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Other authors named Mitch:
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Author's popularity: -2
Vote:  
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Popularity: 6
Vote: | Chandler is MORE than enough; in fact, the main problem organizationally is to keep a resolute focus on doing an initial version that has enough to get people terribly excited, but not more than that. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | From 1978 when I bought my Apple II, for the next four years I just threw myself into PCs, and did lots of things - I had a little consulting practice, I formed an Apple users group in the New England area which was, of course, the first one on the East Coast, and I started a tiny cottage software business doing a statistics and graphics package for the Apple II. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | I actually built a tiny computer as a junior high school project. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I was trying to figure out what to do next, I'd been accumulating ideas for productivity tools - software people could use every day, particularly to help organize their lives. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | No, my family is Russian, Georgian, via Ellis Island. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Oh no, this was before that, I was already in my 20s by the time the 6502 came out. This was all transistor flip-flops. It was a gated adder with a rotary telephone dial as the primary input device. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | OSAF came about as a provisional solution to a number of considerations revolving around, "What do I do next?" This is in 2001, so I had moved to California and spent some time at the tail-end of the boom - really the dot-com bust - being a venture capitalist. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | That's why it has to be a nonprofit, because a nonprofit is required to take monies it receives and use them for the purposes for which it's chartered by the government. It can't be pocketed. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | The culmination of all of that was the decision to start a company, which became Lotus, to do a product, which became 1-2-3. By the time I reached that point it had been four years, and it felt like a lifetime, but really it was kind of evolutionary. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | The organizational design for OSAF came about as a result of thinking about how to create an organization that could make these products and bring them into the world and help start something in which they could thrive in the long term. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | We've already gotten a significant grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and a university consortium. I think the whole sector of Foundations, potentially with government support, is promising - more than promising, I think, it's substantial. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Well, I had a lot of help from my father with the soldering and so on, and he was very good at math and was fascinated with computers, and so I was fortunate enough to have a bunch of exposure going all the way back to high school - this was in the 1960s. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Well, I was fortunate enough to be able to self-fund to start, but I had no intention of self-funding forever, and so I needed a model that would be sustainable. |
Popularity: 9
Vote: | Well, there's no such thing as "non-funded." Any organization gets some money, and the challenge is sustainability. |
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Biography
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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 in Freeport, Long Island, 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 M.B.A. program at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
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, which may compete with Microsoft Outlook.
Kapor has been the Chair of the Mozilla Foundation since its inception in 2003.
Kapor is married and lives in San Francisco.
External links
* Mitch Kapor's weblog
* Inside Mitch Kapor's World
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Mitch Kapor".
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