Esther Dyson

She sits on the boards of Medesk, 23andMe, Eventful.com, Luxoft, Meetup Inc., Pressreader.com (formerly NewspaperDirect), PA Consulting, Personal Inc, TerraLink Technologies, Voxiva (the company behind text4baby.org in the US and Russia), WPP Group, XCOR Aerospace and Yandex (Russia – YNDX).

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.

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 (transformed into Nanoracks, www.nanoracks.com, Zero-G (now part of Space Adventures), 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.

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. As of 2004, she sat on its "reform" 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 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, and the Eurasia Foundation. She is a member of the Board of Directors of The After-School Corporation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to expanding educational opportunities for all students. She is also a member of the boards of the Sunlight Foundation, StopBadware, The Long Now Foundation.

In 1997, "46 year old Dyson" wrote "it so happens that I have never voted."

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.

Esther Dyson (born 14 July 1951) 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.