Esther Dyson, 47, is chairman of EDventure Holdings, a small but diversified company focused on emerging information technology worldwide, and on the emerging computer markets of Central and Eastern Europe. Dyson is also active in industry affairs; she is a member of the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is a member of the President's Export Council Subcommittee on Encryption. She co-chaired the National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council's Information Privacy and Intellectual Property subcommittee, and is now involved in advising various government figures and organizations on a less formal basis, both in the US and elsewhere. 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, Upside Magazine recently wrote that 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."
Last year, Dyson published her first book, Release 2.0: A design for living in the digital age. Publishers include Broadway in the United States, Viking/Penguin in the United Kingdom, Droemer Knaur in Germany and Shueisha in Japan. The book is intended 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. A paperback version, Release 2.1, will appear in the U.S. in late 1998.
Outside her own business, Dyson is a frequent public speaker at industry events and active in advising other organizations. She sits on the boards of the Global Business Network (a consulting organization), ComputerLand Poland , Cygnus Solution, E-Pub Services , Thinking Tools, Accent Software, Medscape, APP (Prague), PRT Group , TrustWorks (Amsterdam), Scala, Poland Online , New World Publishing, IBS (Moscow) and iCat, and on the advisory boards of Perot Systems and the Internet Capital Group. (She has investments in all of them.) She also has investments in other start-ups including PocketScience, Cambridge Display Technology, DPI and TerraLink (both in Russia), Softsteppe (Bishkek), Orchestream (UK), Prediction Company, Internet Securities, 21st Century Travel, Stagecast, FEED, i-traffic, Bright Light Technologies, Mirror Image, NetBeans (Prague) and GiGA Information Group. She is a limited partner of Mayfield Software Partners. Also, she has written articles on industry topics for the Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Wired Magazine, Forbes Magazine, Transition and Russia's CompuTerra magazine, among others. She writes a bi-weekly column for the UK's Guardian Newspaper, is a columnist for Content Magazine and is an occasional commentator on National Public Radio.
On the public-service side, in addition to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Dyson sits on the boards and executive committees of the Santa Fe Institute, The Institute for EastWest Studies and the Eurasia Foundation. She is also a founding member of the Russian Software Market Association. She serves on the advisory boards of the Software Forum (Silicon Valley), the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, the Institute for Research on Learning, the Russian Internet Technology Center and the Soros Medical Information Project.
Fluent in Russian, Dyson is a regular keynote speaker at the annual International Computer Forum in Moscow, and at other trade shows and conferences in the region. She also gives talks in English at events such as the Magazine Publishers Association annual conference, the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the Computers Freedom & Privacy annual conference, and workshops sponsored by the Aspen Institute and other organizations.
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 serious career -- and got her business education -- as a reporter for Forbes Magazine (1974-77).
Dyson graduated from Harvard in 1972, with a BA in economics. Instead of going to classes, she spent much of her time there working on The Harvard Crimson, a daily newspaper. At Harvard she picked up the habit of swimming for an hour every morning, which she does still.
To do all this, Dyson travels widely; she studies 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 Magazine, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post and The New York Times Magazine. The San Jose Mercury News 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!