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
On a personal note, I was born in Brooklyn. My folks moved out to Long Island when I was quite young, but once a Brooklynite, always a Brooklynite.
'Silicon Valley' has come to mean the Bay Area, not just down the Peninsula.
My history is to find the next big thing early.
Oakland's time is coming. In fact, Oakland's time is already here. Tech is coming to Oakland, and it's terribly exciting.
Life in cyberspace is often conducted in primitive frontier conditions, but it is a life which, at its best, is more egalitarian than elitist and more decentralized than hierarchical. It serves individuals and communities, not mass audiences, and it is extraordinarily multi-faceted in the purposes to which it is put.
I give Bill Gates an A for vision because, as a business person and a strategist, he's brilliant. His flaw is that his view is not informed by a humanistic or compassionate vision of how to make computers work for people.
The organizational design for OSAF came about as a result of thinking about how to create an organization that could make these products and bring them into the world and help start something in which they could thrive in the long term.
You can't be in the tech community... without realizing there's a big shortage of talent.
When regulations restricting competition are relaxed, nobody's market share is protected. If telephone companies can offer video programming, cable revenue will surely drop.
When new technology in the classroom starts happening, some people get very excited and think of it as a panacea. It attracts very high amounts of money; it raises expectations, and those expectations aren't met.
Few industries have the ability to transform society like tech, yet too few companies are asking the questions or working on the problems that would create meaningful social change.
Failing to continue to support the public higher-ed system in California will have devastating long-term consequences.
Both VisiCalc and MultiPlan were available when the IBM PC shipped in October 1981. 1-2-3 didn't hit the market until January 1983.
Oh no, this was before that, I was already in my 20s by the time the 6502 came out. This was all transistor flip-flops. It was a gated adder with a rotary telephone dial as the primary input device.