I am an investor (see full list), journalist, author, commentator, and philanthropist.
Over the years I have learned, earned, and served in many sectors and places, including more than 90 countries. My activities cover a variety of areas – many intersecting (partial list below). I write about some of these areas on my Substack, called "In the Pool with Esther."
Currently, I'm busy finishing my second book, "Term Limits: Time and scale in the age of AI," due out early in 2027 from MIT Press.
EDventure.com used to refer to my company EDventure Holdings, which my business partner Daphne Kis and I sold to CNET back in 2004…with the caveat that I got to keep the name. (It's a pun using my initials, though there's a subtle hint of EDitor and EDucation as well.)
My areas of interest include:
Health and IT: I'm optimistic about the potential of IT/AI to improve human health, most of all by reducing administrative and operational friction and thereby allowing humans to earn more money by delivering human care at scale in a system that supports rather than constrains that work. Yes, that's still a bit aspirational and it's hard to find companies that actually do that sustainably. So I'm also an investor in a variety of non-predatory health companies that help by involving individuals in maintaining their own health and by improving the delivery of care and treatments and the institutions that provide it. My activities here include past board seats with 23andMe, Voxiva and numerous other investments, as well as my role as the third of ten initial research subjects in George Church's Personal Genome Project (along with a seat on its board). Currently I'm board chair of Avanlee Care (supporting caregivers of Medicare Advantage patients) and of the non-profit The Commons Project, and an active investor in a variety of players in mental health, neurotech, pharma, and digital health.
Emerging markets: I started traveling in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989, and that's where I first started angel investing (to avoid the conflicts of investing as a journalist in the US). I now have investments in several companies in the region. I speak Russian and I have a certain affinity for the country's people (though my heritage is farther west, according to family records and to 23andMe). More recently, I have spent a lot of time in eastern Asia and India, and now in Africa. I have visited 90+ countries overall - and seen way too many failed governments along with some more hopeful trends in other places.
Wellville: Wellville was a 10-year nonprofit project operating in five small US communities: Clatsop County, OR; Lake County, CA; Muskegon County, MI; North Hartford, CT; and Spartanburg, SC. I founded, funded, and volunteered for it. Its impact lives on - and with the many people inside and outside those places who are continuing to cultivate their own sustainable social fabric in many different forms. You can read much more about Wellville at its own website. Unlike most of my interests and projects, Wellville had a clear beginning and end (2013-2024)…. In some complex way, that fact led to my musings about term limits and ultimately the book on "term limits" I am now completing.
Non-profits: Generally, I prefer to do good through sustainable, profit-making enterprises (which come with a lottery ticket attached), but there are some things companies simply can't do, such as fighting corruption and fostering transparency and the rule of law around the world. Organizations I support include The Long Now Foundation, The Commons Project, The Sustainable Media Center, and ExpandeED Schools.
Logistics, insurance, nitty-gritty: The first company I ever worked with as an analyst (for New Court Securities, 1977-80) looked like an impending disaster: $100 million of capital spent, now raising a down round at a valuation of $15 million, before earning its first revenues. Its name? Federal Express. I loved the way it reimagined the overnight courier business, and shifted gradually from simplicity - unlike couriers and passengers, packages didn't mind the overnight stopovers in its Memphis hub - to complexity, when computers made dynamic scheduling and more efficient routing possible. I love watching how things work, how you need to balance efficiency with a bit of slack to manage exceptions and how to match brilliant design to complex reality. In addition to SpaceX, where careful manufacturing matters as much as clever software, my investments include SWVL, an Egyptian-born company providing fleet management software and services for human passengers in the Middle East and elsewhere; and Trella, a tech-enabled shipping company in the Middle East and Africa. Then there's MakhersStudio, based in Atlanta, GA, which re-purposes shipping containers into cost-effective worker housing and retail units. And finally, I love insurance that does not just price and spread risk, but that actually reduces it. The latest iteration of this interest is my investment in LensDetect.com, which applies AI to monitor highway cameras and summon rural police when conditions warrant - not just crashes, but also real-time risks like falling trees that may cause crashes.
Air/Space 2.0: Likewise, I'm active in fostering the emergence of start-ups in commercial space flight. I have flown weightless six or seven times. My favorite credential is my 2009 certificate of completion from the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center outside Moscow, where I spent six months training as a backup cosmonaut. (More about that in my next book, Present Without Leave.) I have a vague intention to retire on Mars, with its gentle 40% of Earth gravity (easy on aging bones) - but not too soon! It's not my life's ambition, but more a good way to end it when I hand my tasks on Earth over to the next generation.
What I want on my epitaph: "I wasn't done yet! There is still more to learn and to fix... but over to you!"
[ED note: Second half prompted by writing "Term Limits."]
Biography
Esther Dyson is an investor, journalist, author, commentator and philanthropist. She is the author of two books, including the upcoming "Term Limits: Time and scale in the age of AI," due out in Spring 2027 from MIT Press. She also writes a biweekly Substack, "In the Pool with Esther."
Throughout her life she has devoted herself to exploring various "bubbles": seeing what people inside bubbles take for granted, and trying to open their - and her own - eyes to broader perspectives. She speaks four languages - Russian, French, German, and English - and believes that being multilingual is a key advantage in our complex world. She likes to quote AI pioneer David Waltz: "Words are not in themselves carriers of meaning, but merely pointers to shared understanding."
Esther grew up in a bubble herself, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Her parents met there as post-docs in the late 40s. They returned to Europe; Esther was born in Zürich, Switzerland. Her parents returned to the Institute in 1952, her British father Freeman Dyson now as a faculty member reporting to Robert Oppenheimer, and her Swiss mother as a wife. Freeman loosely anticipated today's notion of data centers in space in a 1960 Science Magazine article called "Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation," which posited that the best way to find alien intelligence would be to look for excess infrared energy leaking from a loose shell of orbiting solar-ray collectors that such a civilization would construct around its star to capture most of its energy. That crazy idea soon got the name "Dyson Spheres."
Esther's career has taken many twists, but all sit within her Venn diagram of interests in IT/AI, economics and writing, plus the trajectories of civilizations, companies, markets, governments, spacecraft, and yes, human lives.
From 2013 to 2024, she was founder of and a volunteer for Wellville, a nonprofit project focused on helping five small US communities build their own sustainable community fabric.
From 1983 through 2006, she (and CEO Daphne Kis, who joined her in the mid-80's) owned and operated the annual PC Forum conference and published the influential Release 1.0 newsletter, which analyzed the effect of emerging technologies and markets on organizations, economies and societies. From 1990 to 1995, they also ran a conference (the East-West High-Tech Forum) and newsletter (REL-East) that focused on the tech industry in Eastern Europe and Russia. And for a few years in the early 2000s, they also produced the Flight School conference, for the air-taxi and commercial spaceflight industries. They sold the whole business to CNET in 2004.
Esther is a board member and angel investor in a variety of start-ups, mostly in online services, health care and medicine, logistics, artificial intelligence, emerging markets, and space travel. From 1998 to 2000, she served as founding chairman of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. She has served on the boards of nonprofit organizations including Bridges.org, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Eurasia Foundation, The Long Now Foundation, StopBadware, and the Sunlight Foundation. She was previously a member of the Global Business Network. She also sat on the board of the Personal Genome Project, and was its third research subject. You can find her full genome on the project website.
Her first book, "Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age" (1997), explored the impact of digital technology on every aspect of our private and public lives.
Earlier in her career, Esther worked as a fact-checker and then a reporter at Forbes (1974-77), followed by a five-year stint as an analyst on Wall Street (1977-82). In 1983, she bought Rosen Research from her employer Ben Rosen. She renamed the company EDventure Holdings and his Rosen Electronics Letter newsletter RELease 1.0 [sic for the first few years, in honor of the original's initials].
Esther trained for six months at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia, as a back-up for spaceflight participant Charles Simonyi's March 2009 trip aboard the Soyuz TMA-14 to the International Space Station. She has taken seven parabolic "weightless" flights.
She received her BA in economics from Harvard University, though she spent most of her time at The Harvard Crimson, where she proofread for money and wrote for free.
