Mitch Kapor

board of directors, Mozilla Foundation

Mitchell Kapor, is a pioneer of the personal computing revolution and has been at the forefront of information technology for 30 years as an entrepreneur, software designer, activist, and investor. He is widely known as founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the "killer application" which made the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980s. Mr. Kapor was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1950 and graduated from Freeport (Long Island) High School in 1967. He received a B.A. from Yale College in 1971 and studied psychology, linguistics, and computer science as part of an interdisciplinary major in Cybernetics. In 1978, he received a Master's degree in counseling psychology from Campus-Free College (later renamed Beacon College) in Boston and worked as a mental health counselor at New England Memorial Hospital in Stoneham, Massachusetts. He also attended the Sloan School of Management at MIT, taking a leave of absence one term short of graduation in 1980 in order to take a job in a Silicon Valley start-up company. In the fall of 2005 he became a Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-taught a course "Open Source Development and Distribution of Information". In 2006, he was appointed Adjunct Professor at the School of Information at U.C. Berkeley. Mr. Kapor has written widely about the impact of personal computing and networks on society. He has contributed articles, columns, and op-ed pieces on information infrastructure policy, intellectual property issues, and antitrust in the digital era to Scientific American, *The New York Times*, *Forbes*, *Tricycle: The Buddhist Review*, and *Communications of the ACM*.