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.
In an economy where more and more value is in information - is in the bits, not the atoms, where bits can be copied essentially for free - any time you have that situation, economic schemes that rely on existing models of intellectual property laws for protection are going to do less and less well.
Old ways of thinking die hard, particularly when they were weaned by legally enforced monopolies.
The accomplishment of open source is that it is the back end of the web, the invisible part, the part that you don't see as a user.
Technology advances at exponential rates, and human institutions and societies do not. They adapt at much slower rates. Those gaps get wider and wider.
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.
One of the perks of being the founder is that you get to build the company in your image.
We are living in an era of anxiety produced by computer and communications technology.
There are a lot of similarities between cyberspace and the frontier. It's pretty raw and primitive. I mean, you have to churn your own butter in cyberspace. You can't go down to the 7-Eleven and buy a stick of butter because it's not that well developed.