Words matter. These are the best Mitch Kapor Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
My history is to find the next big thing early.
I believe in having an impact in doing things.
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.
Lotus’s efforts around the Mac were pathetically unsuccessful, which is sad.
We have a responsibility to give people opportunities to do what they can do. It’s a fundamental tenet of democratic society. Libertarians who believe in a completely minimalist state, and don’t feel we have that responsibility, are harming humanity.
Successful entrepreneurs develop products that inspire their passion. They have to. It’s that passion that gets them through the long, arduous, uncertain and frightening early days of a start-up.
Reversing the escalation of health care costs is going to need more than legislation, yet it can be done without imposing rationing, as critics of reform fear.
There’s an admirable belief about the virtues of meritocracy – that the best ideas prove the best results. It’s a wrong and misguided belief by well-intentioned people.
StumbleUpon has humanized the Web and mastered a way for people to discover online content by incorporating an individual’s personal preferences and recommendations of friends and like-minded people.
Failing to continue to support the public higher-ed system in California will have devastating long-term consequences.
Diversifying our tech talent pool is an imperative for the tech sector. More diverse engineers and entrepreneurs will bring about a new type of innovation that Silicon Valley has yet to see.
If advertisers want to decorate their ads to increase their conversions by showing what users think, that’s a good thing.
On a personal note, I was born in Brooklyn. My folks moved out to Long Island when I was quite young, but once a Brooklynite, always a Brooklynite.
Often, the disconnect between the marketing hype around a new product and what the product actually does is astounding.
Open source can propagate to fill all the nooks and crannies that people want it to fill.
If you can command a lot of attention, that’s what is valuable, and many in the commercial ecology would like to have a piece of that attention.
Every year we are greeted by a host of new apps that will ‘change the way we think’ about ordering takeout, ‘fundamentally transform’ our shoe purchases, or ‘revolutionize’ the way we edit photos.
Life in cyberspace seems to be shaping up exactly like Thomas Jefferson would have wanted: founded on the primacy of individual liberty and a commitment to pluralism, diversity, and community.
If only I’d stayed on the West Coast, I might have made something of myself.
There’s a great deal of suspicion and misunderstanding about IT among practicing doctors. One hears things like, ‘I don’t want to be turned into a data entry clerk, and I don’t want some machine between me and my patients.’
I don’t think Silicon Valley understands the power of Wikipedia, how it works, or the opportunities it represents.
I’d always wanted to live in San Francisco, and my circumstances never permitted it. I’m so happy I made the move.
I’ve been around long enough to know that empires come and empires go, and I can’t tell how long the Google empire is going to last – but I’m pretty convinced that the answer is less than forever.
The culmination of all of that was the decision to start a company, which became Lotus, to do a product, which became 1-2-3. By the time I reached that point it had been four years, and it felt like a lifetime, but really it was kind of evolutionary.
Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.
Microsoft represents the best of ourselves or the worst.
What is design? It’s where you stand with a foot in two worlds – the world of technology and the world of people and human purposes – and you try to bring the two together.
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?’
Hackers are seen as shadowy figures with superhuman powers that threaten civilization.
We have to examine very carefully any privacy-reducing technology.
The more you eliminate the inefficient use of information, the better it is for productivity.
I’d been a great angel investor, but professional venture capital was clearly not the right thing for me.
I routinely failed to understand that ‘simple and straightforward’ would have been a much better product strategy for Lotus.
There are excellent public interest grounds to have a search engine whose rankings are transparent.
Even though I had the talent, programming just didn’t feel right. I never considered it very seriously. Some people get gratification from bending a machine to their will. I didn’t.
If you go back to the ’50s and ’60s… there was zero tech in S.F. It was all in the Valley… and it crept northward in early 2000s.
Computers ought to help people find their own best path through lots of textual information.
In an economy where more and more value is in information – is in the bits, not the atoms, where bits can be copied essentially for free – any time you have that situation, economic schemes that rely on existing models of intellectual property laws for protection are going to do less and less well.
Both VisiCalc and MultiPlan were available when the IBM PC shipped in October 1981. 1-2-3 didn’t hit the market until January 1983.
Inside every working anarchy, there’s an Old Boy Network.
We are living in an era of anxiety produced by computer and communications technology.
The accomplishment of open source is that it is the back end of the web, the invisible part, the part that you don’t see as a user.
Human intelligence is a marvelous, subtle, and poorly understood phenomenon. There is no danger of duplicating it anytime soon.
It became clear to me by 1984 that Microsoft was likely going to be the big winner in the PC software apps and operating system category, partly because of the dynamics of owning and controlling the operating system: that gave you enormous power, and I came to see Bill Gates was fierce competitor.
Architecture is politics.
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.
Beware angel investors: they can be disruptive.
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.
Oakland’s time is coming. In fact, Oakland’s time is already here. Tech is coming to Oakland, and it’s terribly exciting.
Life in cyberspace is often conducted in primitive frontier conditions, but it is a life which, at its best, is more egalitarian than elitist and more decentralized than hierarchical. It serves individuals and communities, not mass audiences, and it is extraordinarily multi-faceted in the purposes to which it is put.
Fundly is at the dynamic intersection of high-growth technology startups, social entrepreneurship, and the exploding world of social media. Kapor Capital is proud to back this passionate team, their product, and Fundly’s impressive customer base.
I’m like George Lucas, bringing together a creative team that will come up with a unique, well-crafted product.
‘Silicon Valley’ has come to mean the Bay Area, not just down the Peninsula.
The kind of products you envision as an entrepreneur is a function of your life experience.
Before I started a company, I was an employee with a bad attitude. I was always felt like, bosses are stupid, and people weren’t well treated.
There are a lot of similarities between cyberspace and the frontier. It’s pretty raw and primitive. I mean, you have to churn your own butter in cyberspace. You can’t go down to the 7-Eleven and buy a stick of butter because it’s not that well developed.
People in the industry foresee a time in which, for many people, the only thing they’ll need on a computer is a browser.
I had no fear of speaking to large audiences.
If you look at the history of other movements, whether Civil Rights or environmental rights, these are all decades-long undertakings.
You can’t be in the tech community… without realizing there’s a big shortage of talent.
Bulletin boards are sort of the garage bands of cyberspace.
I woke up nights, worrying that Lotus was out of control – that no one would know what to do.
People are hungry for community. They’re hungry for meaning in a society that is oriented around the production and consumption of consumer goods.
E-mail is a victim of its own success.
Old ways of thinking die hard, particularly when they were weaned by legally enforced monopolies.
I actually built a tiny computer as a junior high school project.
