Mitchell Kapor – Partner

Mitch Kapor works with startups using information technology platforms to drive disruptive innovation. He is a seed stage investor in Uber, Twilio, Inkling and University Now. His focus is increasingly on driving positive social impact, especially in leveraging IT to close gaps of opportunity and access in education, health care and other areas.

Mitch founded Lotus Development Corporation and designed Lotus 1-2-3, the “killer application” which made the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980s. He is the co-founder of The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which protects freedom and privacy on the Internet and the founding chair of the Mozilla Foundation, creator of the open source web browser Firefox. He is also a founding investor in Linden Lab, maker of the first successful virtual world, Second Life.

Currently he serves on the board of Mitchell Kapor Foundation, which works to ensure fairness and equity for low-income communities of color in the areas of civic engagement, sustainability, and college access and the Level Playing Field Institute, whose mission is to enhance equal opportunity in education and the workplace.

Mitch is also on the Advisory Board of Generation Investment Management, a firm whose vision is to embed sustainability into the mainstream capital markets.

Freada Kapor Klein – Partner

Freada Kapor Klein, Ph.D., is an entrepreneur, activist and leader in the field of organizational culture and diversity. An entrepreneur herself who has pioneered in developing models for revenue and sustainability of non-profits, she is an active advisor and mentor to social entrepreneurs. She is also an advocate for entrepreneurs from underrepresented backgrounds, especially people of color and women.

Dr. Klein was the first Director of Organizational Development, Training and Employee Relations for Lotus Development Corporation. Her consulting firm, Klein Associates, specializes in employee surveys, training, and consulting on all forms of bias, harassment, and discrimination in the workplace. Klein’s client base ranges from Harvard Business School to the World Bank to top tier international professional services firms, and tech start-ups.

In 2001 she founded the Level Playing Field Institute, a non-profit which promotes innovative approaches to fairness in higher education and workplaces by removing barriers to full participation; it houses the SMASH (Summer Math and Science Honors) Academy for low income high school students of color. Klein is the author of “Giving Notice: Why the Best and the Brightest Leave the Workplace and How You Can Help Them Stay”.

Brian Dixon – Associate

Brian Dixon focuses on identifying and evaluating early-stage investments along with helping portfolio companies grow effectively. Brian has joined Kapor Capital after spending two summers as an MBA intern. He is committed to making sure entrepreneurs of all backgrounds have access to advice and capital in order to make their business succeed.

Brian holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer and Information Science from Northeastern University and an MBA from F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College and has been selected as a Management Leadership for Tomorrow (MLT) Fellow, Babson Fellow, and Springworks Scholar.

Prior to business school, Brian started his career as a software engineer at Citigroup through their selective IT analyst training program and has worked as a product and project manager at Education First and Babyzone (Acquired by Disney Inc.). He has founded multiple technology start-up companies and enjoys working with founders and accelerator programs.

Ross Fubini – Advisor

Ross was the Co-Founder and a Board Member of Cubetree, a Gartner Visionary enterprise social collaboration company which is used by the Fortune 100 including SAP, Intuit, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He currently serves as an advisor to Kapor Capital, Palantir Technology, Facebook Causes, and other early stage technology companies.

From 2010-2011 Ross was a Vice President for SuccessFactors (NASDAQ:SFSF) which acquired his company CubeTree in 2010. Prior to that, Ross was Sr. Director of Engineering at Symantec, where he owned product development for Symantec/Brightmail Messaging Security anti-spam, anti-virus, and content filtering product lines serving 70,000 customers, protecting 100s of millions of email boxes, and delivering $300M+ revenue/year. Additionally Ross was a lead in M&A/partner selection including the integration of the IMLogic and TurnTide acquisitions; MessageLabs and Vontu partnerships. Before joining Symantec, Ross held technical leadership roles at BEA/Plumtree, TellMe Networks, and Netscape.

Ross is also an active board member of the Level Playing Field Institute (LPFI), a Kapor Foundation-funded non-profit that promotes innovative approaches to fairness in education and the workplace. He is an avid triathlete, marathon runner, and Ironman competitor. He holds a B.S. in engineering and art from Carnegie Mellon University.

Stephen DeBerry – Advisor

Stephen DeBerry makes and manages investments that align strong financial returns with positive social impact. He is the Founder and Chief Investment Officer at Bronze Investments.

Previously, Stephen was Investment Director at Omidyar Network, the mission-based investment firm started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife, Pam. Before that Stephen was a senior manager of business development at Interval Research, the research lab established by Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen.

Stephen is the Chairman of Friends of New Orleans and also serves the boards of The Association of Marshall Scholars and The Dalai Lama Foundation. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology with highest honors from UCLA as well as a Master’s degree in Social Anthropology and a Master of Business Administration degree from Oxford University. He is a Marshall Scholar and a Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute. He lives in the San Francisco bay area with his wife and two daughters.

Nicole Sanchez – Advisor

Nicole is a serial social entrepreneur, having founded several organizations focused on justice issues involving marginalized and under-represented populations.

She was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and attended Stanford University. After graduating, Nicole spent several years at City Year, a model AmeriCorps program, and became its first National Program Director. She then returned to Stanford as Associate Director for the Program in Ethics in Society where she co-founded “Hope House Scholars,” a program in which Stanford professors teach the humanities to recently incarcerated women in Redwood City. Nicole also helped launch the Stanford Center on Ethics, a multi-disciplinary institute that ensures ethics training for all students in the university’s professional schools. In addition, Nicole led two student-focused endeavors—one that aimed to close the achievement gap in Berkeley, CA and one that engaged young people in the US in global poverty alleviation.

Inspired by the private sector partnerships she developed as a leader in the social sector, Nicole returned to school to pursue her MBA from the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business. She received her MBA in May 2012, focusing on organizational behavior and culture.

Ulili Onovakpuri – Analyst Emeritus

Ulili Onovakpuri, an IDEAL alumna, graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 2009 with a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies, with a concentration in Business and Health in Global Societies and a minor in Creative Writing.

While at Cal she completed a thesis project on the rise of Medical Tourism in India and the importance technology has played on the industry. She also studied abroad, both as a part of the Semester at Sea Program, and later as a student at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom.

Ulili has interned with Adaptive Path, Mozilla Corporation, and GeekNet(formerly SourceForge Inc.).

She is currently beginning her first year at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, where she is pursuing her MBA.