Mitch Kapor
Mitch Kapor
Mitchell David Kapor, born November 1, 1950, is an entrepreneur best known for promoting the first spreadsheet VisiCalc, and later founding Lotus, where he was instrumental in developing the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet. He left Lotus in 1986. In 1990 with John Perry Barlow and John Gilmore, he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and served as its chairman until 1994. Kapor has been an investor in the personal computing industry, and supporter of social causes, like the Hidden Genius Project, The...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBusinessman
Date of Birth1 November 1950
CountryUnited States of America
I woke up nights, worrying that Lotus was out of control - that no one would know what to do.
I tell people that the history of Mozilla and Firefox is so one of a kind that it should not be used - ever - as an example of what's possible.
Managerial and professional people hadn't really used computers, hadn't sat down at keyboards, until personal computers. Personal computers have a totally different feel.
Today, in the Internet gold rush, so many people go into dot-com jobs right from school or even before finishing. Their motivation is understandable, but sometimes they just lack experience.
If only I'd stayed on the West Coast, I might have made something of myself.
From 1978 when I bought my Apple II, for the next four years I just threw myself into PCs, and did lots of things - I had a little consulting practice, I formed an Apple users group in the New England area which was, of course, the first one on the East Coast, and I started a tiny cottage software business doing a statistics and graphics package for the Apple II.
Fundly is at the dynamic intersection of high-growth technology startups, social entrepreneurship, and the exploding world of social media. Kapor Capital is proud to back this passionate team, their product, and Fundly's impressive customer base.
If advertisers want to decorate their ads to increase their conversions by showing what users think, that's a good thing.
I don't think Silicon Valley understands the power of Wikipedia, how it works, or the opportunities it represents.
I'd been a great angel investor, but professional venture capital was clearly not the right thing for me.
I'd always wanted to live in San Francisco, and my circumstances never permitted it. I'm so happy I made the move.
I'd acutely felt the lack of a product that I really loved, but there was a tremendous lack of commercial opportunity to start software ventures around these ideas, given the industry's structure, and I did a lot of thinking about how things might be put together, learned a lot about open source, made a pilgrimage to go see Linus, and tried to educate myself.
Bulletin boards are sort of the garage bands of cyberspace.
If we're not creating an educated and skilled workforce, there is just no conceivable way that were going to be economically competitive.