San Francisco Man Joins Ukraine Battle
SAN FRANCISCO, CA — A San Francisco man who heads a Silicon Valley startup has left the comforts of the Bay Area for the “biggest fight for freedom in my lifetime.”
Dwight Crow told CNN he went to Kyiv as soon as the war broke out.
The UC Berkeley graduate is the co-founder and chairman of the board of Palo Alto-based Whisper, a startup that uses artificial intelligence in the development of hearing aids.
Crow was wearing a military helmet during an interview with CNN’s Clarissa Ward broadcast on Friday.
“When I saw the invasion, I honestly bought a plane ticket and got here as quickly as I could,” Crow said. “This is like the biggest fight for freedom in my lifetime.”
Asked if he’d ever experienced a military conflict before, Crow told Ward, “Not like this.”
“This is a little bit out of my comfort zone,” he told Ward.
“It’s scary, you know, when you hear the bombs going off, but at the same time there’s people a lot closer to it than us and they’re really the ones who are really in harm’s way, we’re just doing our part to get them out of here.”
The former Facebook product manager in 2015 attempted to climb Mount Everest to raise money for the victims of a Nepalese earthquake. He failed to reach the summit, but raised $40,000, TechCrunch reports.
He visited Thame, where more than two thirds of the villages 119 building were destroyed, the report said.
Crow described Thame’s residents in an interview with TechCrunch as “unbelievably stoic.”
“Nobody is sitting there asking for money or aid. There are 70-year-old women spending all day un-piling rocks from their homes.”
Crown was featured in a 2012 Bravo’s “Start-Ups: Silicon Valley,” which depicted him as a stereotypical hard-partying tech bro.
“Wild, crazy and absolutely brilliant, Dwight Crow is a programming savant,” the program’s website said of Crow.
“When he’s not intensely coding next to his tenth cup of coffee, he’s out partying with his hacker buddies and solving complex algorithms while playing beer pong.”
