Quotes from Mitch Kapor

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

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.

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.

Old ways of thinking die hard, particularly when they were weaned by legally enforced monopolies.

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.

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

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.

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.

'Silicon Valley' has come to mean the Bay Area, not just down the Peninsula.

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.

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.

I routinely failed to understand that 'simple and straightforward' would have been a much better product strategy for Lotus.

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.

I originally invested in Dropcam because I foresaw what the company and their products could do for consumers and the industry. I've been deeply impressed with what they've done in such little time, and I'm confident that they'll continue to exceed my expectations.

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

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

It is possible to take a population of students who are failing and whose schools are failing them, who are being written off as not being college material, and if they have the right support, they can all go to college and succeed.

Architecture is politics.

No, my family is Russian, Georgian, via Ellis Island.

E-mail is a victim of its own success.

When regulations restricting competition are relaxed, nobody's market share is protected. If telephone companies can offer video programming, cable revenue will surely drop.

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.

Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.

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.