Kevin Rose, Google Ventures partner and co-founder of Digg. Photo via Wikimedia Commons
Protesters waved signs and handed out leaflets outside the San Francisco, California, home of Kevin Rose, a partner with Google Ventures and founder of news aggregator Digg, deeming him a ‘leech’ and ‘parasite’ yesterday.
The leaflets said Rose accelerates the growth of tech wealth in the city by investing in start-ups, which then displaces service workers, and demanded internet search giant Google spend US$3bn on relieving the region’s housing crisis.
“With the success of each start-up, more and more ambitious tech-workers flock to the city and displace underemployed service workers to the cities at the far reaches of the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) line,” SFGate reported the leaflet as stating.
“These workers must then commute back to San Francisco or Oakland every morning, in most cases to perform menial tasks for the entitled scum who drove them out in the first place.”
Google Ventures is Google’s venture-capital investment arm.
“As a partner venture capitalist at Google Ventures, Kevin directs the flow of capital from Google into the tech start-up bubble that is destroying San Francisco,” the leaflet said. “The start-ups that he funds bring the swarms of young entrepreneurs that have ravaged the landscapes of San Francisco and Oakland.”
Rose acknowledged the protest in a post on Instagram, where he shared a photo of one of the leaflets.
“My house was protested today by anti-tech folks, they had a large banner saying ‘Kevin Rose Parasite’, handed these to my neighbours,” Rose wrote.
The protester group also demanded Google give US$3bn to an anarchist organisation of its choosing.
“This money will then be used to create autonomous, anti-capitalist, and anti-racist communities throughout the Bay Area and Northern California,” the group called Counterforce wrote in an online post.
“In these communities, whether in San Francisco or in the woods, no one will ever have to pay rent and housing will be free.”
