5 Minutes With Esther Dyson

Esther Dyson, named by Forbes magazine as one of the most powerful women in American business, started her career as a magazine fact checker and ended up managing her own venture capital fund, EDventure.

She became one of the most influential voices in the Internet industry as a board member and/or early investor in several companies that helped define tech startup success, among them Cygnus Solutions, Flickr, Meetup, del.icio.us, and Technorati. Over the last few years, Dyson has been focusing more and more of her time and energy on private aviation and commercial space startups, as well as on health care and genetics companies.

She is currently on the board of directors of 23andMe and a trustee at Personal Genome Project. Dyson also recently finished six months of cosmonaut training and serves on the NASA Advisory Council.

Recently, NY Report executive editor Daria Meoli spoke with Dyson about the next great market for investing and how she is helping build a Silicon Valley in Russia.

Daria Meoli: You have been called the “Internet guru of the 90s.” Looking ahead to the next decade, what business trends do you see happening?

Esther Dyson: I would say the next big sector is health.

DM: Why?

ED: Because it’s the last frontier other than education. There is now a market for health when there wasn’t before. There was a market for healthcare and there was a market for bad health, but now there’s a market for maintaining health. The opposite of disease is not care. The absence of disease is health. You can make yourself worse, but you can also make yourself better.

DM: You are most known for being an Internet industry guru in the US. How did you get involved with a Russian commission?

ED: I’m one of three foreign members of a Russian government commission to create a “Russian Silicon Valley.” I learned Russian in high school because my father is a physicist who knew a lot of Russian mathematicians and scientists. So, for me, Russia was not such a strange place. I didn’t actually end up going there until 1989, but since then I’ve adopted it as, not so much a motherland, but a child-land.

Russia has lots of brilliant software people. I like to say a Russian software developer is like an engineer squared. And, from the Russian point of view, an American salesman is like a salesman squared. So, they’re very, very different cultures. What they lack is marketing management and implementation. You need raw intelligence and interest to be a good developer. But you need habits and experience and role models to turn that into a business. So, you know, Russia’s challenge really isn’t innovation. They’ve got lots of innovation. It’s implementation.

DM: And that’s where you come in?

ED: I come in trying to explain that it’s not a matter of throwing money at the problem; it’s a matter of changing your culture. What has been a blessing to American companies is good customers. They’re customers who like to buy innovative things that work. In Russia, often the customers would rather get a bribe than a working product.

DM: What was the reason behind starting a NASA advisory council?

ED: NASA has become more risk-averse than it used to be, and there are lots of reasons for that. Whenever there have been cuts to their budget, they would always cut the innovation stuff because they needed to keep existing programs going. But now the new budget is really wonderful, because it basically cuts a big, overdue product, The Constellation, to focus funding on getting to Mars and beyond. There are businesses in the private sector capable of getting people up to the space station, so it makes total sense for the government to focus on other projects.