14 Facts About Mitch Kapor

Mitch Kapor serves on the board of SMASH, a non-profit founded by his wife, Freada Kapor Klein, to help underrepresented scholars hone their STEM knowledge while building personal networks and skills for careers in tech and the sciences.

Mitch Kapor was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Freeport, New York on Long Island, where he graduated from high school in 1967.

Mitch Kapor began but did not complete a master's degree at the MIT Sloan School of Management but later served on the faculty of the MIT Media Lab and the University of California, Berkeley School of Information.

Mitch Kapor founded Lotus after leaving his post as head of development at VisiCorp, the distributors of the VisiCalc spreadsheet, and selling all his rights to VisiPlot and VisiTrend to VisiCorp.

Shortly after Mitch Kapor left VisiCorp, he and Sachs produced an integrated spreadsheet and graphics program.

Under founder and CEO Mitch Kapor, Lotus was a company with few rules and fewer internal bureaucratic barriers.

Mitch Kapor decided that he was no longer suited to running a company, and [in 1986] he replaced himself with Jim Manzi.

Mitch Kapor co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1990 and was its chairman until 1994.

Mitch Kapor was the founding investor in UUNET, one of the first, and the largest among, early Internet service providers; in RealNetworks, the Internet's first streaming media company; and in Linden Lab, maker of the first successful virtual world, Second Life.

Mitch Kapor was founding chair of the Commercial Internet eXchange.

Mitch Kapor serves on the advisory board of the Sunlight Foundation.

Mitch Kapor founded the Mitchell Kapor Foundation to support his philanthropic interests in environmental health.

Mitch Kapor founded the Mitch Kapor Center in 2000 as an institution focused on tech inclusion and social impact.

Mitch Kapor is married to Freada Mitch Kapor Klein and resides in Oakland and Healdsburg, California.