Esther Dyson

Esther Dyson is the Chairman of EDventure Holdings, the name under which she does business. Her primary activity is investing in and nurturing start-up organizations, with a recent focus on health care and aerospace.

From October 2008 to March 2009, Dyson spent nearly six months training as a back-up cosmonaut in Star City outside Moscow, Russia. While there, she had the pleasure of spending time not only with the cosmonauts, but also with some of the US’ finest astronauts. She has chronicled some of her EDventures on Flickr and on The Huffington Post.

Dyson is an active board member for a variety of organizations, including 23andMe, Airship Ventures, Boxbe, Eventful, Evernote, Meetup, NewspaperDirect, Voxiva,  WPP Group, and Yandex, and is on the advisory board of IBS Group. Her past investments have included Medstory (sold to Microsoft), Flickr and del.icio.us (sold to Yahoo!), and Brightmail (sold to Symantec). Her current investments include Icon Aircraft, Space Adventures, and XCOR Aerospace.  She also sits on the boards of several non-profit organizations, including  the the Eurasia Foundation, the Sunlight Foundation, the Personal Genome Foundation, and StopBadware.org.  From 1998 to 2000, she was chairman of ICANN, the international body that sets policy for the Domain Name System.  She writes a monthly column for Project-Syndicate.org, which is also available on Slate.com.

Dyson has been a Member of the Markle Task Force since its inception in 2002.