When new technology in the classroom starts happening, some people get very excited and think of it as a panacea. It attracts very high amounts of money; it raises expectations, and those expectations aren’t met. – Mitch Kapor
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. – Mitch Kapor
I’m fascinated by management and organizations: how organizations get things done and how successful organizations are built and maintained, how they evolve as they grow from start-ups to small companies to medium companies to big companies. – Mitch Kapor
Technology advances at exponential rates, and human institutions and societies do not. They adapt at much slower rates. Those gaps get wider and wider. – Mitch Kapor
For people who know both New York and the Bay Area, it is a complement to say that Oakland is San Francisco’s Brooklyn. It’s a complement both to Oakland and to Brooklyn. And, if you look at Brooklyn, Brooklyn is hot; Brooklyn is cool. – Mitch Kapor
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. – Mitch Kapor
If we’re not creating an educated and skilled workforce, there is just no conceivable way that were going to be economically competitive. – Mitch Kapor
I don’t think Silicon Valley understands the power of Wikipedia, how it works, or the opportunities it represents. – Mitch Kapor
Everyone has a subconscious and automatic preference of this over that. Once you’re aware of that, you can take steps to change. – Mitch Kapor
There are excellent public interest grounds to have a search engine whose rankings are transparent. – Mitch Kapor
Failing to continue to support the public higher-ed system in California will have devastating long-term consequences. – Mitch Kapor
I woke up nights, worrying that Lotus was out of control – that no one would know what to do. – Mitch Kapor
Velano Vascular has developed a simple, game-changing innovation that will improve the way medicine has been practiced for decades. – Mitch Kapor
Oakland’s time is coming. In fact, Oakland’s time is already here. Tech is coming to Oakland, and it’s terribly exciting. – Mitch Kapor
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. – Mitch Kapor
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. – Mitch Kapor
I tell people that the history of Mozilla and Firefox is so one of a kind that it should not be used – ever – as an example of what’s possible. – Mitch Kapor
Physicians today, as human beings, are not exempt from the perverse economic pressures created by fee-for-service regimes to see more patients for shorter appointments and order more tests and procedures. If the incentives were changed to pay to foster better health outcomes, I am convinced physician behavior would change over time. – Mitch Kapor
I give Bill Gates an A for vision because, as a business person and a strategist, he’s brilliant. His flaw is that his view is not informed by a humanistic or compassionate vision of how to make computers work for people. – Mitch Kapor
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. – Mitch Kapor
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. – Mitch Kapor
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. – Mitch Kapor
Well, I had a lot of help from my father with the soldering and so on, and he was very good at math and was fascinated with computers, and so I was fortunate enough to have a bunch of exposure going all the way back to high school – this was in the 1960s. – Mitch Kapor
You can’t be in the tech community… without realizing there’s a big shortage of talent. – Mitch Kapor
In my case, having knocked around at different jobs helped me get a sense of what the world is actually like and also helped me get out of a cocoon. – Mitch Kapor
The main languages out of which web applications are built – whether it’s Perl or Python or PHP or any of the other languages – those are all open source languages. So the infrastructure of the web is open source… the web as we know it is completely dependent on open source. – Mitch Kapor
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. – Mitch Kapor