Esther Dyson is executive founder of Wellville, a 10-year, five-community nonprofit project devoted to showing the value of long-term investment in health and equity. She is a tech media pioneer, angel investor, journalist, and promoter of health over care.
After graduating from Harvard with an economics degree, Dyson began her journalism career at Forbes, quickly rising from fact-checker to reporter. In 1977, she became a securities analyst on Wall Street, following high-tech stocks. This ignited her interest in high-tech and prompted her to join Rosen Research in 1982. Dyson bought the company and renamed it EDventure Holdings in 1983. EDventure published Release 1.0, an influential computer-industry newsletter, and organized PC Forum, a high-profile annual technology conference that ran from 1982 to 2007. Dyson published the bestselling book Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age in 1997.
Dyson was chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and ICANN in the organizations’ early days. Focusing on health, open government, digital technology, biotechnology, and outer space among other things, she has made angel investments in Russia, Africa, Eastern Europe, India and the US as well as other places. In 2008-2009, she trained as a backup space tourist for a trip to the International Space Station. She is one of the first ten volunteers in the Personal Genome Project and is currently on the board of directors of BAMF Health, Element3 Health and Yandex.
