Mitchell Kapor is a pioneer of the personal computing revolution. He is the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the "killer application" which made the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980s.
Mr. Kapor was born in Brooklyn, New York and grew up in Freeport, Long Island. He received a B.A. from Yale College in 1971, where he studied psychology, linguistics, and computer science.
He founded Lotus Development Corp. in 1982 and led it over five years through a successful public offering and over $200 million in annual revenues.
In 1990 he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The EFF is a non-profit civil liberties organization working in the public interest to protect privacy, free expression, and access to public resources and information online.
Mr. Kapor was first chair of the Mozilla Foundation, maker of the open source web browser Firefox, and continues to serve on its board. He is the founding investor and first chair of Linden Research, the creator of the virtual world Second Life.
He has held adjunct faculty positions at MIT’s Media Lab and University of California at Berkeley School of Information.
Currently. he is a trustee of the Mitchell Kapor Foundation, a private foundation works to ensure fairness and equity, particularly for low-income communities of color.
Mr. Kapor is a director of the Level Playing Field Institute, which promotes innovative approaches to fairness in higher education and workplaces. LPFI’s education programs serve more than 150 underrepresented high school and undergraduate students of color from the Bay Area.
In 2009, Mr. Kapor became the board chair of the non-profit OneWebDay, which sponsors an annual, global volunteer-driven day on September 22 modeled after Earth Day to celebrate and protect what’s most valuable about the Internet and the World Wide Web.
He serves on the advisory boards of Generation Investment Management (sustainable, long-term investing), the Sunlight Foundation (improving access to government information), the Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia and other free content projects), the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation (reinventing voting technology for the Digital Age), and the Medpedia Project (openly sharing and advancing medical knowledge).
Mr. Kapor has written widely about the impact of personal computing and networks on society. He has contributed articles, columns, and op-ed pieces on information infrastructure policy, intellectual property issues, and antitrust in the digital era to Scientific American, The New York Times, Forbes, the Communications of the ACM, and The Huffington Post.
Mr. Kapor is married to Freada Kapor Klein and lives in San Francisco, California.