Esther Dyson Biography
Esther Dyson is an American journalist, author, businesswoman, investor, commentator, and philanthropist. Although her career is mostly focused on health, she is an angel investor also focused on open government, digital technology, biotechnology, and outer space. She occasionally invests in health and technology startups.
Esther Dyson Age
Esther was born on the 14th of July 1957 in Zurich, the largest city in Switzerland and the capital of the Canton of Zurich. As of 2018, she is 67 years old.
Esther Dyson Family
Esther Dyson was born to Freeman Dyson, an American-naturalized physicist, and Verena Huber-Dyson, a Swiss-American mathematician. One of her brothers is George Dyson, a non-fiction author, and historian of technology.
Esther Dyson Career
After graduating from Harvard with her degree in Economics, she got a job at Forbes as a fact checker. Sometime after, her position rose to become a reporter. She joined New Court Securities in 1977 following Federal Express and other start-ups. She spent a short time at Oppenheimer Holdings covering software companies then moved to Rosen Research. In 1983, she bought Rosen Research from Ben Rosen and renamed it as EDventure Holdings.
In 2004, she sold off the company to CNET Networks. EDventure spent some time under CNET but eventually, it left CNET in January 2007. On the 7th of October 2008, Space Adventures announced that she had paid to train as a back-up spaceflight participant for Charles Simonyi’s trip to the International Space Station. The mission took place in 2009.
Business Ventures
Esther Dyson is a member of several boards of several companies. Along with this, she has invested in a number of startups. Some of the companies’ boards she serves in are MEDESK, 23andMe, Eventful.com, Luxoft, Meetup Inc.,Pressreader.com, PA Consulting, Personal Inc, TerraLink Technologies, Voxiva, WPP Group, XCOR Aerospace, and Yandex. She is also an advisor for First Monday journal, Visual Ops, and occasionally The Huffington Post.
She has invested in such startups as TrustedID, Cygnus Solutions, Flickr (now owned by Yahoo), del.icio.us (now owned by Yahoo), Eventful, Netbeans (sold to Sun Microsystems), Powerset, Systinet, ZEDO, CV-Online, Medscape (now part of WebMD), Linkstorm, Medstory (sold to Microsoft), Meetup, Valkee, Robin Labs and Lexity (now owned by Yahoo). In early 2007, she started focusing more on private aviation and commercial space startups, as well as healthcare and genetics.
She is one of the founders of the Space Angels Network. From 2005-07, she hosted the Flight School conference in Aspen. She is also one of the first 10 volunteers of the Personal Genome Project.
Philanthropy
Esther is involved in many active non-profit and advisory organizations. She helped found the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICAAN) and as of 2004, she sits at its reform committee. From 2002-12, she has been a member of the Bulgarian President’s IT Advisory Council. She has served as a trustee and financier of many emerging organizations like Glasses for Humanity, Bridges.org, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the Eurasia Foundation.
She is a board member of The After-School Corporation that expands educational opportunities for Students. Along with all her roles, she is on the boards of Sunlight Foundation, StopBadware, The Long Now Foundation. She has donated her genome to the public through the Personal Genome Project. Along with this, she served as the judge for Michael Bloomberg’s NYC BigApps competition in New York.
Esther Dyson Quotes
In this the age of concern over privacy invasion and surveillance and manipulation, people will start to realize that there is no way to avoid being manipulated by other people, governments, marketers, and the like.
Normal people with normal lives are not going to ask for sugar-free yogurt. They just take the stuff with sugar in it.
I think copyright is moral, proper. I think a creator has the right to control the disposition of his or her works – I actually believe that the financial issue is less important than the integrity of the work, the attribution, that kind of stuff.
Change means that what was before wasn’t perfect. People want things to be better.
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