icannwiki

Esther Dyson

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Esther Dyson, is a former Chairman of the ICANN Board, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and her own EDventure Holdings.[1] She is currently an active angel investor with holdings in a variety of online ventures and is a board member for some of these companies. Some of her projects are based in Russia, where she has been spending an increasing amount of time; she is also interested in investing in and traveling around other emerging markets in East Asia and Africa.[2]

Country: USA
Email: edyson [at] boxbe.com
Website:

   [EDventure EDventure]

Twitter:    @edyson

Esther Dyson was appointed as one of ICANN's nine initial directors in October 1998. She served as an ICANN director, and Chair of the board until November, 2000. Her tenure at ICANN was a rocky beginning wherein the board was focused on defining its technical focus and implement structural rules for elections and other organizational necessities.[3]

She speaks Russian in addition to her native English.[4]

EDventure

Ms. Dyson sold her 7 person company,[5] EDventure, to CNet in 2004,[6] and worked for CNet until 2006.[7]Ms. Dyson has since reclaimed the name EDventure Holdings for her business endeavors. Her work with EDventure involved writing the newsletter Release 1.0, and running PC Forum, the IT market’s leading executive conference, which were both influential in determining the early PC era.[8] CNet acquired both those projects, and they have since been dissolved or rebranded.[9]

Entrepreneur & Investor

Memberships

She is a member of the President's Export Council Subcommittee on Encryption and sits on the boards of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Scala Business Solutions, Poland Online, Cygnus Solution, E-Pub Services, Trustworks (Amsterdam), IBS (Moscow), iCat, New World Publishing and the Global Business Network. She is on the advisory boards of Perot Systems and the Internet Capital Group, and a limited partner of the Mayfield Software Fund.

Executive & Board Appointments

Ms. Dyson is also on the boards and executive committees of the Santa Fe Institute and the Institute for East-West Studies, and on the board of the Eurasia Foundation. She is a founding member of the Russian Software Market Association and a member of the Software Publishers Association. She serves on the advisory boards of The Software Entrepreneurs Forum (Silicon Valley), thePoynter Institute for Media Studies, the Russian Internet Technology Center, and the Soros Medical Internet Project.[10]

Details on a number of her investments can be found here, at CrunchBase.

She is a board member for the following non-listed start-ups:[11]

  • Boxbe (US)
  • Evernote (US)
  • 23andMe (US)
  • Airship Ventures (US)
  • Eventful.com (US)
  • Meetup Inc. (US)
  • NewspaperDirect (Canada)
  • Voxiva (US)
  • Yandex (Russia)
  • Midentity (UK)[12]

Her non-profit work includes board memberships with The Sunlight Foundation, StopBadware.org, and PersonalGenome.org;[13] Ms. Dyson prefers to do good through her many business dealings, but recognizes the fact that private industry is not able to address all of the world's problems.[14]

Investments Sold

A number of Ms. Dyson's investments have been acquired, notable sales include:[15]

  • Flickr, sold to Yahoo!
  • Del.icio.us, sold to Yahoo!
  • Medstory, sold to Microsoft
  • BrightMail, sold to Symantec
  • Orbitz, sold to Cendant
  • Powerset, sold to Microsoft
  • Plazes, sold to Nokia
  • Tacit, sold to Oracle

Fun Facts

As a four-time weightless flyer,[16] Esther Dyson is also active in the commercial space flight start-up world. Here investments therein include Icon Aircraft, Space Adventures/Zero-G, XCOR Aerospace and Zero-G.[17] She is actively involved in Air/Space 2.0, The Flight School workshop, and several non-profit foundations, and is a member of the NASA Advisory Council and Chairman of its Technology and Innovation Committee.[18]

Other Background

Ms. Dyson holds a Bachelor's degree in economics from Harvard University (1972).

Previously, she was a securities analyst at New Court Securities, 1977-80; Oppenheimer & Co.; 1980-82; and a reporter for Forbes magazine, 1974-77.[19]

In 1997, she wrote the book, "Release 2.0: A design for living in the digital age".[20]

References

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