Esther Dyson is a Swiss-born American investor, journalist, author, businesswoman, commentator and philanthropist. She is a leading angel investor focused on health care, open government, digital technology, biotechnology, and outer space. Dyson's career focuses on health and continues to invest in health and technology startups.
Life
Esther Dyson's father was English-born, American-naturalized physicist Freeman Dyson, and her mother was mathematician Verena Huber-Dyson, who was of Swiss parentage; one of her brothers is digital technology historian George Dyson. After graduating from Harvard with a degree in economics, she joined Forbes as a fact-checker and quickly rose to reporter. In 1977, she joined New Court Securities following Federal Express and other start-ups. After a stint at Oppenheimer Holdings covering software companies, she moved to Rosen Research in 1982. In 1983, when she bought the company from her employer Ben Rosen, Dyson renamed the company EDventure Holdings and his Rosen Electronic Letter newsletter Release 1.0. She sold EDventure Holdings to CNET Networks in 2004 but left CNET in January 2007. On October 7, 2008, Space Adventures announced that Dyson had paid to train as a back-up spaceflight participant for Charles Simonyi's trip to the International Space Station aboard the Soyuz TMA-14 mission which took place in 2009. In 1997, "46 year old Dyson" wrote "it so happens that I have never voted."
Publications and business ventures
Currently, Dyson is a board member and active investor in a variety of start-ups, mostly in online services, health care/genetics, and space travel. Previously, Dyson and her company EDventure specialized in analyzing the effect of emerging technologies and markets on economies and societies. She created the following publications on technology:
Release 1.0, her monthly technology-industry newsletter, published by EDventure Holdings. Until 2006, Dyson wrote several issues herself and edited the others. When she left CNET, the newsletter was picked up by O'Reilly Media, which appointed Jimmy Guterman to edit it and renamed the newsletter Release 2.0.
Release 2.0, her 1997 book on how the Internet affects individuals' lives. Its full title is Release 2.0: A design for living in the digital age. The revision Release 2.1 was published in 1998.
She sits on the boards of Medesk, 23andMe, Eventful.com, Luxoft, Meetup Inc., Pressreader.com, PA Consulting, Personal Inc, TerraLink Technologies, Voxiva, WPP Group, XCOR Aerospace and Yandex. Dyson is an adviser to the First Monday journal and Visual Ops, an occasional contributor to Arianna Huffington's online Huffington Post, a board member of the education non-profit TASC, a member of the Xconomists, an ad hoc team of editorial advisors for the tech news and media company, Xconomy and "chairwoman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation." Dyson was also an early investor in several tech startups, among them TrustedID, Cygnus Solutions, Flickr, del.icio.us, Eventful, Netbeans, Powerset, Systinet, ZEDO, CV-Online, Medscape, Linkstorm, Medstory, Meetup, Valkee, Robin Labs and Lexity. As of early 2007, Dyson describes herself as "spending more and more time on private aviation and commercial space startups" and also in health care and genetics. Dyson is a founding member of Space Angels Network and has invested in XCOR, Constellation Services, Icon Aircraft, Space Adventures, and Mars One. From 2005 to 2007 she hosted the Flight School conference in Aspen. She is currently on the board of directors of 23andMe, and is one of the first ten volunteers in the Personal Genome Project.
