Mitch Kapor

Mitchell David Kapor ( KAY-por; born November 1, 1950) is an American entrepreneur best known for his work as an application developer in the early days of the personal computer software industry, later founding Lotus Development, where he was instrumental in developing the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet. He left Lotus in 1986. In 1990 with John Perry Barlow and John Gilmore, he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and served as its chairman until 1994. In 2003, he became the founding chair of the Mozilla Foundation, creator of the open source web browser Firefox. Kapor has been an investor in the personal computing industry, and supporter of social causes via Kapor Capital and the Kapor Center. He 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.

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. He received a B.A. from Yale College in 1971 and studied psychology, linguistics, and computer science in an interdisciplinary major, also attending the Boston-based Beacon College, which had a satellite campus in Washington, D.C. at the time. He began a master's degree at the MIT Sloan School of Management, in 1979 but dropped out and did not finish his master's until 2025, though he served on the faculty of the MIT Media Lab and the University of California, Berkeley School of Information, in the interim.

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 US$53 million (equivalent to $139.9 million in 2025) 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.

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.

He has a daughter and son with his first wife.

Kapor's second wife is Freada Kapor Klein and resides in Oakland and Healdsburg, California. Both served on the board of trustees of the Summer Science Program from 2004 to 2006. He was a student of the program in 1966.

1985 – Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement

2003 – Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility Norbert Wiener Award

2018 – Elon University Medal for Entrepreneurial Leadership