Colin Percival

Colin Percival is a Canadian computer scientist and the founder of Tarsnap, a secure online backup service for UNIX-like systems that encrypts data on the client before storing it. He began working on Tarsnap in 2006 because he wanted a better backup service than existed, opened a public beta in November 2008 and reached profitability in February 2009. Tarsnap later became his full-time work, run through Tarsnap Backup Inc., incorporated in British Columbia in 2011.

Percival is also a long-time FreeBSD developer: he became a committer in 2004, served as FreeBSD Security Officer from 2005 to 2012, maintains FreeBSD on Amazon EC2 and became FreeBSD's release engineering lead. He created the scrypt key derivation function, which grew out of Tarsnap's security needs and is now widely used.

Tarsnap is often cited in bootstrapping circles as a famously technical, deliberately low-key business, with usage-based pricing in picodollars and minimal marketing.