Mitch and Freada Kapor

Mitch Kapor is a pioneer of the personal computing industry and long-time startup investor. He founded Lotus Development Corporation and designed Lotus 1-2-3, the “killer application” which made the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980s. He is the co-founder of The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the founding Chair of Mozilla, creator of Firefox. His successful early investments in the Internet sector, streaming media, and virtual reality earned him a reputation for seeing around corners.

For over a decade at Kapor Capital, Mitch and his wife, Dr. Freada Kapor Klein, have invested in tech startups which close gaps of access, opportunity, and outcome for low-income communities and communities of color, and in founders from underrepresented groups.

Through the work of the Kapor Center, Mitch and Freada take a comprehensive approach to removing barriers in education and the workplace, fixing leaks at every stage of the tech pipeline. Mitch serves on the board of SMASH, a non-profit founded by Freada to help underrepresented students hone their STEM knowledge, while building the networks and skills for careers in tech and the sciences. Mitch and Freada are co-authors of Closing the Equity Gap, which details how to create wealth while simultaneously addressing the inequalities in startup investing. “Genius,” Mitch likes to say, “is evenly distributed by zip code, but opportunity is not.”

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Freada Kapor Klein is an entrepreneur, activist, investor and pioneer in the field of organizational culture and diversity. As a Founding Partner at Kapor Capital, Freada
invests in seed-stage tech startups that close gaps of access, opportunity, or outcome for low-income communities and communities of color. She is the founder of SMASH, now in its 20th year, providing rigorous STEM education for low-income high school students of color. SMASH Scholars graduate college in STEM at more than 2x the national average for all students. In 1976, she co-founded the Alliance Against Sexual Coercion, the first organization to address sexual harassment. She holds a Ph.D. in Social Policy & Research, having conducted numerous landmark surveys of perceptions and experiences of bias, harassment, and disrespectful treatment in workplaces. Freada is a member of the Obama Foundation Tech Policy Council, the U.C. Berkeley Chancellor’s Board of Visitors, & the council that formed the Hollywood Commission
chaired by Anita Hill. She serves on the advisory boards of Twilio.org, Generation Investment Management, and Trident; she is a board observer at Aclima.

Freada and her husband, Mitch Kapor, are co-authors of the 2023 book Closing the Equity Gap, which identifies how to create wealth while simultaneously addressing the inequalities in startup investing. She is also the author of Giving Notice, which details the human and financial cost of hidden bias in the workplace.