Esther Dyson was a non-executive director of Yandex from 2006 until her resignation in March 2022. Dyson is the founder of Wellville, a US-based 10-year non-profit project to demonstrate the value of investing in health, ending December 2024. She is an active investor in a variety of IT, health, logistics and space start-ups, and also sits on the boards of AvanleeCare, ProofPilot, SWVL (NASDAQ), and Pressreader (among others). She also sits on the boards of non-profits including Charity Navigator, ExpandED Schools and the Long Now Foundation. 

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She started her career as a fact-checker for Forbes Magazine, and then spent five years as a securities analyst on Wall Street. At New Court Securities, Dyson comprised the sell-side research department, and worked on the initial public offering of Federal Express, among others. At Oppenheimer & Co., she followed the nascent software and personal computer markets. From 1982 to 2004, as the owner of EDventure Holdings, she edited its newsletter Release 1.0 and ran its annual PC Forum conference. She was an early investor in Flickr and del.icio.us (sold to Yahoo!), Medstory and Powerset (sold to MicrosoftMeetup (sold to WeWork)), Geometric Intelligence and Jump (sold to Uber), and Square/Block and Omada Health, among others. She is the author of “Release 2.0: A design for living in the digital age” (1997). Dyson earned a BA in economics from Harvard University, and a certificate of completion from the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Institute.