It took 45 years, but spreadsheet legend Mitch Kapor finally got his MIT degree

Summary

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 said last week. Why the tease? “Because I’m from New York and we talk trash all the time,” Aulet said. Get Starting PointA guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday.“He was just yanking my chain a little bit,” Kapor, 74, said 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 master’s 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 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.”Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development, at MIT in 1979, where he was studying for a mas...