At the end of the phone call last November inviting Kapor to give the lecture, Aulet said he decided to tease his old friend. “I’m like, there’s only one problem, Mitch, I see here you haven’t graduated from MIT,” Aulet recalled last week. Why the tease? “Because I’m from New York and we talk trash all the time,” Aulet said.
“He was just yanking my chain a little bit,” Kapor, 74, recalled in a separate interview.
But the joke got Kapor thinking about why he left MIT without a degree, a story that starts even before he enrolled in Sloan’s accelerated masters program in the summer of 1979.
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 masters 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 decided to leave for good to take a full-time job at Personal.
Comparing his decision to those by other famed tech founder drop-outs, 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.”
A few years later, Kapor returned to Cambridge and founded Lotus in Kendall Square, leading to his first encounter with Aulet.
Around 1982, Aulet was working at IBM in the then-new personal computer unit when Kapor visited the tech giant’s Madison Avenue office in New York to demonstrate Lotus 1-2-3. Kapor arrived dressed not in the IBM standard of a suit and tie but in a Hawaiian shirt, Aulet recalled. “This guy was so cool, so relatable,” Aulet said, which eventually inspired him to become a startup founder himself.
Over the decades, the pair kept in touch. Aulet left IBM in 1993, founded several companies, and started teaching at MIT in 2005. Kapor left Lotus in 1986, cofounded the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1990, and began investing in startups.
As a venture capitalist, Kapor developed a philosophy with his wife, Freada Kapor Klein, that they called “gap-closing investing,” which aimed to fight racial and income inequality by supporting business concepts that would address the needs of underserved communities. HealthSherpa, for example, helped people sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, and LendStreet helped people climb out of debt.
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 the roots and development of his investing strategy. “It’s timely, it’s highly relevant, and I have things to say,” he explained.
One 77-page thesis later, Kapor, donning a cap and gown, finally received his masters degree in May, at a ceremony in the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Cambridge, not far from where he founded Lotus.
The thesis explained that though Kapor’s investing strategy was not aimed at picking entrepreneurs from underrepresented groups, he ended up backing many such founders.
“It turns out that, more often than not, the kinds of people who are the entrepreneurs with these ideas, who have the ability to do them, are themselves from a marginalized or underrepresented group, because that’s the world they know and they grew up in, and that’s what lit their fires,” he said.
Such an outlook could be increasingly important at a time when politicians, from the president on down, have been fighting more straightforward diversity efforts, in business and beyond, Kapor said.
“We take an alternative approach that avoids the kind of head-on opposition in the current political environment,” he said. “This is not tech’s shining hour — far from it — but there’s still reason to be hopeful.”
Aaron Pressman can be reached at aaron.pressman@globe.com. Follow him @ampressman.