (now renamed to Block Inc.) and issued on September 14, 2017.21 As described in the abstract:
Disclosed are method and apparatus that enable a cardless payment transaction to be executed from a merchant point-of-sale (POS) system. A user is enabled to check in at a merchant by using a mobile device of the user and then to pay by simply appearing at the merchant and mentioning his name.
It’s the second patent that really got my attention. Titled “Detecting proximity using Wi-Fi hotspots,” the patent describes:22
A method of includes receiving hotspot identification data from the first device, where the identification data identifies a plurality of WiFi hotspots that are in proximity to the first device; determining that the second device is associated with the first device; sending the hotspot identification data to the second device, where the first device and second device are mobile devices; receiving an indication of proximity from the second device; and notifying the first device of the indication of proximity.
Square/Block is once again the holder of the patent.
Recall Lee’s investment in Tile, described earlier on in this article. Just as Tile uses Bluetooth technology to connect devices to the Internet of Things (IoT), this Square/Block-held patent describes a method to accomplish the same outcome using the very familiar technology of Wi-Fi. In both cases, the idea is to be able to use these wireless networks to tag and identify the physical location of an object (or person) based on its interaction with other parts of the network, also allowing for the sending and receiving of data to each device.
The above graphic comes from an article published by the Wi-Fi Alliance, outlining the importance of Wi-Fi in enable the IoT:23
Wi-Fi has played a foundational role in delivering IoT innovation, providing pervasive connectivity to connect a wide variety of “things” to each other, to the internet, and to 18 billion Wi-Fi devices in use around the world. The economic potential of the Internet of Things is boundless, and Wi-Fi delivers a vast range of opportunities across a variety of sectors including smart homes, smart cities, automotive, healthcare, enterprise, government, and industrial IoT environments.
The third patent, titled “Hierarchical data security measures for a mobile device,” covers a cybersecurity system for mobile devices. It is also held by Square/Block, and was published in September 2019.24
Unlike the other two patents, Lee is not the sole inventor. His co-inventors include:
Nathan McCauley, co-founder and CEO of Anchorage Digital — the “first digital asset bank to be granted a banking charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC).” In a March 2022 article for Fortune, McCauley claims that Anchorage “proactively volunteered to be regulated at the highest level [they] could.”25 He formerly worked as Security Engineering Manager at Square.26
Sam Quigley, Square’s “first information security hire.”27 Quigley started Emerose Advisory Services in 2010 to work as an "Independent consultant, focusing on security, management, and scaling issues." He volunteered for Joe Biden's presidential campaign in August-November 2020. In March 2021, Quigley founded Kicho Inc., “an organization dedicated to finding therapeutics for people with Dup15q Syndrome.”28 He also serves on the board of directors for the Dup15q Alliance, a non-profit organization partnered with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), the pharma-funded National Organization for Rare Diseases (NORD), and the U.S. Government’s Interagency Collaborative to Advance Research in Epilepsy (ICARE) Research Portfolio.29
Eric Monti, a Security Engineer at Square.30 Monti previously worked as Lead Security Researcher for Trustwave’s SpiderLabs Threat Intelligence Gathering program. Among Trustwave’s partners are Amazon Web Services, Cisco, Crowdstrike, Google Cloud, and Microsoft.31
Mike Lewis, Head of Engineering and Human Learning at Square (among other former positions).32 Lewis formerly worked as a software engineer at Google and then Uber, focusing on “financial anti-fraud software,” “cloaking detection,” and rewriting “the service that tracks all of the devices people have logged in with.”
COVID-19
While details are scarce, the World Health Organization confirmed that Lee participated in the development of its official COVID-19 app.33 While this is certainly interesting and bears further investigation, what I find even more pertinent is a job he took before the first year of the declared COVID-19 pandemic was up.
In November 2020, Lee joined a company called PreDxion Bio as an advisor and Head of Software. PreDxion Bio was founded in February 2016 by a trio of students at the University of Michigan, winning a $100,000 TiE Boston Angel Investment Prize.34
From U of M's website:35
PreDxion Bio is a precision medicine diagnostics company with a product called MicroKine, a patent-pending near-bedside diagnostic device that measures certain proteins (“cytokines”) in the blood of critically-ill patients. MicroKine delivers this information in less than 30 minutes—ten times faster than that of any existing technology on the market—from a single drop of blood, allowing physicians to prescribe drugs specifically tailored to an individual patient’s unique immune response.
Sound familiar?
In June 2016, the company received its first pair of grants from the University of Michigan and MedTech Innovator.36 Described as “the largest lifescience accelerator in the world for medical device, digital health, and diagnostic companies,”37 MedTech is funded by COVID-19 vaccine developer Johnson & Johnson, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and the pharmaceutical lobbying association, Advanced Medical Technology Association (AdvaMed).38
In 2018, the company received $224,944 in funding from the National Institutes of Health's Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) small business grant program.39 Further grants and investments for the company came from Y Combinator, Hillsven Capital, SignalFire and Paul Buchheit (inventor of Google’s Gmail).40
But strangely, after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, PreDxion underwent a revision to its history, with the introduction of a brand new flagship product called Refractal.
Instead of their Theranos-like blood testing machine, this new product was specifically focused on testing for COVID-19, alongside flu, strep and RSV “at once, with a single sample.”41 It was during this era of the company that Lee joined on as head of software.
MobileCoin
Lee began advising a cryptocurrency startup called MobileCoin in February 2021, taking on a full time gig as Chief Product Officer (CPO) in November 2021.42
MobileCoin is described as “a cryptocurrency platform that provides anti-fraud services and payment systems for merchants.”43 Its first round of seed funding came from 8 Decimal Capital and INBlockchain,44 the latter of which advertises itself as “the most influential investment group in the Chinese blockchain space,” with its partners being “among the single largest holders of Bitcoin in the world.”45 Its website bears the slogan, "In Blockchain We Trust."
Later rounds of funding brought in investment from Binance Labs, General Catalyst and Future Ventures. Then in August 2021, MobileCoin’s $66 million Series B round of funding brought onboard a number of notable investors including:46
Alameda Research, one half of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX scheme;
Coinbase Ventures;
TIME Ventures, the venture capital firm of Salesforce founder Marc Benioff;
Vy Capital, whose other recent investments include several Elon Musk ventures such as Neuralink, The Boring Company and Twitter.47
MobileCoin’s development was led by the MobileCoin Foundation, whose mission is “to build a trusted and innovative financial network that empowers people and business around the world.”48
In February 2023, MobileCoin announced it was rolling out its own stablecoin pegged to the US dollar called eUSD.49
In the wake of the FTX implosion, the need for proof of reserves has never been greater. Pegged to the US Dollar, eUSD is backed 1:1 by a diversified basket of yield-bearing, trusted stablecoin derivatives utilizing Compound and Aave (aUSDC, cUSDC, aUSDT, cUSDT). eUSD is decentralized, community-governed, and censorship-resistant.
Nevin Freeman, Co-founder of Reserve, shared, "In light of the New York State Department's order for Paxos to stop minting BUSD, exchanges everywhere are scrambling to reshuffle all BUSD trading pairs and functions, which highlights one of the advantages of stablecoins like eUSD that aren't dependent on any one issuer. If any underlying fiat-backed coin included in eUSD's backing has such an issue, it can be rebalanced out via governance without interrupting service for eUSD users at all."
In short, MobileCoin is very much involved in the ongoing transformation of the world’s banking system, tying together many pieces of the puzzle including the collapse of both FTX and Silicon Valley Bank, and the subsequent crackdown on cryptocurrencies and crypto-friendly banks.
Bob Lee’s life and career are notable for many reasons, and his contributions to advancing the cryptocurrency and mobile payments ecosystem are not to be understated. His work on and investments in Internet of Things technology and close relationships to the people and organizations behind Twitter (both Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk) are notable as well.
As of this morning, no arrests have been made. An article in The Independent provided an update from San Francisco police, stating:50
San Francisco police say they are chasing down unspecified leads in the fatal stabbing of Cash App founder Bob Lee as the search for his killer enters day four.
Gruesome details continue to emerge about the murder in an early morning mugging continue to emerge, but authorities do not appear to be anywhere closer to an arrest.
“We have some leads to follow up on,” San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott said Thursday as scrutiny mounts over the investigation. “I can’t disclose what those are now, it’s early on in the investigation. But I’m hopeful and I’m very confident.”
This article is not meant to capture the entirety of who Bob Lee was. I can’t possibly do that, nor do I want anyone walking away thinking this is the most important summary of his life. However, after identifying some of his most prominent accomplishments, I feel we are now better informed as we process further news of what led to his murder.
Rest in peace, Mr. Lee.
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Internet of Things. (2022). Wi-Fi Alliance. https://web.archive.org/web/20230312003323/https://www.wi-fi.org/discover-wi-fi/internet-of-things
McCauley, N., Lee, B., Quigley, O. S. C., Monti, E., & Lewis, M. R. (2019, September 10). Hierarchical data security measures for a mobile device. Google Patents. https://patents.google.com/patent/US10409984B1
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Kilander, G. (2023, April 7). San Francisco police chase leads after Cash App founder Bob Lee stabbed to death. The Independent. http://archive.today/2023.04.07-084910/https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/cash-app-founder-dead-bob-lee-san-francisco-b2315844.html
Indeed better informed we are. A blessing to have you guys shining lights where I never would think nor have the time to look.
Nice synopsis, Liam. Somehow I had missed this news item, and knew little background. Unasked in your piece, of course, is the elephant sitting in the corner: why now? In a world demonstrating little tolerance for innocent coincidence, what motives would rise to require eliminating this man?