Esther Dyson

EDventure Holdings, Inc.

Esther Dyson is active in information technology and spends her time investing in and guiding start-up companies.  Ms. Dyson is on the board of such companies as 23andme, Meetup, Boxbe, CVO Group, Eventful, Midentity, NewspaperDirect, IBS Group, WPP Group, Yandex, and Evernote.  She is the chair of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and was a member of the U.S. National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council, which operated from 1994 to 1995. She co-chaired the National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council's Information Privacy and Intellectual Property Sub-committee and is now involved in advising various government figures and organizations in the U.S. and abroad on a less formal basis.

Ms. Dyson is the 1996 recipient of Hungary's von Neumann Medal, awarded for "distinction in the dissemination of computer culture." Naming her Number 12 in its "Elite 100" list, Upside magazine wrote that Ms. Dyson's "stature is based entirely on her ability to influence others with her ideas rather than directly control companies or huge amounts of capital."

Ms. Dyson is the author of Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age. The book's goal is to help citizens and rulemakers -- legislators, vendors of products and services and other designers of cyberspace -- think analytically and responsibly about the world they are creating as they raise children, run companies and services and use the Internet in their daily lives.

Fluent in Russian and French, Ms. Dyson is a regular keynote speaker at the annual Comtek, International Computer Forum and other events in Moscow, and at CERF in Bucharest. She also gives talks in English at events such as the Magazine Publishers Association annual conference, the World Economic Forum, the Computers Freedom & Privacy annual conference, and workshops sponsored by the Aspen Institute and other organizations.

Ms. Dyson spent five years learning the dynamics of the computer and software businesses as a securities analyst (New Court Securities, 1977-80; Oppenheimer & Co., 1980-82). She began her career and got her business education as a reporter for Forbes magazine (1974-77).

Ms. Dyson graduated from Harvard in 1972, with a B.A. in Economics. Instead of going to classes, she spent much of her time there working on The Harvard Crimson, the university's daily newspaper. At Harvard, she picked up the habit of swimming for an hour every morning, which she does still.

Ms. Dyson travels widely, studying airline schedules the way some people study restaurant menus. She has been featured in full-length interviews in Upside magazine and Micro Times and profiled in Wired, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post and The New York Times Magazine. The San Jose Mercury's Sunday Magazine included her in a feature on Silicon Valley's 100 most influential people, while Russia's "Who's Who in the Computer Market" lists her as Number 23 of the most influential people in Russia's computer industry -- quite a coup considering that she lives in New York City!