Esther Dyson

Esther Dyson (born 14 July 1951) is a Swiss-born American investor, journalist, author, commentator and philanthropist.

She is the executive founder of Wellville, a nonprofit project focused on improving equitable wellbeing.

Dyson is also an 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, and her mother was mathematician Verena Huber-Dyson, of Swiss parentage; her brother is science historian George Dyson.

Her paternal grandfather was the composer Sir 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 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.

In 1997, Dyson wrote that as of that time she had never voted.

The tagline of her email signature block reads “Always make new mistakes”.

Currently, Dyson is a board member and active investor in a variety of start-ups, mostly in online services, health care, logistics, artificial intelligence, emerging markets, and space travel.

She was a board member of Yandex, which is considered the “Google of Russia,” until March 2022.

Previously, Dyson and her company EDventure Holdings specialized in analyzing the effect of emerging technologies and markets on economies and societies.

She produced the following publications on technology:

Dyson is an active member of a number of non-profit and advisory organizations.

From 1998 to 2000, she was the founding chairman of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

She has followed closely the post-Soviet transition of Eastern Europe, from 2002 to 2012 was a member of the Bulgarian President's IT Advisory Council, along with Vint Cerf, George Sadowsky, and Veni Markovski, among others.

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.

Dyson was one of the first ten volunteers for George Church’s Personal Genome Project where you can find her complete genome.

Dyson has served as a judge for Mayor Michael Bloomberg's NYC BigApps competition in New York.

She and business partner Daphne Kis sold EDventure Holdings to CNET Networks in 2004 and left CNET in January 2007.

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.

On 7 October 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.

She opposed ICANN's 2012 expansion of generic top-level domains (gTLDs).