Steve Kirsch
American businessman
Steven Todd Kirsch (born 1956 in Los Angeles) is an American entrepreneur. He has started several companies and was one of two independent inventors of the optical mouse. Kirsch has been both a philanthropic supporter of medical research, and a promoter of misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines.
Education
Kirsch received a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980.
Career
In 1980, Kirsch and Richard F. Lyon independently invented the first versions of the optical mouse. Kirsch has started several companies. In 1993, he founded the search engine Infoseek, which in 1999 was sold to the Walt Disney Co. He co-founded Frame Technology Corp., bought by Adobe in 1995. In 2002 he was CEO of Propel Software.
In 2005 he founded Abaca, which made a spam filter.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2347079. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1956, 1980, 1993 and 1999.
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This entry incorporates text from “Steve Kirsch” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.