Esther Dyson

Chairman and Founder, EDventure Holdings

Founder, Health Initiative Coordinating Council (HICCup)

Esther Dyson keynote speech, conference, lecture, speaker
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Esther Dyson is chairman and founder of HICCup (Health Initiative Coordinating Council) and chairman of EDventure Holdings.

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, Esther Dyson 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. Esther 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.

Her current investments include Icon Aircraft, Space Adventures, Evernote and Square. She also sits on the boards of several nonprofit organizations, including ExpandED Learning, Long Now Foundation, the Sunlight Foundation and the Personal Genome Foundation.