Esther Dyson
Chairman, EDventure Holdings

Website | @edyson | Attendee Directory Profile

Esther Dyson is an active angel investor in a variety of start-ups, for-profit and otherwise, around the world. She also operates as 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 23andMe, Airship Ventures, Boxbe, Voxiva, Eventful, Evernote, IBS Group (Russia, advisory board), Meetup, Midentity (UK), NewspaperDirect, 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), Medstory and Powerset (both sold to Microsoft), Plazes (sold to Nokia), Tacit (sold to Oracle), BlogAds, BrightHouse, ChoiceStream, Dopplr, Dotomi, Linkstorm, Mashery, Organized Wisdom, Ovusoft, PatientsLikeMe, Resilient,Technorati, ThingD, Vizu.com and Zedo. Indirectly, she is an investor in Amee.cc and Wesabe.

As a two-time weightless flyer, she is also active in the commercial space/airline start-up world, with investments in Icon Aircraft, Space Adventures/Zero-G, XCOR Aerospace and Zero-G.

She also blogs occasionally for the Huffington Post, as Release 0.9. She posts photos with captions at Flickr.

On the non-profit side, Dyson sits on the boards of the Eurasia Foundation, the “Long Now Foundation”;http://www.longnow.org/, the Santa Fe Institute and the Sunlight Foundation.