Esther Dyson Biography
- Michelle DeSmyter
- Gisella Gruber
Esther Dyson(@edyson) is founder of Wellville (@WaytoWellville), a 10-year non-profit project to nudge society towards long-term thinking and equity by showing the social and financial value of investing in health and wellbeing for all. The Wellville team of six people coaches leaders in five US communities as they work to improve the physical, mental and financial health of all their residents.
Overall, Dyson works to leverage new business models, new technologies and new markets (both economic and political). From October 2008 to March of 2009, she lived in Star City outside Moscow, Russia, training as a backup cosmonaut.
Apart from this brief sabbatical Ester is an active board member for a variety of companies, including Avanlee Care, PressrReader, ProofPilot and Swvl (Cairo). Her current investments include Fancy, Linqia, Square in information services; Zingaya in Russia; 4DHealthWare, Care.coach, Clover Health, Devoted Health, Eligible, Hawthorne Effect, HealthTap, Humanity, i2Dx, Ilara, Medesk, MedicaSafe, Mindright.io, Nuna, Omada Health, PatientsKnowBest (UK), Pocket Naloxone, Prognos, Rasello, Solera, Startup Health, Tocagen, Valkee (Finland),and Virgo SVS in health; and Icon Aircraft (light sport aircraft), Voyagers Holdings, Space Perspectives and Space Adventures (which organizes programs such as hers for space tourists) in aerospace.
Dyson also sits on the boards of several nonprofits, including the Long Now Foundation and ExpandED Schools, and is a patron of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. From 1998 to 2000, she was non-exec chairman of ICANN (overseeing the Internet’s domain name & address system), and before that chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
She has a BA in economics from Harvard and started her serious career as a fact-checker/reporter for Forbes Magazine (1974-77). From 1977 to 1982 she worked on Wall Street as a securities analyst, covering companies such as Federal Express, Apple Computer and Electronic Data Systems. From 1983 to 2004 she wrote/edited Release 1.0, a monthly analysis of the PC/Internet business, and ran the yearly PC Forum, the industry's leading executive conference (no sponsors), as head of her own company EDventure Holdings. She sold EDventure to CNET in 2004 and worked there for two years before going completely independent. Along the way, she served as founding (non-exec) chairman of ICANN from 1998 to 2000. In addition, she wrote the best-selling, widely translated book "Release 2.0: A design for living in the digital age," published by Broadway Books, in 1997.
Esther Dyson
Founder, Wellville
www.wellville.net [wellville.net]
@edyson
Always make new mistakes!