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
If you can command a lot of attention, that's what is valuable, and many in the commercial ecology would like to have a piece of that attention.
I woke up nights, worrying that Lotus was out of control - that no one would know what to do.
StumbleUpon has humanized the Web and mastered a way for people to discover online content by incorporating an individual's personal preferences and recommendations of friends and like-minded people.
I'd always wanted to live in San Francisco, and my circumstances never permitted it. I'm so happy I made the move.
Often, the disconnect between the marketing hype around a new product and what the product actually does is astounding.
There's an admirable belief about the virtues of meritocracy - that the best ideas prove the best results. It's a wrong and misguided belief by well-intentioned people.
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.
Startups, in some sense, have gotten so easy to start that we are confusing two things. And what we are confusing, often, is, 'How far can you get in your first day of travel?' with, 'How long it is going to take to get up to the top of the mountain?'
Linden Lab's technological breakthroughs have made 'Second Life' a truly revolutionary experience.
Microsoft represents the best of ourselves or the worst.
I'd been a great angel investor, but professional venture capital was clearly not the right thing for me.
I'm like George Lucas, bringing together a creative team that will come up with a unique, well-crafted product.
If you go back to the '50s and '60s... there was zero tech in S.F. It was all in the Valley... and it crept northward in early 2000s.
It's illegitimate to talk about a post-scarcity Utopia without talking about questions of distribution. There have always been these Utopian predictions - 'electricity too cheap to meter' was the atomic promise of the 1950s.