Lotus Software Pioneer Mitch Kapor Born

He wrote Lotus 1-2-3 on a plane. Literally. Kapor sketched the core concept for what became the bestselling software of the early PC era during a flight, and within two years it had made him $70 million. But here's the twist: he walked away. Sold Lotus in 1987, then co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation to fight for digital civil liberties, because he'd seen what unchecked tech power actually looked like from the inside. The spreadsheet that built corporate America helped fund the lawyers protecting your internet rights today. Born in 1950, Mitch Kapor had been a transcendental meditation teacher, a disc jockey, and a psychiatric hospital counselor before discovering personal computers. He learned VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program, and realized he could build something better. Lotus 1-2-3, released in January 1983, combined spreadsheet, database, and charting functions into a single program that ran faster than anything on the market. It became the IBM PC's killer app, the software that convinced corporate America to put computers on every desk. Lotus Development Corporation hit $53 million in revenue in its first year, making it the fastest-growing company in American business history at the time. But Kapor grew uncomfortable with the company's rapid growth and the culture of corporate technology. He resigned as CEO in 1986 and sold his stake for approximately $70 million. In 1990, he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation with John Perry Barlow and John Gilmore, applying his tech fortune to defending privacy, free speech, and civil liberties in the emerging digital world. The EFF has since become the most influential digital rights organization in existence.