San Francisco tech community mourns Ed Lee, an unlikely City Hall ally

Mayor Ed Lee once admitted he didn’t know how to work his Apple Watch, but his desire to learn more about technology led him to become an outspoken voice for the city’s burgeoning startups and to step up on local and national stages to address tech issues ranging from Airbnb to drones.

With Lee’s sudden death Tuesday morning, a city full of fledgling startups and major tech companies no longer has a political leader who often sat on stage at tech conferences with far more famous CEOs — or stepped aside at community events to talk to a young, scrappy entrepreneur hoping to found a new business in the city.

Lee fostered a city where entrepreneurs from around the world dream of starting their businesses. Though that influx of wealth came with its own issues — crowded streets, steep housing prices, pervasive homelessness — Lee strove to balance his role as an advocate for the industry with his background as a community activist.

He became mayor in 2011 “at a key time when we were emerging from the recession and he signaled to the tech community that they had a place in San Francisco,” said Jim Wunderman, president and CEO of the Bay Area Council, a business advocacy group.

“He asked me questions about why startups would want to locate to San Francisco, and how we were involved in the community,” Sasha Orloff, founder of startup LendUp, recalled of an encounter with Lee in 2012. “It was very collaborative. You could tell he very much cared about wanting to attract people to the city (who) would also have involvement and engagement in the city.”

Lee was one of the longest-serving mayors in San Francisco, overseeing a period of unprecedented growth. He was strongly supported by the tech community — including the likes of angel investor Ron Conway, who founded sf.citi and saw Lee as a key political ally.

“He cared so deeply about the city and its people, about jobs and opportunity for young people,” Conway wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “Every time I saw Ed, I always asked him, ‘How’s the greatest mayor in America?’ ”

In an attempt to lure startups to San Francisco and keep them from fleeing to the Peninsula or South Bay, Lee created a tax incentive program for large companies in 2012.

This program — dubbed the “Twitter tax break” — was championed by the tech community, as it helped companies avoid millions in city taxes that would otherwise have been levied on their stock options. The program also drew ire from his critics who said the breaks pandered to venture-backed startups at the expense of small businesses and city residents.

But when startup founders like Jiyan Wei of BuildZoom went to the mayor’s office for help, they said they were well taken care of. Wei said his company is currently in a legal fight with another city office and recently asked the mayor’s office for help.

Lee’s director of business development pointed out that “the mayor’s office was trying to cultivate an environment that was friendly to entrepreneurs,” Wei said. “From a company’s perspective who has made a decision to pay high square-footage costs in San Francisco, that meant a lot.”

Lee did not always see eye to eye with technologists. Serving on the Federal Aviation Administration’s Drone Advisory Committee, Lee advocated for giving local cities control over their airspace. He sent a letter Nov. 8 to committee Chairman Brian Krzanich, who is also CEO of Intel, blasting the group for a “lack of transparency and poor management” and for recommending policies that favored the drone industry over local governments and the public.

As news broke of Lee’s death early Tuesday, well-known entrepreneurs and investors were quick to mourn the loss.

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, said in a tweet that Lee was one of the “nicest and kindest leaders” he has ever known, recalling a lunch he had with him where he asked Salesforce to focus on improving public schools.

When Lee visited PayPal co-founder Max Levchin’s new company, Affirm, in 2015, the employees had a lot of questions: How can we get more housing? What about the public schools? What about homelessness?

He didn’t have all the answers, he said during an interview with Fox Business, where he sat in a suit and tie next to Levchin, who wore a hoodie.

Levchin told The Chronicle Tuesday that he remembered Lee as being “inquisitive and curious” about what he could do to better employees’ lives. While PayPal was founded in Palo Alto, Levchin started his next two companies in San Francisco.

Political and business leaders said whoever succeeds Lee as mayor — whether it’s London Breed, now acting mayor, or hopefuls like Mark Leno or David Chiu — needs to show the same curiosity and interest in learning about the tech scene.

“Even though the people in City Hall have varying views about this or that technology issue, I do believe there’s a very broad consensus that it is a good thing that San Francisco is the innovation capital of the world, and it is in our interests in keeping that status,” said state Sen. Scott Wiener, a former city supervisor. “You can’t be mayor of San Francisco and ignore the technology sector.”

Lee wrestled with tech shuttle buses that clogged neighborhood streets. The rise of ride-hailing and homes-as-hotels — trends that birthed highly valued San Francisco startups like Uber, Lyft and Airbnb, but also raised important regulatory questions for their hometown — came on his watch. Recently, he was also working on a plan to create neighborhood drop-off points for Uber and Lyft, and pursuing an ambitious initiative to build a citywide municipal Internet network with Supervisor Mark Farrell.

Wiener said Lee probably wasn’t as immersed in tech before becoming mayor, but like Lee, his successor will have to become just as passionate.

“If you’re not already passionate about innovation, there’s no faster way than to become mayor of San Francisco,” he said.