Esther Dyson is the Internet’s court jester, a person of no institutional standing who somehow manages to speak the truth and be heard when and where it matters. She does business as EDventure Holdings, the reclaimed name of the company she owned for 20-odd years before selling it to CNET Networks in 2004.Her primary activity is investing in start-ups and guiding many of them as a board member. Her board seats include 23andMe, Boxbe, Caivis, CVO Group (Hungary), Eventful.com, Evernote, IBS Group (Russia, advisory board), Meetup, Newspaper-Direct, Voxiva, Yandex (Russia)…and WPP Group (not a start-up). Her past IT investments include Flickr and Del.icio.us (sold to Yahoo!), BrightMail (sold to Symantec), Medstory (sold to Microsoft), Orbitz (IPOed, sold to Cendant and later re-IPOed). Her current holdings include ActiveWeave, BlogAds, ChoiceStream, Dopplr (pending), Dotomi, Linkstorm, Ovusoft, PatientsLikeMe, Plazes, Powerset, Resilient, ReliefinSite, Tacit, Technorati, Visible Path, Vizu.com and Zedo.
As a four-time weightless flyer, she is also active in the commercial space/airline start-up world, with investments in Airship Ventures, Coastal Aviation Software, Constellation Services, Icon Aircraft, Space Adventures, XCOR Aerospace and Zero-G. Her next annual Flight School workshop, on the new air-taxi and commercial space markets, takes place June 4 to 6 in Boulder, CO.
On the non-profit side, Dyson sits on the boards of the Eurasia Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Santa Fe Institute and the Sunlight Foundation.
For more than 20 years Dyson wrote the newsletter Release 1.0 and ran PC Forum, the
IT market’s leading executive conference. She sold them to CNET Networks in 2004, and left CNET at the end of 2006. (The Forum was discontinued under CNET Networks’ ownership, while O’Reilly Media now produces Release 1.0 under the new name of Release 2.0, with Dyson’s blessing.) Dyson was the founding chairman of ICANN (policy-setter for the Domain Name System) from 1998-2000, and was also chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the 90s. In 1997, she wrote her (so far) only book, “Release 2.0: A design for living in the digital age,” which appeared in paperback a year later as “Release 2.1.” In 1994, she wrote a seminal essay on intellectual property for WIRED magazine. In both her investments and her nonprofit activities, she has always been concerned with the impact of information (technology) on business and society.
She also blogs occasionally for the Huffington Post, as Release 0.9.
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Richard Lederer is the author of more than 30 books about language, history, and humor, including his best-selling Anguished English series and his current book, Presidential Trivia. His language topics range from puns and bloopers to writing style and usage to anagrams, palindromes, and crossword puzzles.
Richard Lederer’s syndicated column, “Looking at Language,” appears in newspapers and magazines throughout the United States. He has been profiled in magazines as diverse as The New Yorker, People, and the National Enquirer and frequently appears on radio as a commentator on language, including, for many years, WNYC. He is a former Usage Editor of The Random House Dictionary of the English Language and has been named International Punster of the Year and Toastmasters International’s Golden Gavel winner.
As father of Howard “The Professor” Lederer and Annie Duke, Richard Lederer is also the greatest breeder of world-class professional poker players in history.
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Bernard L. Schwartz is chairman and CEO of BLS Investments, LLC, a private investment firm. He also manages the investments of the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, which mainly supports higher education, medical research and New York City-based cultural organizations. He promotes the development of U.S. economic policy initiatives through investment in educational institutions, think tanks and advocacy organizations. Mr. Schwartz is also an active supporter of the Democratic Party.
Prior to establishing BLS Investments in March 2006, Mr. Schwartz served for 34 years as chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Loral Space & Communications and its predecessor company, Loral Corporation. In 1972, Mr. Schwartz took the helm at Loral which became, under his leadership, a Fortune 200 designer and manufacturer of advanced, state-of-the-art systems, hardware and systems integration for the defense and aerospace industries. Through its successful strategy of acquisition and internal development, the company achieved extraordinary growth, posting 96 consecutive quarters of increased earnings from 1972 to 1996. Over that period, Loral made more than 40 acquisitions and its market value rose from $7.5 million to $15 billion. At its height, the company employed more than 30,000 employees in numerous countries around the world. In 1996, Mr. Schwartz directed the divestment of Loral’s defense businesses and formed Loral Space & Communications, one of the world’s largest satellite manufacturing and satellite services companies. In connection with this transaction, Loral collectively paid a dividend to its shareholders of more than $9 billion, primarily in cash and the balance in stock of the new Loral Space & Communications. In addition, Bernard Schwartz personally established a fund of more than $18 million for distribution to employees of Loral to mitigate any negative effects on those employees from the sale of Loral’s defense businesses.
Mr. Schwartz graduated from City College of New York with a B.S. degree in finance and holds an honorary Doctorate of Science degree from the college. He and his wife live in New York City and have two daughters, three granddaughters and one grandson.
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On August 2, 2004, Dr. Kathleen Waldron became the president of Baruch College, the nation’s largest accredited business school and one of the most selective public colleges in the northeast. Before joining Baruch, Dr. Waldron was dean of the School of Business, Public Administration and Information Sciences of Long Island University Brooklyn Campus. Prior to her transition to education administration, Dr. Waldron distinguished herself for thirteen years in several managerial positions at Citibank. From 1996 to 1998, she was a member of the policy committee for Citibank’s Private Bank, which managed over $100 billion in assets of clients from over 40 countries, and offered a full range of investment, credit, and corporate finance products. She was in charge of Global Strategic Planning for the Private Bank as the group achieved revenues of $1.4 billion. She also served on a transition team when Citicorp merged with Travelers Insurance to form Citigroup in 1998. From 1991 to 1996, she was President of Citibank International in Miami, where she managed a $25 million business. From 1988 to 1991, she was director of Citibank’s International Agencies Division, responsible for providing investment and credit services to large not-for-profit entities in the United States, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Before joining Citibank, Dr. Waldron worked at Chemical Bank in the Argentine area of the Latin American Division, responsible for government and private sector lending.
In addition to her Masters degree, Dr. Waldron received her Doctorate in Latin American History from Indiana University in 1977. She went on to be an assistant professor at Bowdoin College in Maine (1977 – 1981), and a Fulbright Scholar at the Universidad Catolica Andres Bello in Caracas, Venezuela in 1981.
Dr. Waldron has also been a member of the Presidential Committee on the Fulbright Program, a member of the Board of Directors of Shands Hospital in Gainesville Florida, a member of the Florida International Bankers Association, a Director of the Fulbright Association, and served on the board of Alpha II, a closed end equity mutual fund. Dr. Waldron is a member of the Latin American Studies Association, the Financial Women’s Association, the Academy of Management, the Economics Club, the Association for a Better New York, and currently serves on the board of Accion International, a micro-credit lending organization.
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Fara Warner is the author of “The Power of the Purse: How Smart Businesses Are Adapting to the World’s Most Important Consumers—Women.” She has written about marketing, advertising, and consumer trends for more than 18 years for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fast Company, Forbes and other national publications.
While at Fast Company as a senior writer, she wrote “Nike’s Women’s Movement,” an in-depth cover story of how Nike transformed the way it sells to, designs for, and communicates to women. The article became the basis for her successful business book on women’s consumer and economic power.
She currently is a frequent contributor to Forbes, Fast Company, and Conde Nast’s Portfolio.com. Ms. Warner is the 2007-2009 Howard R. Marsh Visiting Professor of Journalism at the University of Michigan’s Department of Communication Studies. She teaches classes on Internet communications, consumer trends, and global press freedom. She holds a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and is the recipient of a Knight-Wallace Fellow in Journalism at the University of Michigan.
