Esther Dyson, named by Forbes magazine as one of the most powerful women in American business, is an acknowledged luminary in the technology industry.
Esther Dyson has been highly influential in her field for the past 20 years, with a state-of-the-art knowledge of the online information technology industry worldwide and the emerging computer markets of Central and Eastern Europe.
She 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. Among the topics she has covered are social software and social networks, registries of people and things, the Internet, the transformation of e-mail to “meta-mail,“ identity management, and the use of “consumer“ Internet services such as Yahoo! , eBay and Google by small businesses.
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 organisations on a less formal basis, both in the US and elsewhere.
Dyson was born circa 1952 to prominent mathematician Verena Huber-Dyson and physicist and futurist writer Freeman Dyson. Her father worked at the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and Dyson grew up accustomed to seeing Nobel laureates at the dinner table. An aspiring novelist, she started her own mini newspaper at age eight and later worked as a page in the public library. She entered Harvard University at age 16, but by her own account, rarely attended classes, instead spending most of her time at the university newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, or hanging out with friends on the Harvard Lampoon. She graduated with a B.A. in economics in 1972.
Although she’d hoped to become an entertainment writer at Variety, she ended up as a fact checker, and later a reporter, at Forbes, where she became fascinated by the business world. In 1977, she joined New Court Securities as ‘the research department’, following Federal Express and other start-ups. After…
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