Investor

Esther Dyson is chairman of EDventure Holdings, the name with which she does business.  Her primary activity is investing in and nurturing start-ups, with a recent focus on health care and aerospace.  She recently (October 2008 to March 2009) spent most of six months training as a backup cosmonaut in Star City outside Moscow Russia.  While there she had the pleasure of spending 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,  WPP Group (not a start-up!) and Yandex.   Her past investments have 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 such as hers for space tourists), and XCOR Aerospace.  She also sits on the boards of several nonprofits, including  the the Eurasia Foundation, the Su