Mitch Kapor is the founder of Lotus Development Corporation. It can be said that he provided the kindling for the rapid expansion of the personal computer market. The program he co-authored, Lotus 1-2-3, was the product of his vision which made him and those around him very wealthy. Kapor’s life has expanded and contracted on its path of discovery, which began in the fertile era of the 1960’s.

Mitch Kapor was born in Brooklyn, New York and raised on Long Island (Inc. , 1983). His business education started in his childhood listening to his father and grandfather, both businessmen, discussing the business of the day (Frazier, 1983). His formal college education began in 1967 at Yale. He studied a mix of psychology, linguistics, and computer science. During his time at Yale he spun records as a disk jockey, became active in anti-war movement, and explored the depths of the drug culture (Lyons, 1988). Kapor earned his Bachelors Degree in 1971 and was a typical college graduate lacking any significant plans.

Kapor was married and his bride moved him to the Boston area. She was offered a job at the Boston Public Television Station. Kapor pursued a Masters and received his Masters in Psychology 1978 from Beacon College in Boston.

Kapor's Master's degree furnished him with a job working in as a psychiatric counselor in a community hospital (Inc. , 1983). His life began moving in an unsettling direction, so he turned his focus toward computer consulting. He purchased an Apple computer to do his programming. To reach his goal of starting his own business, he enrolled at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. However, he decided quickly that business school was not for him.

Kapor hired on with Personal Software Incorporated, a marketer for VisiCalc, a spreadsheet program for the Apple II personal computer (Petre, 1985). This association with Personal Software Incorporated moved him to the West Coast. During his time with Personal Software he designed and developed VisiPlot and VisiTrend to complement the VisiCalc product. The Visi products sold very well and his vision was integrate the three products for ease of use. His integration concept was pitched to the company but was rejected. The demand for the Visi products skyrocketed and soon Kapor was receiving monthly royalties of six figures (Inc. , 1983).

Although the money was good, Kapor had a strong desire to move back to the comforts of the east. The rejection of his idea coupled with the burning desire to start his own company persuaded him to move on. Kapor returned to the East Coast and soon sold his rights to Personal Software for 1.2 Million dollars (Inc. , 1983). Mitch Kapor became a millionaire.

In 1981, Kapor with the help of venture capitalists founded the Lotus Development Corporation in Cambridge Mass. Kapor’s integrated software vision became a reality in January 1983 (Inc. , 1983). This was the release date of the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program. Mitch co-authored 1-2-3 while guiding the process and creating a company in his image. The Lotus 1-2-3 program ran on the latest hardware, the IBM PC, and the disk operating System (DOS). The Lotus Corporation estimated first year sales of $4 million dollars for Lotus 1-2-3 product. The sales quickly reached $4 million and continued to a staggering $53 million dollars (Longwell, 1997).

In the absences of direct competition, sales of the Lotus products soared to $225 million dollars by 1986 (Longwell, 1997). The quick success of Mitch Kapor's Lotus Corporation left him in unfamiliar territory and he began a plan to phase himself out of the very company he created. In retrospect, his phase out was done quickly including the fortunes that it created. Many have viewed his leaving Lotus in negative terms, but as Kapor said in an interview with Inc. Magazine "I can’t control the judgement of history, and I’m not looking to history as a source of self-esteem" (Inc. , 1983).

Kapor continued with Lotus as a director and consultant for a short period before all ties were broken. This break was in accordance with his desire to spend more time with his second wife and their first child. The goal of this movement into "intentional unstructured time" was to afford him greater creative opportunities (Duffy, 1986, P1).

Kapor moved forward with his renewed creativity in 1987 with another Startup Company called On-Technology (Lyons, 1989). His background coupled with his desire to bring computing and humans together was the task they undertook. Kapor and his backers hoped to create a common software platform for all computers, a task that proved to ambitious for the new company. Kapor stepped down from On-Technology in 1990.

Kapor’s contribution to the industry was offered through the co-founding of the Electric Frontier Foundation (EFF). His aspiration was to shape policy surrounding the Internet and technology use to insure everyone has equal access to this medium (Longwell, 1997). The EFF produced documentation and lobbied U.S. government for fair use of the Internet. He has since parted ways with the EFF and has entered another period of "unstructured time".

Today Kapor's world has again contracted inward, possibly to reserve his creative energies for yet another venture. Whatever the reason, his contributions to the fields of computing and technology have been written in indelible ink. His life, to date, has been an unusually effective combination of psychology, entrepreneurial sprit, vision, timing, and genuine empathy for human beings and their connection to technology.