Mitch Kapor

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Mitch Kapor (2005)
Mitch Kapor's voice (English)

Mitchell David Kapor (born November 1, 1950 in Brooklyn , New York ) is an American software developer, IT entrepreneur, investor, activist and philanthropist . He was the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of the spreadsheet software Lotus 1-2-3 .

Life

Kapor attended public schools in Freeport, Long Island , where he graduated from high school in 1967. In 1971 he received his BA from Yale University ; he studied psychology, linguistics and computer science as part of an interdisciplinary course in cybernetics. Kapor was instrumental in Yale's radio station ("WYBC-FM"), where he served as music and program director. He also studied (without a degree) at the MIT Sloan School of Management .

In 1982 Kapor founded the Lotus Development Corporation together with Jonathan Sachs , where he created Lotus 1-2-3 together with Sachs, who was responsible for the technical architecture and implementation. He was president, chairman and managing director of Lotus from 1982 to 1986 and director until 1987. In Lotus’s first fiscal year, 1983, the company had sales of 53 million US dollars, in 1984 even 156 million US dollars. In 1985 more than 1,000 people were employed.

In 1990 Kapor founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation together with his friends " digital rights " activists John Perry Barlow and John Gilmore and was its chairman until 1994. The EFF is a non-profit organization for the protection of private rights, especially in the areas of privacy, Freedom of expression, free access to information and the responsibility of the media.

In 2001, Kapor founded the Open Source Applications Foundation , a group that works on a personal information manager made up of open source components. The product called Chandler was supposed to compete against Microsoft Outlook .

Kapor was a board member of the Mozilla Foundation from 2003 to 2010. In April 2003, he also became a partner and chairman of the board of Linden Lab , the operator of the virtual world simulation Second Life .

He is married and lives in San Francisco .

“When you go to design a house you talk to an architect first, not an engineer. Why is this? Because the criteria for what makes a good building fall substantially outside the domain of what engineering deals with. "

“When you're designing a house, talk to the architect first, not the civil engineer. Why? Because the criteria of what makes a good building are outside of what engineers are concerned with. "

- Mitch Kapor

Kapor Center for Social Impact and Kapor Capital

Kapor founded the Kapor Center for Social Impact in 2000 . The task of this institution is to provide important non-profit organizations with social and financial capital.

Part of the Kapor Center is Kapor Capital, the area for venture capital. The company has invested in more than 160 companies since 2009, including Uber .

Web links

Commons : Mitch Kapor  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ About the Mozilla Foundation. Archived from the original on June 27, 2009 ; Retrieved October 24, 2009 .
  2. ^ A Software Design Manifesto , 1991
  3. ^ Mitchell Kapor Foundation . Retrieved January 3, 2018.
  4. ↑ Kapors pledge $ 40 million investment in tech diversity . Retrieved December 29, 2015.
  5. ^ Company Overview of Kapor Capital . Retrieved January 3, 2018.
  6. ^ Kapor Capital - Investments . Retrieved January 3, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME Kapor, Mitch
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kapor, Mitchell David (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American software developer and entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH November 1, 1950
PLACE OF BIRTH Brooklyn , New York