Colby Thomson has built his career where technology meets the people who most depend on it.
For close to a decade on the board of the Human Rights Foundation, he has helped govern an organization that puts secure tools for communication and payment into the hands of activists and dissidents whose safety depends on them, often under the world's most repressive governments. Thomson is also the founder and chief executive of the Good Ancestor Foundation, a nonprofit that funds work across digital security, artificial intelligence and biosecurity, societal resilience, and human rights.
Before turning to philanthropy and governance, Thomson built and ran several companies including Honest Policy, which he founded to create financial products that protect customer privacy by design. Additionally, his early tenure as director of strategy at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and as a founding advisor to Singularity University gave him a long view of how powerful technology reshapes individual autonomy, well before the field caught up.
Thomson studied computer science and earned an MBA at the Jeffrey S. Raikes School at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. That long view now matters directly to Sovright, which builds infrastructure to keep individuals in control of their money, their data, and their choices as technology makes that harder.
Areas of expertise
Financial privacy, human rights, nonprofit governance, AI safety, freedom technology, and digital sovereignty.
Track record
- Human Rights Foundation: Board Director (2016–present)
- Good Ancestor Foundation: Founder and Chief Executive
- Honest Policy: Founder and Chairman
- Machine Intelligence Research Institute: Director of Strategy (2007–2010)
- Singularity University: Founding Board of Advisors (2008–2010)
- Open Source Ecology: Board Director (2011–present), recognized in Time's Best Inventions of 2012
- ALLFED (Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters): Board Director (2022–present)
- Lace Lithography: Board Member, Security Committee (2025–present)
- Education: BSc Computer Science and MBA, Jeffrey S. Raikes School, University of Nebraska–Lincoln
Featured appearances and writing
- Inside North Korea with the Human Rights Foundation,
- Towards an Open Source Civilization,
- Tech, Geopolitics, and Human Rights,