Mitch Kapor

Businessman

1950-11-01

Quotes by Mitch Kapor

• Successful entrepreneurs develop products that inspire their passion. They have to. It's that passion that gets them through the long, arduous, uncertain and frightening early days of a start-up.

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• 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.

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• Hackers are seen as shadowy figures with superhuman powers that threaten civilization.

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

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• Life in cyberspace seems to be shaping up exactly like Thomas Jefferson would have wanted: founded on the primacy of individual liberty and a commitment to pluralism, diversity, and community.

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• 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.

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

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• 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.

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

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

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• There's an admirable belief about the virtues of meritocracy - that the best ideas prove the best results. It's a wrong and misguided belief by well-intentioned people.

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• Technology advances at exponential rates, and human institutions and societies do not. They adapt at much slower rates. Those gaps get wider and wider.

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• Wikipedia has a way of compiling compendiums of information on subjects.

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• I don't think Silicon Valley understands the power of Wikipedia, how it works, or the opportunities it represents.

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• The computer environment is radically different today. In the 1980s, it was like the Wild West, with a lot of open territory. Now, the cowboys have moved out and the farmers have moved in.

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