Esther Dyson  Esther Dyson (born 14 July 1951) is a Swiss-born American investor, journalist, author, businesswoman, commentator and philanthropist. She is a leading angel investor focused on health care, open government, digital technology, biotechnology, and outer space. Dyson's career focuses on health and continues to invest in health and technology startups. Esther Dyson's father was English-born, American-naturalized physicist Freeman Dyson, and her mother was mathematician Verena Huber-Dyson, who was of Swiss parentage; one of her brothers is digital technology historian George Dyson. After graduating from Harvard with a degree in economics, she joined Forbes as a fact-checker and quickly rose to reporter. In 1977, she joined New Court Securities following Federal Express and other start-ups. After a stint at Oppenheimer Holdings covering software companies, she moved to Rosen Research in 1982. In 1983, when she bought the company from her employer Ben Rosen, Dyson renamed the company EDventure Holdings and his "Rosen Electronic Letter" newsletter "Release 1.0". She sold EDventure Holdings to CNET Networks in 2004 but left CNET in January 2007. On October 7, 2008, Space Adventures announced that Dyson had paid to train as a back-up spaceflight participant for Charles Simonyi's trip to the International Space Station aboard the Soyuz TMA-14 mission which took place in 2009. In 1997, "46 year old Dyson" wrote "it so happens that I have never voted." Currently, Dyson is a board member and active investor in a variety of start-ups, mostly in online services, health care/genetics, and space travel. Previously, Dyson and her company EDventure specialized in analyzing the effect of emerging technologies and markets on economies and societies. She created the following publications on technology:  She sits on the boards of Medesk, 23andMe, Eventful.com, Luxoft, Meetup Inc., Pressreader.com (formerly NewspaperDirect), PA Consulting, Personal Inc, TerraLink Technologies, Voxiva (the company behind text4baby.org in the US and Russia), WPP Group, XCOR Aerospace and Yandex (Russia – YNDX). Dyson is an adviser to the "First Monday" journal and Visual Ops, an occasional contributor to Arianna Huffington's online Huffington Post, a board member of the education non-profit TASC, a member of the Xconomists, an ad hoc team of editorial advisors for the tech news and media company, Xconomy and "chairwoman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation."