You were listening to the Entrepreneurial Thought Leader series, brought to you weekly by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.

You can find podcasts and video clips of these lectures online at edcorner.standford.edu.

Today, I get to welcome, turns out an old friend, Mitch Kapor. Mitch sort of represents, if you look at your list here, and it's always great to pick up one of these on the way in or look on it online. Mitch is the first of eight, but he kind of represents a piece of everybody else who are going to see the rest of the quarter.

They're investors, they're entrepreneurs, oh my goodness, their social entrepreneurs here, people who are deeply interested in education.

So it's kind of cool that we get to have Mitch kick us off here in 2008.

I could spend the rest of the hour highlighting his bio.

I mean, he went to Yale, went to MIT.

We got an MIT fan down here with his t-shirt that says MIT nerds rock.

So we got at least two MIT nerds in the room.

But I got to know Mitch when he was,

it was a long time ago, 25 years ago,

when he was in the midst of founding Lotus.

Now, if you text or email your parents during this session

and say, did you use Lotus 1, 2, 3? About 90% probability

you'll get an answer back saying, yeah, of course. It was really the spreadsheet that was

the killer app for personal computing in the 80s, and a lot of people feel like it was the

major reason that personal computer took hold. Of course, now we use Excel and all that,

but many of the basic ideas were embedded in one, two, three, or its predecessor that were,

we both know well and who worked with Lotus 2, and that's VisiCalc. So that's from the sort

of 80s. But if you leap ahead, all the things have gone on recently, I'm going to start by chatting with Mitch about

what's up right now? What's he doing here in 2008? They relate specifically to a new

startup, well, was a new startup last year, Fox marks. And that makes sense, you know, for Fox

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