Kapor, Mitchell

1950–

Software Entrepreneur, Activist

Mitchell Kapor is the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, a pioneering spreadsheet and database-management software system that was one of the most successful commercial computer products of the 1980s. He has gone on to use his wealth both as co-founder of the civil-rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation and as an early investor in companies like UUNet and Real Networks. After spending much of the 1990s espousing a belief in the Internet as the nexus of a decentralized society, Kapor began decrying the Internet's blatant commercialization.

Kapor was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1950 to Jesse and Phoebe Kapor, owners of Corrugated Paper Products, Inc. As a child, he attended public schools in Freeport, Long Island, graduating in 1967, and attended Yale University to study psychology, linguistics, and computer science as part of a multi-disciplinary cybernetics major. While at Yale, Kapor served as the program director at the college radio station; this led to a short career as a progressive-radio disc jockey in Hartford, Connecticut, in the 1970s. Later, after jumping into teaching transcendental meditation in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Fairfield, Iowa, he returned to working with computers as an entry-level programmer. In 1978, he earned a master's degree in counseling psychology at New England Memorial Hospital, before attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management. He dropped out of MIT one term short of graduation, and bought an Apple II personal computer after scrounging up enough money to cover the $1,500 price tag.

It was around this time that he met the authors of VisiCalc, the first computer spreadsheet program, who inspired him to develop a similar application that would graph the results of a spreadsheet's calculation. He called it VisiPlot, and later developed another related product called VisiTrend. Very quickly, $100,000 monthly royalty checks began arriving. Along with a partner in his nascent business, Kapor was bought out for $1.2 million.

In 1982, Kapor founded Lotus Development Corp., the company that would seal his reputation. Along with Jonathan Sachs, the new company's chief technical architect, Kapor created Lotus 1-2-3, an elegant, popular business-software tool that helped make desktop computers ubiquitous in the office environment of the 1980s. Lotus 1-2-3 placed Kapor among the ranks of 1980s computer barons like Microsoft's Bill Gates and Apple's Steve Jobs. By 1984, Lotus' revenues reached $156 million a year, and the company had more than 1,200 workers by 1986.

True to his earlier form, Kapor again dropped out in 1986, resigning as CEO of Lotus and leaving the company altogether a year later. In many eyes, that act of abandonment cemented Kapor's hero status. As The New Republic's Robert Wright put it: “Kapor, in short, seemed the more authentic embodiment of Silicon Valley's hacker ideals: anti-corporate, nonconformist, vaguely whole-earthish, creative.”

His first job after Lotus was as a visiting scientist at MIT's Center for Cognitive Science and at the school's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He left academia in 1987 to serve as chairman and CEO of another start-up, ON Technology, until 1990, achieving only modest success compared to Lotus.

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