In the shadow of Apple and Google, Silicon Valley’s forgotten poor find an unlikely hero

A tech boss’s Facebook assault on the homeless sparked outrage. Amid growing unease about inequality in the US, Greg Gopman says he has changed his mind

Greg Gopman once branded San Francisco’s homeless as “degenerates”, “trash” and “hyenas”, a tirade that personified Silicon Valley’s perceived callousness to the less fortunate, but as dusk seeped across the city last week – and the sidewalk-dwellers who so angered him huddled deeper into blankets, braced for another cold night – Gopman had a new message. “I want to help.”

The founder of a startup which organises hackathons for the technology industry, Gopman spoke from an armchair on the top floor of the San Francisco tennis club, a beachhead of privilege in San Francisco’s gentrifying Mission District. But his thoughts, he said, were with those outside in ragged encampments of cardboard and tarpaulin, pockets of Dickensian squalor in one of America’s richest cities.

I’m back, asking for a second chance and hoping to help start a civic conversation about what we can all do

Related: San Francisco's guerrilla protest at Google buses swells into revolt

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