Mitch Kapor

“There are excellent public interest grounds to have a search engine whose rankings are transparent.”

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

“On a personal note, I was born in Brooklyn. My folks moved out to Long Island when I was quite young, but once a Brooklynite, always a Brooklynite.”

“I think there is widespread agreement that there is a crisis in public education.”

“You can't be in the tech community... without realizing there's a big shortage of talent.”

“Open source can propagate to fill all the nooks and crannies that people want it to fill.”

“That's 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 it's chartered by the government. It can't be pocketed.”

“Wikipedia has a way of compiling compendiums of information on subjects.”

“I routinely failed to understand that 'simple and straightforward' would have been a much better product strategy for Lotus.”

“If you go back to the '50s and '60s... there was zero tech in S.F. It was all in the Valley... and it crept northward in early 2000s.”

“I was trying to figure out what to do next, I'd been accumulating ideas for productivity tools - software people could use every day, particularly to help organize their lives.”

“Oakland's time is coming. In fact, Oakland's time is already here. Tech is coming to Oakland, and it's terribly exciting.”

“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?'”

“Life in cyberspace is often conducted in primitive frontier conditions, but it is a life which, at its best, is more egalitarian than elitist and more decentralized than hierarchical. It serves individuals and communities, not mass audiences, and it is extraordinarily multi-faceted in the purposes to which it is put.”

“If we're not creating an educated and skilled workforce, there is just no conceivable way that were going to be economically competitive.”

“Failing to continue to support the public higher-ed system in California will have devastating long-term consequences.”

“Everyone has a subconscious and automatic preference of this over that. Once you're aware of that, you can take steps to change.”

“People are hungry for community. They're hungry for meaning in a society that is oriented around the production and consumption of consumer goods.”

“We have a responsibility to give people opportunities to do what they can do. It's a fundamental tenet of democratic society. Libertarians who believe in a completely minimalist state, and don't feel we have that responsibility, are harming humanity.”

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