Lotus Kapor and his business partner
Jonathan Sachs founded
Lotus Development in 1982 with backing from
Ben Rosen. Lotus' first product was presentation software for the
Apple II known as Lotus Executive Briefing System. 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 Kapor left VisiCorp, he and Sachs produced an integrated spreadsheet and graphics program. Even though IBM and VisiCorp had a collaboration agreement whereby VisiCalc was being shipped simultaneously with the PC, Lotus had a clearly superior product. Lotus released
Lotus 1-2-3 on January 26, 1983. Its name referred to the three ways the product could be used: as a spreadsheet, graphics package, and
database manager. In practice, the latter two functions were less often used, but 1-2-3 was the most powerful spreadsheet program available. Lotus was almost immediately successful, becoming the world's third-largest microcomputer software company in 1983 with million (equivalent to $ million in ) in sales in its first year, compared to its business plan forecast of $1 million. Jerome Want says: Under founder and CEO Mitch Kapor, Lotus was a company with few rules and fewer internal bureaucratic barriers... Kapor decided that he was no longer suited to running a company, and [in 1986] he replaced himself with
Jim Manzi.
Digital rights activism Kapor co-founded the
Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1990 and was its chairman until 1994. EFF defends civil liberties in the digital world and works to ensure that rights and freedoms are enhanced and protected as the use of technology grows. Kapor attended the first
Wikimania in 2005.
Investments 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. He was also founding chair of the
Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX). In 2003, he became the founding chair of the
Mozilla Foundation, creator of the open source web browser
Firefox. He serves on the advisory board of the
Sunlight Foundation. In May 2009, after founder
Susan P. Crawford joined the Obama administration, Kapor took over chairmanship of
OneWebDay—the "Earth Day for the internet". In 1996, the
Computer History Museum named him a Museum Fellow "for his development of Lotus 1-2-3, the first major software application for the IBM PC". He founded the Mitchell Kapor Foundation to support his philanthropic interests in environmental health. As an active
angel investor, Kapor participated in the initial rounds of
Dropcam,
Twilio,
Asana, Cleanify and
Uber.
Kapor Center and Kapor Capital Kapor founded the Kapor Center for Social Impact (the KaporCenter) in 2000 as an institution focused on tech inclusion and social impact. The institution's mission is to invest in social and financial capital in vital non-profit organizations. A part of the Kapor Center, Kapor Capital is its venture capital arm, and has operated since 2011. As of 2018, it has made over 160 investments, primarily in information technology seed-stage startups, with a particular focus on diversity. Since 2016, the Kapor Center for Social Impact and Kapor Capital have been located in the
Uptown neighborhood of Oakland.
Diversity in technology In August 2015, Mitch and Freada Kapor announced they would invest $40 million over three years to accelerate their work to make the tech ecosystem more inclusive. In addition to his roles at Kapor Capital and Kapor Center, Mitch currently serves on the board of SMASH, whose mission is to enhance equal opportunity in education and the workplace, and sits on the advisory board of Generation Investment Management, a firm whose vision is to embed sustainability into the mainstream capital markets. Like the two Kapor namesake organizations, SMASH is also located in Uptown Oakland. ==Personal life==