Esther Dyson is the Internet's court jester, a person of no institutional
importance who somehow manages to speak the truth and to be heard when and
where it matters. She does business as EDventure, the reclaimed name of the
company she owned for 20-odd years before selling it to CNET Networks in 2004.
Her primary activity is investing in start-ups and guiding many of them as a
board member. Her board seats include Boxbe (pending), CVO Group, Eventful,
Evernote, IBS Group (Russia, advisory board), Meetup, Midentity (UK),
NewspaperDirect, Voxiva, Yandex (Russia)and WPP Group (not a start-up). Some of
her other direct IT investments include Flickr and Del.icio.us (sold to
Yahoo!), BrightMail (sold to Symantec), Orbitz (sold to Cendant), ActiveWeave,
BlogAds, ChoiceStream, Dotomi, Linkstorm, Medstory, Ovusoft, Plazes, Powerset,
Resilient, Tacit, Technorati, Visible Path, Vizu.com and Zedo.
As a two-time weightless flyer, she is also active in the commercial
space/airline start-up world, with investments in Constellation Services, Space
Adventures, XCOR Aerospace and Zero-G. She will run the third annual Flight
School conference, on the new air-taxi market, this June 20 to 22 in Aspen, CO.
On the non-profit side, Dyson sits on the boards of the Eurasia Foundation, the
Santa Fe Institute and the Sunlight Foundation.
For more than 20 years Dyson wrote the newsletter Release 1.0 and ran PC Forum,
the IT market's leading executive conference. She sold them to CNET Networks in
2004, and left CNET at the end of 2006. Dyson was the founding chairman of
ICANN (policy-setter for the DNS) from 1998-2000, and was also chairman of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation in the 90s. In 1997, she wrote her (so far) only
book, "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. In both her investments and her
nonprofit activities, she has always been concerned with the impact of
information (technology) on business and society.
