Esther Dyson
Esther Dyson is a Swiss-born American journalist, author, businesswoman, investor, commentator, and philanthropist. She is a leading angel investor focused on health care, open government, digital technology, biotechnology, and outer space. Dyson's career now focuses on health, and she continues to invest in health and technology startups.
Esther Dyson's father was English-born, American-naturalized physicist Freeman Dyson; her mother was mathematician Verena Huber-Dyson, of Swiss parentage; her brother was science historian George Dyson. She was educated at Harvard University, where she studied economics and wrote for The Harvard Crimson.
After graduating, she joined Forbes as a fact-checker and quickly became a reporter. In 1977, she joined New Court Securities, following Federal Express and other startups. 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 and business partner Daphne Kis sold EDventure Holdings to CNET Networks in 2004 and left CNET in January 2007.
On 7 October 2008, Space Adventures announced that Dyson had paid to train as a backup 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, Dyson wrote that she had never voted as of that time. Her email signature block tagline reads, "Always make new mistakes."
Dyson is an active member of several non-profit and advisory organizations. From 1998 to 2000, she was the founding chairman of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. As of 2004, she sat on its "reform" committee (the At-Large Advisory Committee), dedicated to defining a role for individuals in ICANN's decision-making and governance structures. She opposed ICANN's 2012 expansion of generic top-level domains (gTLDs).
She has followed the post-Soviet transition of Eastern Europe from 2002 to 2012 closely and was a member of the Bulgarian President's IT Advisory Council, along with Vint Cerf, George Sadowsky, and Veni Markovski, among others. In addition, she has served as a trustee of and helped fund emerging organizations such as Glasses for Humanity, Bridges.org, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Eurasia Foundation, StopBadware, and the Sunlight Foundation.
Currently, she is a trustee of Charity Navigator, ExpandED Schools (outside-of-class services for kids), the Long Now Foundation, Open Corporates, and The Commons Project, where she chairs the comp and culture committee.
