Mitch Kapor
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 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 UC_Berkeley_School_of_Information.
He is married to Freada Kapor Klein and lives in San Francisco.