Mitch Kapor
Regular readers of this magazine might remember that we opened our issue about Microsoft three years ago with a reference to the D5 conference panel of May 2007, where Bill Gates and Steve Jobs shared the stage with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. At the beginning of that event, around minute 07:30 of the recording, you can hear Walt calling out a certain person in the audience.
Before we get started, I think you know, there were some pioneers - of course we have the pioneers here on stage, but there were some other really important pioneers in the video we just saw. And a couple of them are here in the audience. So, Mitch Kapor, who is a regular D could you just stand up and, wherever you are - there he is.
Mitchell Kapor has not (yet) written (or published) his autobiography, at least not that we are aware of. He should have, not only for his exceptional contributions to the development and spread of the personal computer in the 1980s (this author thinks that Mitch should have shared the stage with Jobs and Gates that day of May 2007), but also because Mitch believed that a different kind of Corporate America was possible, and did everything he could to make it happen.
(There is a book, however, written about Mitch Kapor and one of his projects: “Dreaming in Code”, published in 2007, and reviewed by Joel Spolsky. The book tells the story of a failed open source collaboration software package called “Chandler”. No, it is not a reference to the character in the TV comedy show “Friends” played by the late Matthew Perry, but to a writer called Raymond Chandler.)
In lieu of an autobiography we have, thankfully, countless interviews and video recordings to learn about Mitch’s worldview in his own words. The objective of this exercise is to understand that the founding of Lotus Development Corporation was a vehicle, not for becoming a distinguished member of the 0.1% of the richest people in the planet, or to dominate the spreadsheet or workgroup markets, but to embrace a certain, some would say outdated, vision of philanthropy and humanities.
Let us enumerate a few of those sources.
Esquire Magazine
The testosterone-filled cover of the December 1984 issue of Esquire magazine boasts the title “The Best of the New Generation”. Given the tagline of the magazine (“Man At His Best”), one would safely presume that “The Best” are all men, but behold! The subtitle on the cover clearly says “Men and Women Under Forty Who Are Changing America”. Phew.
In page 355 (heavyweight magazines were a staple before the Web) we find an interview with Mitch Kapor, where he, after being described as a “cross between Rocky Balboa and a yoga master” (whatever that means), Mitch says:
The whole notion of preserving the best of the Sixties values, whatever they are, and marrying them back into the American dream–it’s a very potent combination, because seemingly opposite things are coming together. Frenzies of energy. I think there’s a vanguard, a body of people, in which class I’ve put myself, who have tried to be creative in preserving and building upon a certain set of values. To say, ‘Hey, you have a business? It is just as important that it be good for people as for the bottom line.’ Not only that, but that being good for the bottom line is integrally tied with being a good place for people to work.
You know what it is? It’s receptivity. Receptivity to the process dimension. What’s the asset here? The asset is people.
Not a lot of AI or crypto entrepreneurs speak like that nowadays, let alone do it, innit? A few paragraphs below, Mitch explains why:
Ultimately, though, I don’t subscribe to romantic notions of the entrepreneur as hero. I’ts like everything else–there are good entrepreneurs and bad ones, good cowboys and bad cowboys. The mere fact of belonging to that category, the idea that having gotten there one has some heroic qualities–I don’t believe it.
A healthy reminder and a warning to those among us worshiping the wrong gods. You know who they are, and you know who you are.
Rolling Stone Magazine
There were some other romantic notions to which Mitch adhered, though. In a Rolling Stone article by Jeff Goodell in 1993, we read that
Kapor went on to flirt with a number of alternate lives, including a short stint as a stand-up comic. But then, in the late Seventies, he got his hands on an Apple II, and his life suddenly found direction. (…)
But unlike his ex-rival Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, seemingly born with a robber baron’s compulsion to rule the world, Kapor quickly grew bored by corporate life.
While Steve Jobs reportedly suggested Bill Gates to “drop some acid”, Mitch would have probably asked Bill to start his foundation a decade before meeting Melinda.
William Aspray
None other than the great software historian William Aspray interviewed Mitch for the “Oral History” recorded on behalf of the Computer History Museum in November 2004. This gem provides several clues about the Mitch’s personal history.
(…) I went to college and wound up – at 16 – at Yale and discovered that pure math was not my thing. It was just way over my head, and I was probably smoking too much marijuana at the time too; my brain was clouded. I got very interested in the counterculture, and I was mainly on the Yale radio station and barely squeaked through academically. But I had one course in programming that was on APL (A Programming Language), which was great.
Ah, APL; one of the languages Alan Perlis profusely praised. But there is more:
I don’t like working for others, and I have problems with authority.
Welcome to the club. Then we reach the core:
We created a very progressive corporate culture. I was such a bad employee. I had this attitude, and the woman I hired as my office manager was a political radical – this is at the very, very beginning – who needed a job, and I was more comfortable hiring other odd ball people because I felt more comfortable with them. She just had a very left-wing, progressive attitude, much more so than I, but I kind of liked having that in the mix. She hired Freada Kapor-Klein, who’s now my wife, to be the Director of Employee Relations with a charter to build the most progressive corporate culture in the US. We did all of this outrageous stuff that I’m extremely proud of, and that people love the company for, and which has had a very significant long-term impact. (…)
We had very serious diversity efforts ongoing. We had a very diverse work force. We were the first corporate sponsor I believe anywhere of an AIDS walk, which then became a big thing. We adopted the Sullivan Principles and wouldn’t sell into South Africa. We had a very egalitarian kind of culture, based on respect and fairness. I’m really proud of that.
This was during the 1980s, when the most famous South African in the world was an unjustly jailed individual called Nelson Mandela, not the “space Karen” right-wing asshole actively engaged in polluting social media and low Earth orbit alike, and who shall remain nameless in this article.
Sterling Report
The result of Mitch’s take on life and business was nothing short of sensational and transformational, as explained in the December 2004 issue of the long-gone Sterling Report:
In 1982, he (Mitchell Kapor) founded Lotus Development Corporation, for which he is most noted. While there, he revolutionized corporate workplace culture by making diversity and inclusivity top priorities in his goal for creating an environment that attracted and retained employees. There were many “firsts” for Lotus, including being the first company to sponsor an AIDS Walk event in the mid-80’s and refusing to do business with South Africa due to Apartheid.
To provide an institutional and corporate framework to these activities, Kapor hired Janet Axelrod (the “political radical” he mentioned in the Aspray interview quoted previously), who took not just a few cues from the work of Barbara Walker at Digital Equipment Corporation at the end of the 1970s.
Computer History Museum
Under the umbrella of Janet Axelrod, Freada Kapor Klein, and Mitch Kapor, Lotus was not only talking the talk but quite literally walking the walk.
Given the size of Boston relative to Los Angeles and New York City, the success of the Boston AIDS Walk on June 1, 1986 was extraordinary. 4,000 people walked to the Boston Common, raising $500,000. Governor Dukakis and Mayor Flynn both appeared. Not only was Lotus the only corporate sponsor, but its early gift of $10,000 to the Walk funded all of the organizational costs to make the Walk a success.
Kids: if you thought the 2020 pandemic was a rough time to be alive, you have no idea how horrendous the early 1980s were to people infected with HIV. We do not talk about AIDS so much these days, but just to give you an idea, even after the acclaimed release of “Philadelphia” in 1993, and even with a well-deserved Academy Awards in Hanks’ hands, the stigma against HIV-positive people has been horrifying. The availability for treatments against AIDS certainly helped subdue the shadow of rejection hovering above its victims, but it still persists to a large extent.
Los Angeles Times
The example set by Lotus did not go unnoticed outside its headquarters, as reported by the Los Angeles Times in October 1993:
Indeed, many tech companies have been national leaders in developing non-discrimination policies that mention sexual orientation and the granting of benefits to same-sex domestic partners.
Apple Computer Inc., Borland International Inc. and Lotus Development Corp., for example, were among companies honored at the three-day event organized by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. The conference was sponsored by more than 40 companies–a big leap for an effort begun in 1991 with no corporate backing as a five-hour gathering in a college hall in San Francisco.
Most of those pioneering efforts in diversity and inclusion were largely forgotten by Silicon Valley, only to be somehow “rediscovered” almost 20 years later, during the mid-2010s amidst the rise in prominence of the #MeToo and the Black Lives Matter movements.
Andrew Goldstein
Alas, good things never last forever. An excerpt from the interview conducted by another legendary computing historian, Andrew Goldstein from the Center for the History of Electrical Engineering, on May 20th, 1993, tells us about Mitch’s reasons to leave Lotus in July 1986.
I felt that there was just too much responsibility I couldn’t sleep at night. I think I felt overly responsible for the whole thing. That certainly didn’t help. It wasn’t my ambition to run a big company. I wanted to do this great product and make a big business out of it. But I didn’t find the positive parts of running this big show to be very gratifying.
To be fair to Mitch, the 1980s were the times of Reaganomics and its partner in crime, the almighty cult of Wall Street. It must have been exhausting to deal with the loud voices of cocaine-fueled capitalists screaming for more and more profits via the reduction of all unneeded expenses, particularly those related to inclusion, social responsibility, and other stupid ideas like that.
Jessica Livingston
In chapter 6 of her 2007 book “Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days”, Jessica Livingston (of Y Combinator fame) interviewed Mitch Kapor.
(As an anecdote, one could say that the order of the chapters in this book is as important as their contents: chapter 5 contains an interview of Dan Bricklin, the inventor of the VisiCalc spreadsheet, the product that Lotus 1-2-3 ultimately killed; and chapter 7 is an interview of Ray Ozzie, who had brought Lotus Notes to the market, the product that would trigger IBM to aggressively take over Lotus Development Corporation in 1995.)
In page 95, amidst the descriptions of how Lotus grew from zero to millions of dollars of revenue, and from zero to hundreds of employees in just a few years, Mitch says:
The other thing that I cared about from the very beginning was creating a workplace that treated people well. (…) So when I unexpectedly found myself running this high-growth successful software company, the thought of making it the kind of place that I would want to work at and different from all those other places was incredibly appealing.
(…) And so we did all sorts of very progressive things with the corporate culture. We invested in the human resources function extensively. We surveyed all the employees annually on quality of work-life issues, and took what we heard very seriously. We had a corporate value statement that wasn’t just on a piece of paper. We actually at one point tied a portion of the managers’ bonuses to how well their direct reports viewed them exemplifying the corporate values. I made every single manager get on the support lines and listen to customers, no matter what function they were in.
This last part reminds me of a scene at the beginning of the 2014 movie “The Intern”, where we see Anne Hathaway’s character trying to solve an issue with a customer on the phone. But Mitch says more:
When I was running Lotus, we never had a single employment discrimination lawsuit (…). And then we had a diversity committee that had out gays and lesbians on it–this was in 1984. We were the first corporate sponsor of an AIDS walk. We had a corporate philanthropy committee in which the employees actually made decisions about where the money went, not the pet projects of senior management. So for many people what was memorable and important about Lotus was that it was the best place they ever worked.
Let that last phrase sink in. Are you able to say that about your current employer, or, if you are an entrepreneur reading this, do you think your employees say that about you?
Michael Swaine and Paul Freiberger
In 2014, The Pragmatic Bookshelf published the third edition of an absolute classic book about the history of the personal computer, “Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer”.
On the closing words of the last chapter of the book, the authors dedicate a full section to the post-Lotus years of Mitch, and the creation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. This organization became a cornerstone during the early days of the World Wide Web and the explosion of online services.
EFF evolved quickly from a legal defense fund for some kid hackers to an influential lobbying organization. “In a way it was an ACLU of cyberspace,” Kapor now says. “We quickly found that we were doing a lot of good raising issues, raising consciousness about the whole idea of how the Bill of Rights ought to apply to cyberspace and online activity. I got very passionate about it.”
(…)
Ironically, the social networks built by the cloud-based companies have become the means of circulating both facts and wild rumors about these surveillance horrors. As the industry rushes gleefully into a networked world of embedded devices and lives lived in public, the public is increasingly convinced that we are being sucked into some nightmare science-fiction future of mind control, tracking devices embedded in newborns, and a Big Brother who sees your every act and knows your every thought. Mary Shelley could do a lot with that material.
A decade later, the words of Swaine and Freiberger sound as stronger as ever.
Founder Institute
But wait, where is this month’s Vidéothèque video? It is a short fragment of a talk Mitch gave at the Founder Institute in 2014, titled “Mitch Kapor on Why Diversity is Essential for Startup Success”.
This talk happened right at the middle of the 2010s, when the terms “diversity and inclusion” were once again part of the agenda, after being almost forgotten for more than two decades. In it, Mitch tackles some common misunderstandings around D&I initiatives, including the infamous question of quotas (“fundamentally stupid in a suicidal kind of way”) and goes to the heart of the issue:
Teams that are more diverse (and this is across all dimensions, whether it’s age or gender or race and ethnicity) tend to have certain kinds of advantages in problem-solving, and they also have some disadvantages. If you’re a homogeneous group and everybody is the same you can make decisions much more quickly, but you can make decisions much better if there are multiplicity of perspectives.
It must be disheartening to have to repeat once and again the same message, to each and every generation of entrepreneurs out there, but clearly, the tech industry has a strong “white-male-between-25-and-35” bias.
Conclusion
What do we take of all these pieces of information? We can say without a doubt that Mitch is, by far, among the humblest and wisest people in the history of computing and entrepreneurship. He foresaw, almost exactly 40 years ago, the devastating strength of venture capital in the formation, behavior, and ultimate survival of businesses; yet he also saw the transformative power of software in culture and society. The clash between the two did not bode well; his prognosis was therefore, unfortunately and fortunately, correct.
His departure from the top job of Lotus Development Corporation, and his later work at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation remain as proofs of one thing: that Mitch is, essentially, an eternal optimist coupled with a pragmatist.
I hope that the totality of what I’ve done, or that which Freada and I have done together, really gives people a sense of hope and possibility, in a practical way, that business can be a constructive force in the world and genuinely help make the world a better place for everyone.
Plea
Mitch, if you are reading these lines, I beg you; write and publish your autobiography; and, if at all possible, do not ask Walter Isaacson for help, will you?
Well, actually… Walter Isaacson did write something about you, a very funny anecdote in his famed 2011 biography of Steve Jobs. In page 224 of chapter 18, titled “NeXT”, we can read this:
During the early months of NeXT, Jobs and Dan’l Lewin went on the road, often accompanied by a few colleagues, to visit campuses and solicit opinions. At Harvard they met with Mitch Kapor, the chairman of Lotus Software, over dinner at Harvest restaurant. When Kapor began slathering butter on his bread, Jobs asked him, “Have you ever heard of serum cholesterol?” Kapor responded, “I’ll make you a deal. You stay away from commenting on my dietary habits, and I will stay away from the subject of your personality.” It was meant humorously, but as Kapor later commented, “Human relationships were not his strong suit.” Lotus agreed to write a spreadsheet program for the NeXT operating system.
Dear Mitch: your story deserves to be told, and it would be much better if you told it yourself, with your own words, and, yes, with your own empathy, wit, and naïveté.
Yes, of course; Lotus Development Corporation produced great software and made a lot of cash, but none of that should be considered your greatest legacy. In the long run, what remains is the goodwill that one spreads in the world, of which in your case, there is a lot to talk about.
Watch this month’s Vidéothèque video, Mitch Kapor on Why Diversity is Essential for Startup Success, on YouTube. Complement it with this other one, “Lotus History: The First Five Years”.
Cover snapshot chosen by the author.