As we mentioned, we are dedicated to making the Startup Weekend EDU event huge. If you thought we were all talk, here is some proof. We are proud to announce that Mitch Kapor will be keynoting our event (I don’t know how Dave pulled this one off, but he is quite the magician).
We will be inviting the community Sunday evening at 5:00pm to watch his keynote which will be followed by all of our teams pitching what they have built over the weekend.
Mitch Kapor is a pioneer in personal computing and has shown his extreme passion for education through his continuous efforts to invest in companies that create social value. It’s hard to summarize his bio in a short blog post, but here goes nothing…
Bio:
- Founder of the Lotus Development Corporation which was acquired by IBM in 1995 for $3.5BIL.
- Chairman for the Mozilla foundation.
- Chair of the Board of Directors of Linden Lab, a San Francisco-based company which created Second Life
-Advisory Board for the Wikimedia Foundation.
Investments
Kapor Capital invests in seed and early stage startups whose success in business generates positive social impact. His portfolio consists of startups like:
Get Satisfaction
Uber
Twilio
Posterous
and plenty more…
Some of his education investments include:
EduLender
inkling
Fidelis College
InternMatch
MindSnacks
MotionMath
Philanthropy
-Mitch Kapor Foundation is a private foundation which works to ensure fairness and equity, particularly for low-income communities of color. Current areas of focus for the foundation include building sustainable communities, affording greater access to college education for young African-American males, and protecting the integrity of the electoral process.
-Director & major funder of the Level Playing Field Institute, which works to increase fairness in education and the workplace by closing the opportunity gap and removing barriers to success.
-Board member Commonsense Media, the nation’s leading independent non-profit advocating for children.
-Advisory board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (defending free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights on the Internet)
Heck, he even worked with the 2008 Obama campaign and transition team in the area of technology and technology policy.
After an amazing weekend, I can’t think of a better person to summarize the amount of impact we can create in this world than Mitch Kapor. Hope to see you there, you definitely don’t want to miss this!