Mitch Kapor Quotes

Beware angel investors: they can be disruptive.

My history is to find the next big thing early.

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.

I soon realized that the best thing I could do for the profession of human services was to get out of it.

I believe in having an impact in doing things.

If advertisers want to decorate their ads to increase their conversions by showing what users think, that's a good thing.

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.

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.'

If only I'd stayed on the West Coast, I might have made something of myself.

I'm like George Lucas, bringing together a creative team that will come up with a unique, well-crafted product.

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.

Human intelligence is a marvelous, subtle, and poorly understood phenomenon. There is no danger of duplicating it anytime soon.

I woke up nights, worrying that Lotus was out of control - that no one would know what to do.

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.

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.

The critical thing in developing software is not the program, it's the design. It is translating understanding of user needs into something that can be realized as a computer program.

Everyone has a subconscious and automatic preference of this over that. Once you're aware of that, you can take steps to change.

I'd been a great angel investor, but professional venture capital was clearly not the right thing for me.

The more you eliminate the inefficient use of information, the better it is for productivity.

If information wants to be free, then that's true everywhere, not just in information technology.

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.

Technology advances at exponential rates, and human institutions and societies do not. They adapt at much slower rates. Those gaps get wider and wider.

I don't think Silicon Valley understands the power of Wikipedia, how it works, or the opportunities it represents.

E-mail is a victim of its own success.

I had no fear of speaking to large audiences.

I think there is widespread agreement that there is a crisis in public education.

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.

We have to examine very carefully any privacy-reducing technology.

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?'

I actually built a tiny computer as a junior high school project.

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.

People in the industry foresee a time in which, for many people, the only thing they'll need on a computer is a browser.

Today, in the Internet gold rush, so many people go into dot-com jobs right from school or even before finishing. Their motivation is understandable, but sometimes they just lack experience.

The computer environment is radically different today. In the 1980s, it was like the Wild West, with a lot of open territory. Now, the cowboys have moved out and the farmers have moved in.

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.

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.

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.

Hackers are seen as shadowy figures with superhuman powers that threaten civilization.

Open source can propagate to fill all the nooks and crannies that people want it to fill.

People are hungry for community. They're hungry for meaning in a society that is oriented around the production and consumption of consumer goods.

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.

Failing to continue to support the public higher-ed system in California will have devastating long-term consequences.

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.

Velano Vascular has developed a simple, game-changing innovation that will improve the way medicine has been practiced for decades.

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.

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.

Computers ought to help people find their own best path through lots of textual information.

We've already gotten a significant grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and a university consortium. I think the whole sector of Foundations, potentially with government support, is promising - more than promising, I think, it's substantial.

The kind of products you envision as an entrepreneur is a function of your life experience.

Lotus's efforts around the Mac were pathetically unsuccessful, which is sad.

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.

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.

It's illegitimate to talk about a post-scarcity Utopia without talking about questions of distribution. There have always been these Utopian predictions - 'electricity too cheap to meter' was the atomic promise of the 1950s.

I'd always wanted to live in San Francisco, and my circumstances never permitted it. I'm so happy I made the move.

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.

I was trying to figure out what to do next, I'd been accumulating ideas for productivity tools - software people could use every day, particularly to help organize their lives.

You can't be in the tech community ... without realizing there's a big shortage of talent.

Linden Lab's technological breakthroughs have made 'Second Life' a truly revolutionary experience.

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.