| Mitch Kapor | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1950 Brooklyn, New York, USA |
| Known for | Lotus 1-2-3 and co-founder of The Electronic Frontier Foundation |
Mitchell David Kapor (born in 1950)[1] is the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3.[2][1] He is also a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and was the first chair of the Mozilla Foundation.[1] He has been involved in a number of other Internet-oriented organizations.
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Kapor was born in Brooklyn, New York, and attended public schools on Long Island in Freeport, New York,[1] where he graduated from high school in 1967.[1] In 1966, he studied astronomy at the Summer Science Program. He received a Bachelor of Arts from Yale University in 1971 and studied psychology, linguistics and computer science as part of an interdisciplinary major in cybernetics.[1] Kapor served as Music Director and Program Director at Yale's radio station WYBC-FM.
During the 1970s, Kapor was employed as a radio disc jockey at WHCN-FM, a commercial progressive rock station based in Hartford, Connecticut. It was also in this period that he became interested in Transcendental Meditation, going on to teach the philosophy in Cambridge, Massachusetts (where he also worked as a low-level computer programmer) and Fairfield, Iowa. In 1978, he graduated with a master's degree in psychology from Campus-Free College (later renamed Beacon College) in Boston.[3] Kapor subsequently began a career as a mental health counselor at New England Memorial Hospital in Stoneham, Massachusetts.[1]
In 1980, Kapor left his counseling career to attend the Master's of Science in Management program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, but did not graduate.[3]
Kapor founded Lotus Development Corporation in 1982 with Jonathan Sachs, who was responsible for technical architecture and implementation, and created Lotus 1-2-3. Kapor 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.
Lotus' first product was presentation software for the Apple II known as Lotus Executive Briefing System. Kapor founded Lotus after working as head of development at VisiCorp (the marketers of VisiCalc) and selling the rights to his products VisiPlot and VisiTrend to VisiCorp.
Shortly after Kapor left VisiCorp, Sachs and he designed and developed an integrated spreadsheet and graphing program. Even though IBM and VisiCorp collaborated on VisiCalc for the PC and VisiCalc shipped simultaneously with the PC, Lotus had a superior product. Lotus released Lotus 1-2-3 in January 1983. The name referred to the three ways the product could be used: as a spreadsheet, a graphics package, and a database manager. The last function was seldom used. 1-2-3 was the most powerful spreadsheet available in the new PC-compatible market; sales were enormous, turning Lotus into the largest independent software vendor in the world almost overnight. The business plan had called for $1,000,000 in sales in the first year, but the actual results were $53,000,000.
Kapor was also the fundamental architect of the "free-form" database application, Lotus Agenda.
In October 1984 Jim Manzi was named President, and in April 1986 he was named as CEO, succeeding Kapor, who had become inactive in the company.
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.
Mitch Kapor was a founding investor in UUNET Technologies, one of the earliest commercial Internet service providers.[4]
Kapor was the Chair of the Mozilla Foundation at 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 was the original Chair and is currently on the Board of Directors of Linden Lab, a San Francisco-based company which created the popular virtual world Second Life, and a member of the Advisory Board for the Wikimedia Foundation.[5]
Kapor serves on the advisory board of the Sunlight Foundation.[6]
In May 2009, after founder Susan P. Crawford had joined the Obama administration, Kapor took over chairmanship of OneWebDay - the "Earth Day for the internet".[7]
In 1990, Kapor's new company ON Technology introduced their new product On Location, an application designed for the Macintosh that contained an indexing system that permit quick retrieval and display of text on the Mac's hard disk.[8] "We think we're being cagey by bringing it out on the Mac first," Kapor said.[8] "It's a richer medium than MS-DOS, and if we have a hot product in the Mac market, it will be easier to get into the PC market."[8]
In 2001, Kapor founded the Open Source Applications Foundation, where he worked on Chandler Project. His involvement with the Foundation and Project ended in 2008.
In 2006, Kapor founded his latest startup, Foxmarks (later renamed as Xmarks), based in San Francisco.
He is married to Freada Kapor Klein and resides in San Francisco. 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. He is allergic to cats[9] and gluten.