16 Quotes & Sayings By Mitch Kapor

Mitch Kapor is an entrepreneur, author, and philanthropist who has dedicated most of his life to giving back to the community. He is best known as the founder of Lotus Development Corporation, the creators of the pioneering integrated software application suite called Lotus 1-2-3. Mitch has also founded several other technology companies, including speech recognition pioneer speechWorks and the Coalition for Green Fax Technology (CGT), which is working with fax manufacturers to bring green fax messaging to the world. His philanthropic efforts focus on educational opportunities for economically disadvantaged youth, especially children in Africa Read more

Mitch lives in California with his wife and two sons.

1
Managerial and professional people hadn't really used computers, hadn't sat down at keyboards, until personal computers. Personal computers have a totally different feel. Mitch Kapor
2
Computers ought to help people find their own best path through lots of textual information. Mitch Kapor
3
Well, I had a lot of help from my father with the soldering and so on, and he was very good at math and was fascinated with computers, and so I was fortunate enough to have a bunch of exposure going all the way back to high school - this was in the 1960s. Mitch Kapor
4
I give Bill Gates an A for vision because, as a business person and a strategist, he's brilliant. His flaw is that his view is not informed by a humanistic or compassionate vision of how to make computers work for people. Mitch Kapor
5
Human intelligence is a marvelous, subtle, and poorly understood phenomenon. There is no danger of duplicating it anytime soon. Mitch Kapor
6
No, my family is Russian, Georgian, via Ellis Island. Mitch Kapor
7
The kind of products you envision as an entrepreneur is a function of your life experience. Mitch Kapor
8
A typical medical practice is like an old-fashioned business which keeps all of its records on paper. It can probably track down any individual transaction if it needs to, but it's basically helpless when it comes to overall measurements of performance. And that's the big problem. Mitch Kapor
9
Startups, in some sense, have gotten so easy to start that we are confusing two things. And what we are confusing, often, is, 'How far can you get in your first day of travel?' with, 'How long it is going to take to get up to the top of the mountain?' Mitch Kapor
10
The critical thing in developing software is not the program, it's the design. It is translating understanding of user needs into something that can be realized as a computer program. Mitch Kapor
11
Lotus's efforts around the Mac were pathetically unsuccessful, which is sad. Mitch Kapor
12
If information wants to be free, then that's true everywhere, not just in information technology. Mitch Kapor
13
The widespread adoption of broadband and the continued advances in personal computing technology are finally making it possible for the collective creation of an online world on a realistic scale. Mitch Kapor
14
That's why it has to be a nonprofit, because a nonprofit is required to take monies it receives and use them for the purposes for which it's chartered by the government. It can't be pocketed. Mitch Kapor
15
If you look at the history of other movements, whether Civil Rights or environmental rights, these are all decades-long undertakings. Mitch Kapor