Top 101 Quotes & Sayings by Mitch Kapor
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American businessman Mitch Kapor.
Last updated on December 22, 2024.
If only I'd stayed on the West Coast, I might have made something of myself.
I was not a student of Wall Street, but I was a quick study.
I'd been a great angel investor, but professional venture capital was clearly not the right thing for me.
I had no fear of speaking to large audiences.
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.
Architecture is politics.
I'd always wanted to live in San Francisco, and my circumstances never permitted it. I'm so happy I made the move.
A typical medical practice is like an old-fashioned business which keeps all of its records on paper. It can probably track down any individual transaction if it needs to, but it's basically helpless when it comes to overall measurements of performance. And that's the big problem.
I don't think Silicon Valley understands the power of Wikipedia, how it works, or the opportunities it represents.
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.
Everyone has a subconscious and automatic preference of this over that. Once you're aware of that, you can take steps to change.
What is design? It's where you stand with a foot in two worlds - the world of technology and the world of people and human purposes - and you try to bring the two together.
Bulletin boards are sort of the garage bands of cyberspace.
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.
Wikipedia has a way of compiling compendiums of information on subjects.
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.
The Internet, the network of networks, is growing at an exponential pace. It's growing so fast, in fact, nobody really knows how many people use the Internet.
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.
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.
Failing to continue to support the public higher-ed system in California will have devastating long-term consequences.
Beware angel investors: they can be disruptive.
If advertisers want to decorate their ads to increase their conversions by showing what users think, that's a good thing.
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.
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.
People in the industry foresee a time in which, for many people, the only thing they'll need on a computer is a browser.
Hackers are seen as shadowy figures with superhuman powers that threaten civilization.
People are hungry for community. They're hungry for meaning in a society that is oriented around the production and consumption of consumer goods.
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.
I actually built a tiny computer as a junior high school project.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oakland's time is coming. In fact, Oakland's time is already here. Tech is coming to Oakland, and it's terribly exciting.
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?'
'Silicon Valley' has come to mean the Bay Area, not just down the Peninsula.
My history is to find the next big thing early.
If you look at the history of other movements, whether Civil Rights or environmental rights, these are all decades-long undertakings.
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.
I soon realized that the best thing I could do for the profession of human services was to get out of it.
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.
Before I started a company, I was an employee with a bad attitude. I was always felt like, bosses are stupid, and people weren't well treated.
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.
If information wants to be free, then that's true everywhere, not just in information technology.
Technology advances at exponential rates, and human institutions and societies do not. They adapt at much slower rates. Those gaps get wider and wider.
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.
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.
The accomplishment of open source is that it is the back end of the web, the invisible part, the part that you don't see as a user.
One of the perks of being the founder is that you get to build the company in your image.
No, my family is Russian, Georgian, via Ellis Island.
I woke up nights, worrying that Lotus was out of control - that no one would know what to do.
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.
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.
I'm an inveterate note taker - I scribble all these things down on pieces of paper. I wanted to create some way of organizing all of them.
Computers ought to help people find their own best path through lots of textual information.
Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.
Inside every working anarchy, there's an Old Boy Network.
Managerial and professional people hadn't really used computers, hadn't sat down at keyboards, until personal computers. Personal computers have a totally different feel.
That's why it has to be a nonprofit, because a nonprofit is required to take monies it receives and use them for the purposes for which it's chartered by the government. It can't be pocketed.
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.
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