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
There are excellent public interest grounds to have a search engine whose rankings are transparent.
We have a responsibility to give people opportunities to do what they can do. It's a fundamental tenet of democratic society. Libertarians who believe in a completely minimalist state, and don't feel we have that responsibility, are harming humanity.
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?'
If advertisers want to decorate their ads to increase their conversions by showing what users think, that's a good thing.
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.
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.
I'm fascinated by management and organizations: how organizations get things done and how successful organizations are built and maintained, how they evolve as they grow from start-ups to small companies to medium companies to big companies.
People are hungry for community. They're hungry for meaning in a society that is oriented around the production and consumption of consumer goods.
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.