Esther Dyson, Independent Investor and Writer

Hi, I'm Esther Dyson, a long-time catalyst of start-ups in information technology in the US and other markets, including Russia. Since selling my company, EDventure Holdings, to CNET Networks in 2004, I have taken on newer challenges in private aviation and space as well as in health care (as a director of 23andMe, a consumer genetics company). My IT investments have included Flickr and del.icio.us (both sold to Yahoo!), and  Medstory (sold to Microsoft), as well as Meetup Inc., Eventful.com, Boxbe and Voxiva; I sit on the boards of the latter four companies. I'm also an active investor in air and space, with holdings in Space Adventures and Zero-G Corporation, as well as XCOR Aerospace, Constellation Services International, Coastal Technologies Group, Dopplr.com, Airship Ventures and Icon Aircraft.  I do business under the (reclaimed) name of EDventure Holdings.  

EDventure Holdings is the name I give when people ask for an affiliation.

My activities comprise a variety of areas – some of them intersecting:

• IT/Internet: I have holdings in a variety of online ventures and sit on the boards of several of them, including both start-ups and WPP Group, an increasingly active player in the online world. From time to time, I get involved in industry affairs, including last fall's Cookie Crumbles video contest. This was a contest on YouTube for videos explaining how cookies work; we showed the five top videos at the FTC meeting on behavioral targeting. I sit on the Stop Badware Advisory board. Long ago, I was chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and of ICANN.

• "Air/Space 2.0": Likewise, I'm active in fostering the emergence of start-ups in air and space – air taxis, online markets for travel, new forms of air traffic management, commercial space start-ups, space tourism and the like. I have flown weightless three times and will be doing so again in mid-February. My main effort here is...

• Flight School: The Flight School workshop is an outgrowth of PC Forum, my conference for Internet and IT entrepreneurs (1980-2006). This year, we are doing Flight School 08 in collaboration with Imaginova, June 4 to 6 in Boulder, Colorado. Click here for more info.

• Health care and IT: I'm excited about the potential of IT to change the world of health care, both through genetics and genomics (which are a form of information science) and through the use of IT to facilitate and ultimately transform the delivery of health care and the institutions that provide it. My activities here include a board seat with 23andMe and my role as one of ten initial research subjects in George Church's Personal Genome Project.

• Emerging markets: I started traveling in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989, and that's where I first started angel investing. I now have board seats and investments in several companies in the region. I speak Russian and I have a certain affinity for the region (though my heritage is farther west, according to family records and to 23andMe). More recently, I have been spending a lot of time in India, and some in eastern Asia and Africa.

• Non-profits: Generally, I prefer to do good through profit-making enterprises, but there are things companies simply can't do. Those include fighting corruption and fostering transparency and the rule of law around the world (Eurasia Foundation, National Endowment for Democracy, the Sunlight Foundation.) I also support education and science as a trustee of the Santa Fe Institute and the After-School Corporation.