Mitch Kapor finally completes MIT master's degree after 45-year detour

During which he coded Lotus 1-2-3 and co-founded Mozilla and the EFF

The man behind Lotus 1-2-3 and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has wrapped up a master's degree at MIT Sloan, decades after dropping out to help kickstart the PC software boom.

Mitchell David Kapor has a pretty impressive CV already. He started several important organizations, including Lotus Development Corporation, then the EFF, and then the Mozilla Foundation. His start in programming led him to drop out of MIT in 1980. This month, though, he finally finished his nominally 12-month master's degree there, making him arguably the most accomplished "MBA" in the world.

It's not his first degree – he got a bachelor's from Yale – but it's significant inasmuch as it's from MIT, which doesn't hand out honorary degrees. Graduates must earn them, which Kapor has. He has been awarded a Master of Science in Management Studies for his thesis, Principles and Practices of Gap-Closing Investing [PDF].

After his bachelor's, Kapor took a few years off, and we don't blame him. It was 1971, which we hear was a fun time to be a 21-year-old. Over the next eight years or so, Kapor worked as a DJ, taught transcendental meditation, and did mental health counseling. In 1979, he got a place at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Partway through, though, Dan Bricklin of VisiCalc fame offered Kapor $20,000 to come work for him, and he never looked back.

Kapor went on to start Lotus and co-develop its combined spreadsheet, database, and business graphics app 1-2-3, as The Register recounted when that program turned 30. He also co-developed Lotus's radical Personal Information Manager (PIM) app, Agenda.

In 1994, Kapor co-founded the EFF, which campaigns for civil liberties on the internet. When Netscape set up its non-profit arm, the Mozilla Foundation, and handed it the source code of what was to be Netscape 5, Kapor was its first board chair. He also funded the short-lived FOSS next-gen PIM app Chandler, billed at the time as a "spreadsheet for the mind."

Between the EFF and Mozilla, Kapor started an ethical investment capital company, Kapor Capital. That's why MIT prof Bill Aulet invited Kapor to give this year's Doriot Lecture at Sloan.

The small issue being that Kapor was a former Sloan student, but dropped out. There is a bit of a history of people dropping out of college and becoming famous for what they did instead – then returning decades later to finish the course.

The Reg FOSS desk's favorite in this category is Dr Brian May, justly celebrated for his work on radial velocities in the zodiacal dust cloud [PDF]. ®