Mitchell Kapor

Cofounder, Lotus Development

Story:

     Lotus get started when Mitchell Kapor met Eric Rosenfeld at the Apple II user group, called New England Apple Tree, he confounded. He was asked by Rosenfeld to help him write a statistics routine that ran on Apple II which could be used to analyze data in his dissertion. They realized that what they did could help other people and so they began to call it Tiny Troll. They met the authors of VisiCalc in one of the meetings of the Apple II user group and Kapor was introduced to their publisher- Dan Fylstra and Peter Jennings- who offered them to have Tiny Troll as a companion product to VisiCalc. Kapor decided and began to write and clean up Tiny Troll alone since his partner was already engaged to teaching in Harvard. Since he still wanted to make it better and it's almost done, he demanded the publisher to let him move out to California, where they were, and hire him as a product manager which they found fine. Tiny Troll was eventually changed to the name VisiPlot. Personal Software began bringing in more management which made him be moved aside since he has not yet finished his product for about 6 months of his stay in California. He moved back to Boston and finally finished it after another six months. It was brought out in the early part of 1981 and started generating a huge amount in royalties right away- about $100K a month. He then started to assist the VisiCalc guys and work with bob Frankston in developing the data interchange format which would be a way to exchange data between VisiCalc and VisiPlot. The moving of data between these two programs was really cumbersome since there were no hard drives in those days, and Kapor was the person to raise the idea of putting both programs on a single disc to make the process less cumbersome. But, it was just taken for granted making him feel that the people around him doesn't want to work with him anymore so he had them buy him out for $1,200,000. After six months, he started founding Lotus Development with Jonathan Sachs- the person who architect and implemented the original version of 1-2-3. In August 1981, when IBM announced IBM PC, they decided to target it and build a product that is optimized for its large memory space and fast processor. They grabbed the opportunity and took advantage of the fact that Software Arts and Personal Software were fighting with each other and were essentially distracted; to create a bigger spreadsheet that's faster and takes full advantage of the IBM PC. Lotus went public in 1983 where Kapor served as president and CEO from 1982 to 1986. It was in 1995 that Lotus was acquired by IBM for $3.5 billion.

THREE THINGS I LEARNED:

     As I read how Lotus Development was founded, I basically learned three things from its cofounder Mitchell Kapor.

     First, I learned that even though you have many credentials or working backgrounds, you should not underestimate people and judge them from their appearance. Just like Mitchell Kapor when he was hired as product manager at Personal Software, his ideas were not always given attention by the Visicalc guys and all of his coworkers never gave interest to what he suggests. And the reason is simply because he had no credentials at all except for his unfinished product which they got interested with. But what happened is that a simple pest turned out to be Visicalc's savior when the founders of it were having legal disputes with their publisher personal Software. Moreover, the Lotus 1-2-3 developed by his company eventually hit the market and it took over to the "killer app" VisiCalc.

     The next thing I learned is that in every startup, there is really a need to give human relations importance. Just like what Kapor did, he made the kind of place that he would want to work at in the company he's running. He created a workplace that treated people well. This idea was actually the same idea of the successful British entrepreneur at Scotland in the name of Robert Owen which laid the foundation for human relations movement.

     Lastly, I learned that when choosing a successor to your position, you should choose the person not only because he/ she has good credentials. The thing should be is that that person should share the same vision or values you have so that the things you have started and put in place would sustain even though you're gone.