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Mitch Kapor | |
---|---|
Born | Mitchell David Kapor November 1, 1950 Brooklyn, New York, U.S. |
Education | Yale University (BA) Beacon College of Boston (MS) MIT Sloan School of Management |
Occupation | Entrepreneur |
Known for | Lotus 1-2-3 and co-founder of The Electronic Frontier Foundation |
Spouse(s) | Ellen M. Poss (divorced) Freada Kapor Klein |
Children | 2 |
Mitchell David Kapor ( /ˈkeɪpɔːr/ KAY-por; born November 1, 1950 [1] [2] ) is an American entrepreneur best known for his work as an application developer in the early days of the personal computer software industry, 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. In 2003, he became the founding chair of the Mozilla Foundation, creator of the open source web browser Firefox. Kapor has been an investor in the personal computing industry, and supporter of social causes via Kapor Capital [3] and the Kapor Center. [4] He serves on the board of SMASH, [5] a non-profit founded by his wife, Freada Kapor Klein, to help underrepresented scholars hone their STEM knowledge while building personal networks and skills for careers in tech and the sciences. [6] [7] [8]
Kapor was born to a Jewish family [9] in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Freeport, New York on Long Island, where he graduated from high school in 1967. [1] He received a B.A. from Yale College in 1971 and studied psychology, linguistics, and computer science in an interdisciplinary major, also attending the Boston-based Beacon College, which had a satellite campus in Washington, D.C. at the time. He began but did not complete a master's degree at the MIT Sloan School of Management but later served on the faculty of the MIT Media Lab and the University of California, Berkeley School of Information.
Kapor and his business partner Jonathan Sachs founded Lotus in 1982 with backing from Ben Rosen. Lotus' first product was presentation software for the Apple II known as Lotus Executive Briefing System. Kapor founded Lotus after leaving his post as head of development at VisiCorp, the distributors of the VisiCalc spreadsheet, and selling all his rights to VisiPlot and VisiTrend to VisiCorp.
Shortly after Kapor left VisiCorp, he and Sachs produced an integrated spreadsheet and graphics program. Even though IBM and VisiCorp had a collaboration agreement whereby VisiCalc was being shipped simultaneously with the PC, Lotus had a clearly superior product. Lotus released Lotus 1-2-3 on January 26, 1983. Its name referred to the three ways the product could be used: as a spreadsheet, graphics package, and database manager. In practice, the latter two functions were less often used, but 1-2-3 was the most powerful spreadsheet program available.
Lotus was almost immediately successful, becoming the world's third-largest microcomputer software company in 1983 with $53 million in sales in its first year, [10] compared to its business plan forecast of $1 million. Jerome Want says:
Kapor co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1990 and was its chairman until 1994. EFF defends civil liberties in the digital world and works to ensure that rights and freedoms are enhanced and protected as the use of technology grows. [12] [13] [14] [15]
Kapor was the founding investor in UUNET, one of the first, and the largest among, early Internet service providers; in RealNetworks, the Internet's first streaming media company; and in Linden Lab, maker of the first successful virtual world, Second Life . He was also founding chair of the Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX).
In 2003, he became the founding chair of the Mozilla Foundation, creator of the open source web browser Firefox.
He serves on the advisory board of the Sunlight Foundation. [17] In May 2009, after founder Susan P. Crawford joined the Obama administration, Kapor took over chairmanship of OneWebDay—the "Earth Day for the internet". In 1996, the Computer History Museum named him a Museum Fellow "for his development of Lotus 1-2-3, the first major software application for the IBM PC". [18] He founded the Mitchell Kapor Foundation to support his philanthropic interests in environmental health.
As an active angel investor, Kapor participated in the initial rounds of Dropcam, Twilio, Asana, Cleanify and Uber.
Kapor founded the Kapor Center in 2000 as an institution focused on tech inclusion and social impact. [19] The institution's mission is to invest in social and financial capital in vital non-profit organizations. [20]
A part of the Kapor Center, Kapor Capital is its venture capital arm, [21] and has operated since 2011. [22] As of 2018, it has made over 160 investments, primarily in information technology seed-stage startups, with a particular focus on diversity. [23]
Since 2016, the Kapor Center for Social Impact, Kapor Capital, and SMASH have been located in the Uptown neighborhood of Oakland, CA. [24]
In August 2015, Mitch and Freada Kapor announced they would invest $40 million over three years to accelerate their work to make the tech ecosystem more inclusive. [25] [6] [7] [26]
In addition to his roles at Kapor Capital and Kapor Center, Mitch currently serves on the board of SMASH, whose mission is to enhance equal opportunity in education and the workplace, and sits on the advisory board of Generation Investment Management, a firm whose vision is to embed sustainability into the mainstream capital markets. [27] [28]
Kapor is married to Freada Kapor Klein and resides in Oakland and Healdsburg, California. [29] Both served on the board of trustees of the Summer Science Program from 2004 to 2006. He was a student of the program in 1966. [30]
Robert M. Frankston is an American software engineer and businessman who co-created, with Dan Bricklin, the VisiCalc spreadsheet program. Frankston is also the co-founder of Software Arts.
Daniel Singer Bricklin is an American businessman and engineer who is the co-creator, with Bob Frankston, of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program. He also founded Software Garden, Inc., of which he is currently president, and Trellix, which he left in 2004. He currently serves as the chief technology officer of Alpha Software.
Lotus 1-2-3 is a discontinued spreadsheet program from Lotus Software. It was the first killer application of the IBM PC, was hugely popular in the 1980s, and significantly contributed to the success of IBM PC-compatibles in the business market.
VisiCalc is the first spreadsheet computer program for personal computers, originally released for the Apple II by VisiCorp on October 17, 1979. It is considered the killer application for the Apple II, turning the microcomputer from a hobby for computer enthusiasts into a serious business tool, and then prompting IBM to introduce the IBM PC two years later. More than 700,000 copies were sold in six years, and up to 1 million copies over its history.
Lotus Improv is a discontinued spreadsheet program from Lotus Development released in 1991 for the NeXTSTEP platform and then for Windows 3.1 in 1993. Development was put on hiatus in 1994 after slow sales on the Windows platform, and officially ended in April 1996 after Lotus was purchased by IBM.
Lotus Software was an American software company based in Massachusetts; it was sold to India's HCL Technologies in 2018.
Raymond "Ray" Ozzie is an American software industry entrepreneur who held the positions of Chief Technical Officer and Chief Software Architect at Microsoft between 2005 and 2010. Before Microsoft, he was best known for his role in creating Lotus Notes.
Brian Behlendorf is an American technologist, executive, computer programmer and leading figure in the open-source software movement. He was a primary developer of the Apache Web server, the most popular web server software on the Internet, and a founding member of the Apache Group, which later became the Apache Software Foundation. Behlendorf served as president of the foundation for three years. He has served on the board of the Mozilla Foundation since 2003, Benetech since 2009, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation since 2013. Behlendorf served as the General Manager of the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) from 2021-2023 and is currently the Chief Technology Officer of the OpenSSF.
Brad Templeton is a Canadian software developer, internet entrepreneur, online community pioneer, publisher of news, comedy, science fiction and e-books, writer, photographer, civil rights advocate, futurist, public speaker, educator and self-driving car consultant. He graduated from the University of Waterloo.
Visi On is a graphical user interface (GUI)-based operating environment program for IBM compatible personal computers running MS-DOS. Visi On was developed by VisiCorp. It was one of the first GUIs on a personal computer. Visi On was never popular, as it had steep minimum system requirements for its day, but it was influential in the development of later GUIs like Microsoft Windows.
VisiCorp was an early personal computer software publisher. Its most famous products were Microchess, Visi On and VisiCalc.
Freada Kapor Klein is an American venture capitalist, social policy researcher and philanthropist. As a partner at Kapor Capital and the Kapor Center for Social Impact, she is known for efforts to diversify the technology workforce through activism and investments. Her 2007 book Giving Notice: Why the Best and the Brightest Leave the Workplace and How You Can Help Them Stay examines the reasons people have for leaving corporate America as well as the human and financial cost.
Data Interchange Format (.dif) is a text file format used to import/export single spreadsheets between spreadsheet programs.
Sevin Rosen Funds (SRF) is a Texas-based venture capital firm credited with pioneering the personal computing revolution in the 1980s and also venture investing in Dallas. It was established in 1981 by L. J. Sevin, a former Texas Instruments engineer, and Ben Rosen, and was one of the leading investors on the US West Coast.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. It was founded in 1990 to promote Internet civil liberties.
Edward M. Esber, Jr. is semi-retired in Park City, Utah. Ed spends his time helping the State of Utah, Utah Law enforcement and the Silicon Slopes entrepreneur community in Utah.
Sorcim Corporation was an early start-up company in Silicon Valley, founded in June 1980 by Richard Frank, Paul McQuesten, Martin Herbach, Anil Lakhwara, and Steve Jasik - all former Control Data Corporation employees working in the Language Group in Sunnyvale, CA. Jasik left company early on, to develop the MacNosy product for the Macintosh.
Concentric Data Systems, Inc. was founded in December 1979 by John J. Henderson and Jonathan Sachs, both having left their jobs as system programmers at Data General Corporation. Originally, the company undertook a variety of software consulting projects for the Data General line of computers. In 1981, the company developed a spreadsheet product, CompuCalc, that ran on Data General hardware and was modeled after VisiCalc.
Jonathan Rotenberg is an executive coach, management consultant, and author. In 1977, he cofounded The Boston Computer Society, which became the world's largest personal computer user organization. He is currently writing a book about what he learned from his early mentor, Apple founder Steve Jobs.
Samuel Jerrold "Jerry" Kaplan is an American computer scientist, author, futurist, and entrepreneur. He is best known as a pioneer in the field of pen computing and tablet computers. He is the founder of numerous companies, including GO Corporation, whose technology was used to develop the first smartphone and tablet PC. Kaplan is the co-founder of OnSale, the first B2C online auction site launched in 1994, five months prior to eBay. He is a recipient of the 1998 Ernst & Young Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year Award and author of the best-selling book Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure. He has been featured in major news publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Red Herring, and Bloomberg Businessweek. Kaplan is also the author of the 2015 book Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Additional companies he has co-founded include artificial intelligence company Teknowledge, Inc. and social game website Winster.com. Kaplan was briefly a Fellow at the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics.
Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corporation, made the trip on his own time.