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
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.
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.
One of the perks of being the founder is that you get to build the company in your image.
For people who know both New York and the Bay Area, it is a complement to say that Oakland is San Francisco's Brooklyn. It's a complement both to Oakland and to Brooklyn. And, if you look at Brooklyn, Brooklyn is hot; Brooklyn is cool.
The culmination of all of that was the decision to start a company, which became Lotus, to do a product, which became 1-2-3. By the time I reached that point it had been four years, and it felt like a lifetime, but really it was kind of evolutionary.
Hackers are seen as shadowy figures with superhuman powers that threaten civilization.
I'm an inveterate note taker - I scribble all these things down on pieces of paper. I wanted to create some way of organizing all of them.
The main languages out of which web applications are built - whether it's Perl or Python or PHP or any of the other languages - those are all open source languages. So the infrastructure of the web is open source... the web as we know it is completely dependent on open source.
Successful entrepreneurs develop products that inspire their passion. They have to. It's that passion that gets them through the long, arduous, uncertain and frightening early days of a start-up.
Physicians today, as human beings, are not exempt from the perverse economic pressures created by fee-for-service regimes to see more patients for shorter appointments and order more tests and procedures. If the incentives were changed to pay to foster better health outcomes, I am convinced physician behavior would change over time.
I've been around long enough to know that empires come and empires go, and I can't tell how long the Google empire is going to last - but I'm pretty convinced that the answer is less than forever.