Esther Dyson

Esther Dyson is chairman of EDventure Holdings. Her primary activity is investing in and nurturing start-ups, with a recent focus on health care and aerospace. Between October 2008 and March 2009 she spent close to six months training as a backup cosmonaut in Star City outside Moscow Russia. While there, she could spend time not only with the cosmonauts but also with some of the US’s finest astronauts. She has chronicled some of her EDventures on Flickr  and on Huffington Post.

Apart from this brief sabbatical, she is an active board member for a variety of startups, including 23andMe, Airship Ventures, Boxbe, Eventful, Evernote, IBS Group (advisory board), Meetup, NewspaperDirect, Voxiva, and Yandex. Her past investments included Medstory (sold to Microsoft), Flickr and del.icio.us (sold to Yahoo!), Brightmail (sold to Symantec).

Her current investments include Icon Aircraft (light sport aircraft), Space Adventures (which organizes programs for space tourists), and XCOR Aerospace. She also sits on the boards of several nonprofit organizations, including  the the Eurasia Foundation, the Sunlight Foundation, the Personal Genome Foundation and StopBadware.org.