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Title: After 45 Years, 74-Year-Old Spreadsheet Legend/EFF Cofounder Mitch
Kapor Gets His MIT Degree

Link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/06/30/03122...

Mitch Kapor dropped out of MIT's business school in 1979 - and had soon
cofounded the pioneering spreadsheet company Lotus. He also cofounded the
EFF, was the founding chair of the Mozilla Foundation, and is now a
billionaire (and an VC investor at Kapor Capital). 45 years later, when the
74-year-old was invited to give a guest lecture at MIT's business school last
year by an old friend (professor Bill Aulet), he'd teased the billionaire
that "there's only one problem, Mitch, I see here you haven't graduated from
MIT." The Boston Globe tells the story... After graduating from Yale in 1971
and bouncing around for almost a decade as "a lost and wandering soul,"
working as a disc jockey, a Transcendental Meditation teacher, and a mental
health counselor, Kapor said he became entranced by the possibilities of the
new Apple II personal computer. He started writing programs to solve
statistics problems and analyze data, which caught the attention of Boston-
area software entrepreneurs Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, who co-created
VisiCalc, one of the first spreadsheet programs. They introduced Kapor to
their California-based software publisher, Personal Software. Midway through
Kapor's 12-month master's program, the publisher offered him the then-
princely sum of about $20,000 if he'd adapt his stats programs to work with
VisiCalc. To finish the project, he took a leave from MIT, but then he
decided to leave for good to take a full-time job at Personal. Comparing his
decision to those of other famed tech founder dropouts, like Bill Gates,
Kapor said he felt the startup world was calling to him. "It was just so
irresistible," he said. "It felt like I could not let another moment go by
without taking advantage of this opportunity or the window would close...."
When Aulet made his joke on the phone call with his old friend in 2024, Kapor
had largely retired from investing and realized that he wanted to complete
his degree. "I don't know what prompted me, but it started a conversation"
with MIT about the logistics of finally graduating, Kapor said. By the time
Kapor gave the lecture in March, Aulet had discovered Kapor was only a few
courses short. MIT does not give honorary degrees, but school officials allow
students to make up for missing classes with an independent study and a
written thesis. Kapor decided to write a paper on the roots and development
of his investing strategy. "It's timely, it's highly relevant, and I have
things to say," he said. One 77-page thesis later, Kapor, donning a cap and
gown, finally received his master's degree in May, at a ceremony in the Hyatt
Regency Hotel in Cambridge, not far from where he founded Lotus.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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