Mitch Kapor
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Mitch Kapor (center) with Bill Gates and Fred Gibbons, while developing applications for the Apple Macintosh, 1984 |
Mitchell David Kapor (born
1950) is the founder of
Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of
Lotus 1-2-3, the "
killer application" often credited with making the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980s. He has been at the forefront of the information technology revolution for a generation as an entrepreneur, investor, social activist, and philanthropist.
Kapor was born in
Brooklyn, New York and attended public schools on Long Island in
Freeport, New York, where he graduated from high school in 1967. He received a B.A. from
Yale College in
1971 and studied psychology, linguistics, and computer science as part of an interdisciplinary major in
Cybernetics. He was greatly involved with Yale's radio station, WYBC-FM, where he served as Music Director and Program Director. He went on to attend the
Master's degree in Management (M.B.A.) program at the
MIT Sloan School of Management but did not graduate.
He founded Lotus Development Corp. in 1982 and with
Jonathan Sachs, who was responsible for technical architecture and implementation, created Lotus 1-2-3. He served as the President (later Chairman) and Chief Executive Officer of Lotus from
1982 to
1986 and as a Director until
1987. In
1983, Lotus' first year of operations, the company achieved revenues of $53,000,000 and had a successful public offering. In 1984 the company tripled in revenue to $156,000,000. The number of employees grew to over a thousand by
1985.
In
1990 with fellow digital rights activists
John Perry Barlow and
John Gilmore, he co-founded the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, and served as its chairman until
1994. The EFF is a non-profit civil liberties organization working in the public interest to protect privacy, free expression, and access to public resources and information online, as well as to promote responsibility in new media.
In
2001 Kapor founded the
Open Source Applications Foundation, where he is now working on a modern personal information manager using open source tools and methods. The group is working on
Chandler.
Kapor has been the Chair of the
Mozilla Foundation since its inception in
2003. He founded the Mitchell Kapor Foundation to support his philanthropic interests in environmental health. He also co-founded and is on the board of the Level Playing Field Institute, a 501c(3) dedicated to fairness in education and workplaces. Kapor is also Chair of the Board of Directors of
Linden Lab, a
San Francisco-based company which created the popular virtual world
Second Life.
Kapor is an Adjunct Professor at the School of Information at U.C. Berkeley.
He is married to
Freada Kapor Klein and lives in San Francisco.
*
Massively distributed collaboration*
OSAF community weblog *
Mitch Kapor's blog*
Mitch Kapor's weblog archives*
Inside Mitch Kapor's World*
Level Playing Field Institute*
Mitch Kapor's Why Wikipedia is the next big thing*
Wikimania 2006 bio
