Advisor

Esther Dyson

Esther Dyson(@edyson on Twitter) is executive founder of Wellville (@WaytoWellville), a 10-year nonprofit project to show how five small US communities can use their own assets to increase the resilience and agency of their members, building sustainable institutions and healthier living conditions. 

The Wellville team of six coaches leaders in five US communities who are working to improve the physical, mental and financial health of their residents. One of the communities is Lake County, CA, just three hours north of Mountain View and adjacent to Napa and Sonoma Counties. As it nears the end (2025) of its operation, Wellville is starting to explore how to inspire other communities and institutions to follow its lead. 

Aside from that full-time role, Dyson works to leverage new business models, new technologies and new markets (both economic and political).  From October 2008 to March of 2009, she lived in Star City outside Moscow, Russia, training as a backup cosmonaut.

She is an active board member for a variety of companies, including BAMF Health, Element 3 Health, PressrReader, Swvl (Cairo), and Yandex (Russia - YNDX). Her current investments include AdKeeper, Evernote, Fancy, Factual, GoodData, Hurdle Health, Linqia, Square in information services;  TerraLink and Zingaya in Russia; 4DHealthWare, Care.coach, Clover Health, Devoted Health, Eligible,  Enso Relief, Hawthorne Effect, HealthTap, Humanity,  i2Dx, Ilara, Medesk, MedicaSafe, Mindright.io, Nuna, Omada Health, PatientsKnowBest (UK), Pocket Naloxone, Prognos, Rasello, Solera, Startup Health, Tocagen, Valkee (Finland), Virgo SVS in health; and Icon Aircraft (light sport aircraft), Nanoracks and Space Adventures (which organizes programs such as hers for space tourists) in aerospace.

 Dyson also sits on the boards of several nonprofits, including the Long Now Foundation and ExpandED Schools, and is a patron of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. From 1998 to 2000, she was non-exec chairman of ICANN (overseeing the Internet’s domain name & address system), and before that chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

She has a BA in economics from Harvard and started her serious career as a fact-checker/reporter for Forbes Magazine (1974-77).  From 1977 to 1982 she worked on Wall Street as a securities analyst, covering companies such as Federal Express, Apple Computer and Electronic Data Systems. From 1983 to 2004 she wrote/edited Release 1.0, a monthly analysis of the PC/Internet business, and ran the yearly PC Forum, the industry's leading executive conference (no sponsors), as head of her own company EDventure Holdings. She sold EDventure to CNET in 2004 and worked there for two years before going completely independent.  Along the way, she served as founding (non-exec) chairman of ICANN from 1998 to 2000. In addition, she wrote the best-selling, widely translated book "Release 2.0: A design for living in the digital age," published by Broadway Books, in 1997.