Mitch Kapor

Mitchell David Kapor ( born November 1, 1950 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American software developer, IT entrepreneur, investor, philanthropist and activist. He was the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet software. Since 2003 he has been Chairman of the Board of Linden Lab, the operator of the virtual world Second Life simulation.

Biography

Kapor attended public schools in Freeport, Long Iceland, where in 1967 he graduated from high school. In 1971 he graduated from Yale University with a BA and studied psychology, linguistics and computer science as part of an interdisciplinary program in cybernetics. Kapor was decisive part in Yale's radio station ( " WYBC - FM" ), where he worked as a music manager and program manager. He also earned an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

In 1982, Kapor along with Jonathan Sachs, the Lotus Development Corporation, where he, along with Sachs, who was responsible for the technical architecture and implementation, Lotus 1-2-3 created. He was President, Chairman and CEO of Lotus from 1982 to 1986 and director until 1987. Lotus first year, 1983, the company achieved a turnover of 53 million U.S. dollars in 1984 even 156 million U.S. dollars. 1985 more than 1,000 people were already busy.

In 1990, Kapor along with his friend, " digital rights " activist John Perry Barlow and John Gilmore, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and was its chairman until 1994. EFF is a non-profit organization for the protection of private rights, particularly in the areas of privacy freedom of expression, free access to information and the responsibility of the media.

In 2001, Kapor, the Open Source Applications Foundation, a group of managers of open-source components working on a personnel information. The product named Chandler should take one day to Microsoft Outlook.

Kapor is a board member of the Mozilla Foundation since its inception in 2003. In April 2003, he was also a partner and chairman of Linden Lab.

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 Substantially falling outside the domain of what engineering deals with. "