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ESTHER DYSON
Angel Investor & Founder, Wellville
About Me
Esther Dyson is the founder of Wellville, a 10-year nonprofit project to nudge society toward long-term thinking and equity by showing the social and financial value of investing in health and wellbeing for all. The Wellville team of seven people coaches leaders in five US communities as they work to improve the physical, mental, and financial health of all their residents.
The five Wellville communities are all under 200,000 in population: Clatsop County, OR; Lake County, CA; Muskegon County, MI; North Hartford, CT; and Spartanburg, SC. The Wellville advisor for Muskegon, Esther is actively involved in overall policy and fundraising for the project. When it ends in 2024, she will focus on spreading its learnings (many from mistakes) more broadly, to other communities, to healthcare systems, to voters, and to the government, which is best-suited to invest in collective, equitably distributed health.
Esther advocates long-term thinking, including putting externalities into pricing, such as taxing sugar and subsidizing care work (nurses, childcare workers, gym teachers, prison guards, etc.). In her spare time, she is fascinated by and invests in new business models, new technologies, and new markets (both economically and politically).
Overall, Esther works to leverage new business models, new technologies, and new markets (both economic and political). From October 2008 to March 2009, she lived in Star City outside Moscow, Russia, training as a backup cosmonaut. She 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 chair of ICANN (overseeing the Internet’s domain name and address system), and before that, chair of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Esther 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) chair of ICANN and wrote the best-selling, widely translated book Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age (Broadway Books, 1997).
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