Mitchell Kapor: Biography

Mitchell Kapor: Biography

BIO

Mitchell Kapor, 58, is a pioneer of the personal computing revolution and has been at the forefront of information technology for 30 years as an entrepreneur, software designer, angel investor, and activist. He is widely known as founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the "killer application" which made the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980s.

Other organizations in which Mr. Kapor has played an important role include UUNET (founding investor), the first successful independent commercial Internet Service Provider; the Electronic Frontier Foundation (co-founder), which protects freedom and privacy on the Internet; Real Networks (founding investor), which pioneered the use of streaming media over the Internet; the Mozilla Foundation(founding Chair), maker of the open source web browser Firefox; and Linden Research(founding investor, Board Chair), the creator of the first successful open virtual world,Second Life.

Mr. Kapor was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1950 and graduated from Freeport (Long Island) 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. As an undergraduate, he served as Music Director and Program Director for the Yale radio station, WYBC-FM.

Following graduation, Mr. Kapor worked as a disc jockey at WHCN-FM, a commercial progressive rock station in Hartford, Connecticut; became a teacher of Transcendental Meditation and taught TM in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Fairfield, Iowa; and worked as a computer programmer in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In 1978, he received a Master's degree in counseling psychology from Campus-Free College (later renamed Beacon College) in Boston and worked as a mental health counselor at New England Memorial Hospital in Stoneham, Massachusetts. He also attended the Sloan School of Management at MIT, taking a leave of absence one term short of graduation in 1980 in order to take a job in a Silicon Valley start-up company.

In 1978 he bought an Apple II personal computer and worked as an independent software consultant; as the co-developer of Tiny Troll, the first graphics and statistics program for the Apple II; as a product manager for Personal Software Inc., the publisher of VisiCalc, the world's first electronic spreadsheet; and as the designer and programmer (in BASIC) of VisiPlot and VisiTrend, companion products to VisiCalc.

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 1300 employees by 1985.

From 1984 until its dissolution in 1998, Mr. Kapor served as a trustee of the Kapor Family Foundation.

After leaving executive management at Lotus, he spent 1986 and 1987 completing work on his favorite product, Lotus Agenda, the first application for Personal Information Management (PIM), and as a visiting scientist at MIT's Center for Cognitive Science and the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. From 1987-1990 Mr. Kapor served as the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of ON Technology, a developer of software applications for workgroup computing.

In 1990 with 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 1992 and 1993 he chaired the Massachusetts Commission on Computer Technology and Law which was chartered to investigate and report on issues raised by the problem of computer crime in the state. He also served as a member of the Computer Science and Technology Board of the National Research Council and the National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council. From 1994-1996, he served as Adjunct Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab where he taught courses on software design, Democracy and the Internet, and digital community.

In 1997, he created and endowed the Mitchell Kapor Foundation, a private foundation works to ensure fairness and equity, particularly for low-income communities of color. Areas of focus for the foundation include responses to the global climate crisis, protecting the integrity of the electoral process, and affording greater access to college education for young African-american males.

From 1999 to 2001, Mr. Kapor was a partner at Accel Partners, a venture capital firm based in Palo Alto, California.

In 2001 he founded the Open Source Applications Foundation to promote the development and acceptance of high-quality application software developed and distributed using open source methods.

In 2003 he became the founding Chair of the Mozilla Foundation, which is dedicated to the development and promulgation of standards-compliant open source web browser software. He now serves as a Board member of the Mozilla Foundation.

From 2005 to 2009 he was on the faculty of the Information School at the University of California, Berkeley, as Lecturer (2005-2006) and Adjunct Professor (2006-2009) where he co-taught "Open Source Development and Distribution of Information".

Since 2001, Mr. Kapor has been a trustee of the Level Playing Field Institute, which promotes innovative approaches to fairness in higher education and workplaces by removing barriers to full participation. LPFI's education programs, which are centered around the University of California at Berkeley serve more than 150 underrepresented high school and undergraduate students of color from the Bay Area.

In 2006, Mr. Kapor founded Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks). He served as its CEO through 2008 and is now Chair. Xmarks is the leading bookmark synchronization add-on for web browsers and uncovers the best sites chosen by millions of users syncing nearly a billion bookmarks.

In 2009 Mr. Kapor became the Board Chair of the non-profit OneWebDay, an organization which sponsors an annual, global volunteer-driven day on September 22 modeled after Earth Day to celebrate and protect what's most valuable about the Internet and the World Wide Web.

Mr. Kapor is currently active as an angel investor with some 20 investments (includingbitly, Get Satisfaction, Sprout, EtherPad, Twilio, CubeTree, Dapper, Wikia, and Federated Media) in seed stage startup companies developing disruptive Internet and mobile innovations. He serves on the Boards of ePals (the Internet's largest global community of connected classrooms), Discoverio (maker of Mr. Tweet, people discovery service for Twitter), and Headroom (maker of TuneIn, visual media dashboard for Twitter).

He serves on the advisory Boards of Generation Investment Management (sustainable, long-term investing), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (defending free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights on the Internet), the Sunlight Foundation (improving access to government information), the Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia and other free content projects), the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation (reinventing voting technology for the Digital Age) and the Medpedia Project (openly sharing and advancing medical knowledge).

Mr. Kapor has written widely about the impact of personal computing and networks on society. He has contributed articles, columns, and op-ed pieces on information infrastructure policy, intellectual property issues, and antitrust in the digital era to Scientific American, The New York Times, Forbes, the Communications of the ACM, and Huffington Post.

Mr. Kapor is married to Freada Kapor Klein and lives in San Francisco, California.