Esther Dyson

Esther Dyson

Entrepreneur/Philanthropist

Esther Dyson does business as EDventure Holdings, the reclaimed name of the company she owned for 20-odd years before selling it to CNET Networks in 2004. In the last few years, she has turned her sights towards IT and health care. She dedicated two issues of her newsletter, Release 1.0, to the topic (Health and Identity: No Patient Left Behind? in January 2005 and Personal Health Information: Data Comes Alive! in September 2005).  Also in September 2005, she ran the Personal Health Information workshop that laid out many of the challenges still perplexing the health-care community.

Currently, she is on the board of directors of 23andMe and is one of the initial ten subjects of George Church's Personal Genome Project. Her primary activity is investing in start-ups and guiding many of them as a board member. Her board seats include Boxbe, CVO Group (Hungary), Eventful.com, Evernote, IBS Group (Russia, advisory board), Meetup, Midentity (UK), NewspaperDirect, and WPP Group and Yandex (Russia).

Some of her past direct IT investments include Flickr, Del.icio.us, BrightMail, Medstory and Orbitz. Dyson was the founding chairman of ICANN from 1998 to 2000, and was also chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the 90's. In 1997, she wrote Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age, which appeared in paperback a year later as Release 2.1. In 1994, she wrote a seminal essay on intellectual property for Wired magazine.

5mins
Journalist, philanthropist, entrepreneur, and astronaut, Esther Dyson describes how the future of search will be verbs, not nouns, as people are looking to take direct action with their queries.
3mins
For scientists to better correlate genes and disease, millions of people need to voluntarily have their genomes analyzed.
4mins
How do we design a system that incentivizes good behavior?
2mins
Like the voyages of Christopher Columbus, commercial projects can drive the future exploration of space.
4mins
Medical technology can also make us less physically fit, Dyson says.
2mins
The web is saturated with video, Dyson says, and a recession will help drain the swamp.
3mins
Dyson wants to make sure her money does something unique.
3mins
The problem, Dyson says, is not the platform but the individual users.
2mins
Dyson talks about the threats to online security, and how governments, corporations and individuals can address that.
3mins
As unconstrained speech is pushed online, where does the new threat come from? Government or corporate interests?
1mins
Physicist Freeman Dyson wrote of his daughter that her main childhood advantage was being neglected. She saw it more as freedom.