How Data Enables a New Market for Health as an Asset Class

I am very pleased to host Esther Dyson as our first speaker for 2016.

Abstract: Esther Dyson, formerly a techy and a trained cosmonaut, is now taking on the new goal of defining and demonstrating health as an asset class – a store of value resident in human bodies. Health is neither directly tangible, nor is it owned, but it does create value (or reduce costs) for entities that should be willing to pay for it – insurers, employers, communities, governments. Esther discusses how she came to this work and how health can defined and how the value it creates can be measured, attributed and funded.

This initiative will require a lot of hard work and persuasion to turn this asset into a fungible financial product. Esther will discuss what can/should we do about the negative externalities of junk food, addictive substances, and other attractions of modern life.

Bio: Esther Dyson is an angel investor, and the founder of Wellville, a nonprofit initiative to produce health in five small (<200,000 population) US communities. She is on the board of health-oriented companies including 23andMe and Voxiva. She is an investor in Applied Proteomics, Clover Health, CUR, Eligible API, GeriJoy, Health Tap, HealthLoop, Medesk, Medivo, Medicalgorithmics, Meetup, Omada Health, PatientsLikeMe, PatientsKnowBest, Proofpilot, StartupHealth and others. In addition, she is on the board of and research subject #3 for the Personal Genome Project.

Esther received her BA in Economics from Harvard.

Here is a link to her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/edyson