Quotes by Mitch Kapor

Before I started a company, I was an employee with a bad attitude. I was always felt like, bosses are stupid, and people werent well treated.

Managerial and professional people hadnt really used computers, hadnt sat down at keyboards, until personal computers. Personal computers have a totally different feel.

Computers ought to help people find their own best path through lots of textual information.

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 give Bill Gates an A for vision because, as a business person and a strategist, hes brilliant. His flaw is that his view is not informed by a humanistic or compassionate vision of how to make computers work for people.

Human intelligence is a marvelous, subtle, and poorly understood phenomenon. There is no danger of duplicating it anytime soon.

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

The kind of products you envision as an entrepreneur is a function of your life experience.

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 its basically helpless when it comes to overall measurements of performance. And thats the big problem.

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?

The critical thing in developing software is not the program, its the design. It is translating understanding of user needs into something that can be realized as a computer program.

Lotuss efforts around the Mac were pathetically unsuccessful, which is sad.

If information wants to be free, then thats true everywhere, not just in information technology.

The widespread adoption of broadband and the continued advances in personal computing technology are finally making it possible for the collective creation of an online world on a realistic scale.

Thats 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 its chartered by the government. It cant be pocketed.

If you look at the history of other movements, whether Civil Rights or environmental rights, these are all decades-long undertakings.