Esther Dyson
Chairman, EDventure; Host, Flight School
Esther Dyson has a habit of being early: She left home (for college) at 16; she covered Federal Express as a Wall Street analyst from 1977 to 1980; she started following the computer industry in Eastern Europe in 1989; she first wrote about the impact of the Internet on intellectual property (for Wired magazine) in 1994. She met Walter Isaacson (and Jim Fallows) in the early 70s, Vern Raburn in 1982, and Ed Lacobucci and Charles Simonyi a few years later.
Now she is turning at least some of her attention air- and space-wards. She is an investor in Airship Ventures, Constellation Services, Icon Aircraft, Space Adventures, Xcor Aerospace, and Zero G Corporation, and is a patron of the Personal Spaceflight Federation. She has flown weightless on Zero-G four times, and will do so a fifth time right after Flight School. And last year she went to Russia and Kazakhstan with Space Adventures to watch the Charles Simonyi launch.
For 25 years Dyson led PC Forum, the computer industry's leading annual conference for executives. She sold her company EDventure Holdings to CNET Networks in 2004, and started Flight School as a spinoff of PC Forum in 2005. Dyson left CNET at the end of 2006 and retrieved the name EDventure, under which she now does business. CNET declined to continue PC Forum, but Dyson took Flight School with her and now runs it independently.
Aside from that, Dyson is an active investor and sits on a few too many boards, including one public company (WPP Group) and a host of IT start-ups around the world - Yandex (Russia), Meetup, Eventful, 23andMe, Newspaperdirect and others. She has invested in start-ups sold to Symantec, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, among others. She also sits on the boards of the Sunlight Foundation and the Santa Fe Institute, among other nonprofits.
Dyson received (but did not exactly earn, she confesses) a BA degree in economics from Harvard. She started her serious career as a fact-checker for Forbes Magazine, a role that prepared her well for most of her activities since, which generally involve sifting truth from hope and fiction.
