Esther Dyson

Esther Dyson (born 14 July 1951) is an American investor, journalist, author, commentator and philanthropist. Until 2024, she was the executive founder of Wellville, a nonprofit project focused on improving equitable wellbeing. Dyson is also an angel investor focused on health care, open government, digital technology, biotechnology, and outer space. Dyson's career now focuses on health and she continues to invest in health and technology startups.

Esther Dyson's father was English-born, American-naturalized physicist Freeman Dyson, and her mother was mathematician Verena Huber-Dyson, of Swiss parentage; her brother is science historian George Dyson. Her paternal grandfather was the composer Sir George Dyson. She was educated at Harvard University, where she studied economics and wrote for The Harvard Crimson.

After graduating she joined Forbes as a fact-checker and quickly rose to reporter. In 1977, she joined New Court Securities following Federal Express and other start-ups. After a stint at Oppenheimer Holdings covering software companies, she moved to Rosen Research in 1982, at which time they launched PC Forum (originally the Personal Computer Forum) a highly influential annual invitation-only high tech conference that ran from 1982 until 2007. From 1982 until the early 1990s, it served as the premier networking and brainstorming hub for tech visionaries, venture capitalists and industry executives. Many of the eventual major startups in Silicon Valley obtained their initial funding at PC Forum events.

In 1983, when she bought the company from her employer Ben Rosen, Dyson renamed the company EDventure Holdings and his Rosen Electronic Letter newsletter Release 1.0. She and business partner Daphne Kis sold EDventure Holdings to CNET Networks in 2004 and left CNET in January 2007.

On 7 October 2008, Space Adventures announced that Dyson had paid to train as a back-up spaceflight participant for Charles Simonyi's trip to the International Space Station aboard the Soyuz TMA-14 mission which took place in 2009.

In 1997, Dyson wrote that as of that time she had never voted. The tagline of her email signature block reads “Always make new mistakes”.

Currently, Dyson is a board member and active investor in a variety of start-ups, mostly in online services, health care, logistics, artificial intelligence, emerging markets, and space travel. She was a board member of Yandex until March 2022.