Mitch Kapor

"A typical medical practice is like an old-fashioned business which keeps all of its records on paper. It can probably track down any individual transaction if it needs to, but it's basically helpless when it comes to overall measurements of performance. And that's the big problem."

"Before I started a company, I was an employee with a bad attitude. I was always felt like, bosses are stupid, and people weren't well treated."

"Computers ought to help people find their own best path through lots of textual information."

"I give Bill Gates an A for vision because, as a business person and a strategist, he's brilliant. His flaw is that his view is not informed by a humanistic or compassionate vision of how to make computers work for people."

"If you look at the history of other movements, whether Civil Rights or environmental rights, these are all decades-long undertakings."

"Managerial and professional people hadn't really used computers, hadn't sat down at keyboards, until personal computers. Personal computers have a totally different feel."

"No, my family is Russian, Georgian, via Ellis Island."

"Well, I had a lot of help from my father with the soldering and so on, and he was very good at math and was fascinated with computers, and so I was fortunate enough to have a bunch of exposure going all the way back to high school - this was in the 1960s."

"What is design? It's where you stand with a foot in two worlds - the world of technology and the world of people and human purposes - and you try to bring the two together."