Mitchell Kapor

Founder of Lotus Development Corporation and cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

• Born: November 1, 1950
• Place of Birth: New York, New York

Primary Company/Organization: Lotus Development Corporation

Introduction

Mitchell Kapor is best known for the design, development, and marketing of the spectacularly successful spreadsheet program Lotus 1-2-3 in the 1980s. He has, however, a string of other accomplishments. He has been a significant force in making the benefits of technology available to a wide range of people, especially minorities. As an entrepreneur, investor, and founder of the Mitchell Kapor Foundation, he has sought to bring educational opportunities to minority students and to minority-owned companies trying to establish themselves in the information technology (IT) field. He has also worked in the areas of open systems development for the Internet, revising outdated copyright protection laws, and creating an effective national technology policy.

Early Life

Mitchell Kapor was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 1, 1950. His father was the owner of a box manufacturing company, and his mother was a librarian. At a very young age, he built a primitive computer with his father, finding the instructions in a book. While in high school, he had the opportunity to attend the Summer Science program sponsored by the National Science Foundation in Ojai, California. That experience was significant in his eventual development, and later in life he supported the Summer Science program.

After high school, Kapor enrolled at Yale University, graduating with a bachelor's degree in an interdisciplinary major he had designed with a linguistics professor. His self-created major combined computer science, psychology, and linguistics. His life during the next few years was unsettled but involved some interesting experiences. He moved to Boston in 1973, worked at a public television station, and was a radio disc jockey. He returned to school and received a master's degree in psychological counseling, eventually working in a mental hospital. Kapor enrolled at the Sloan Business School at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with the objective of getting a master's in business administration, but he never completed the course work.

Becoming interested in computers in the late 1970s, when the computers available were early TSR (terminate and stay resident) systems and the Apple II, Kapor inadvertently became a consultant and programmer for the Apple II. Eventually, he became seriously involved with programming for the VisiCorp, which developed a spreadsheet program known as VisiCalc. Kapor's experience programming for the VisiCalc application would exert a strong influence on his subsequent programming and development efforts.

Life's Work

In 1982, Kapor left VisiCorp and with a partner, Jonathan Sachs (with whom he had worked on VisiCalc), began the Lotus Development Corporation. The next January, Lotus released its spreadsheet, Lotus 1-2-3. The effects of this release were staggering at the time. The personal computer was new and there was even a strong belief in some circles (most famously, perhaps, on the part of Ken Olsen of Digital Equipment Corporation, who did not believe there was a market for microcomputers such as the personal computer) that it was not going to last as an innovation. Personal computers of the time were seen as the domain of hobbyists. Lotus 1-2-3 changed that perception. A personal spreadsheet program was something that many people could use in a time when slide rules and the recently marketed handheld digital calculator were among the most sophisticated consumer electronics, and now that an effective and widely applicable spreadsheet program existed consumers had a compelling reason to invest in a PC. The early International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) PCs came with what was referred to as a “shell” that contained and allowed access to several programs that IBM also provided. These included a word-processing program, a graphics package, and the spreadsheet program VisiCalc, on which Kapor had worked before starting Lotus Development. Lotus 1-2-3 was purchased by people who were willing to pay an additional sum for an application that worked better than the free spreadsheet they received with the computer. The success of the product took everyone, including Kapor, by surprise. He had anticipated that revenues in the first year would be $1 million. The actual revenues in the first year of Lotus 1-2-3 sales were approximately $53 million. In 1984, the revenues from Lotus 1-2-3 were three times that amount.

The success of 1-2-3 was not to be matched again, however. As the 1980s progressed, the Macintosh, with its graphical user interface, appeared with programs that could be navigated with a computer mouse; Lotus 1-2-3 was designed to be run on DOS (the “disk operating system” typical of PCs at the time), in which one navigated and performed actions using the keyboard's Tab and Enter keys and saw primarily characters on the screen. Eventually, Microsoft's Excel would overtake Lotus 1-2-3 as the spreadsheet application of choice for PC users.

Other programs and application suites developed by Lotus enjoyed limited success or were outright failures. An application suite for the PC called Lotus Symphony enjoyed some popularity. A similar suite for the Macintosh, Jazz, failed miserably, in large part because its interface was different from anything then seen on the Macintosh, having a look and feel completely different from the interface to which Macintosh users had become accustomed. Other development projects followed, and failed: a file management application (Magellan), a word-processing program (Manuscript), and a personal information management program (Agenda). Another project was designed specifically for Steve Jobs's NeXT computer and failed as well.

There was one more success story at Lotus, however, and that was a communication and groupware application called Lotus Notes. Notes was not a PC application but one that would service an entire enterprise—an important consideration as the 1980s progressed and it was becoming ineffective for PCs to operate as stand-alones (in isolated manner) as opposed to combining in local-area networks. The effectiveness of Notes started to arouse the interest of IBM, which was attempting to create software that would successfully compete with the new array of Microsoft products that supported both individual and group-centered work projects. In July 1995, IBM would purchase Lotus for $3.5 billion.

Kapor had left Lotus by that time, however. After his departure from Lotus in the late 1980s, he became active in a number of areas, and in many of these venues he has sought to make both the development and benefits of information technology available to a wider population, with emphasis on minorities. He has also advocated the use of open systems in developing applications. He was a cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in 1990, an organization with the stated purpose of defending free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights; he was EFF's chairman until 1994. In 1997, he founded the Mitchell Kapor Foundation, which supports many social (specifically minority) initiatives by granting funds and providing technical support.

In 2001, Kapor became director of the Level Playing Field Institute, which works to expand educational and employment opportunities. Two years later, he founded and became chair of the Mozilla Foundation (developer of Firefox and a champion of open systems development). As a venture capitalist, including as a partner with Kapor Capital beginning in 2010, Kapor has assisted in the successful launch of several minority-owned IT start-ups. He has been on the boards of many philanthropic organizations as well.

Kapor has not been uniformly successful, however, as seen in his involvement with the Chandler Project, a seven-year effort to create a personal information management system. Chandler was to be a rival to Microsoft's Outlook, not only as a functioning application but also as a project with open source code; its developer was the Open Source Application Foundation. Development efforts began in 2001, but by 2007 it was apparent that Chandler was not ready for release, mostly because of performance issues. Kapor then announced that the following year would see him withdraw his funding. Although there was talk as late as 2009 that the project would continue, it ended without coming to fruition.

Personal Life

Kapor has been not only a software developer, entrepreneur, and activist but also a teacher and scholar. He taught at MIT's Media Lab during the 1994–95 and 1995–96 academic years, as well as the University of California, Berkeley. Kapor also worked with President Barack Obama both during the 2008 presidential campaign and in the postelection transition, pushing for the creation of a national chief technological officer. He continued to provide advice to the Obama administration on technical issues and on how they affect society at large.

In 2011, Kapor was an adviser for a highly discussed documentary produced by CNN. Titled “The New Promised Land: Silicon Valley,” the program was part of the CNN-produced series Black in America. The program emphasized that, despite the belief that Silicon Valley is a complete meritocracy, it is in fact an environment in which minorities are not necessarily given an even chance to succeed or even participate. Kapor appeared in the program, articulating his beliefs and reflecting his ongoing efforts to bring greater opportunities in the technical fields to minority students.

On September 16, 2011, in Kendall Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts (just slightly more than five minutes' walk from where Lotus Development had been located), the Entrepreneur Walk of Fame was unveiled. Among its first seven inductees, whose stars were embedded into the sidewalk, were Kapor, Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, and Bill Gates.

Kapor is married to Freada Kapor Klein, an expert and activist on diversity and fairness in the workplace and cofounder of the Kapor Center and its related organizations and efforts. Together they wrote Closing the Equity Gap: Creating Wealth and Fostering Justice in Startup Investing, which was published in 2023.

Bibliography

Aspray, William. Engineers as Executives: An International Perspective. New York: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 1995. Print.

Kapor Klein, Freada, and Mitchell Kapor. Closing the Equity Gap: Creating Wealth and Fostering Justice in Startup Investing. HarperCollins, 2023. Print.

Kapor, Mitchell D., Pamela Samuelson, Randall Davis, and J. H. Reichman. “A Manifesto Concerning the Legal Protection of Computer Programs.” Columbia Law Review 94.8 (1994): 2308–2431. Print.

Rosenberg, Scott. Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software. New York: Random House, 2007. Print.

Shah, Vikas. "A Conversation with Mitch Kapor, Computing Pioneer, on the Power of Investment to Tackle the Biggest Problems in Society." Thought Economics, 19 Oct. 2023, thoughteconomics.com/interviewees/mitch-kapor/. Accessed 7 Mar. 2024.

"Who We Are." Kapor Center, www.kaporcenter.org/who-we-are/. Accessed 7 Mar. 2024.

Winograd, Terry, ed. Bringing Design to Software. Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1996. Print.