ESTHER DYSON Chairman EDventure Holdings Inc.

Esther Dyson is actively involved in improving the world’s health, both as an investor and as the publisher on the Internet of her own genome and health records, as a subject of George Church’s Personal Genome Project.  She believes fiercely in the power of information to affect  people’s behavior and to improve the quality of health as well as health care.  She has written two monographs on electronic records and health information liquidity, and ran the 2005 Personal Health Information workshop co-sponsored by New York’s New School University.

She brings to her work insights from economics, information technology, management practice and practical psychology.  Currently, having just returned from a five-month stint training as a backup cosmonaut in Russia and Kazakhstan, she is trying to figure out how space medicine can contribute to Earth medicine.

However, her primary activity is investing in start-ups and guiding many of them as a board member. To that end, she travels broadly and speaks four languages (English, Russian, French and German.)  Her board seats include 23andMe, Airship Ventures, Boxbe, CVO Group  (Hungary), Eventful.com, Evernote, IBS Group (Russia, advisory board), Meetup,  NewspaperDirect, Voxiva, Yandex (Russia)…and WPP Group (not a start-up).  Her past IT investments include Flickr and Del.icio.us (sold to Yahoo!), BrightMail (sold to Symantec), Medstory and Powerset  (sold to Microsoft), Plazes (sold to Nokia), Orbitz (IPOed, sold to Cendant and later re-IPOed), Tacit (sold to Oracle), and ActiveWeave (sold to Buzzlogic).  Her current holdings include BlogAds, ChoiceStream, Dopplr, Dotomi, Linkstorm, Ovusoft, PatientsLikeMe, Resilient, ReliefinSite, School of Everything, Technorati, TerraLink (Russia), UCMS (Russia), Vizu.com and Zedo.

Dyson is also active in the non-profit world.  She is a director of the Sunlight Foundation, devoted to transparency in government, and sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy.  She has visited its grantees in countries ranging from Russia to Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.