Johann Thusbass

Johann Thusbass is a co-founder of Guanaja Hills, a resort, community and business development on the Honduran island of Guanaja. A Swiss ICT manager and co-founder of Club Hayek Zurich, he was an early participant in the Crypto Valley.

The project is run by an association registered in Lucerne and takes its motto from the movement it grew out of, Liberty in Our Lifetime. It is planned as a place to live and work rather than as a holiday development, on an island whose economy has run on fishing, diving and tourism.

Thusbass has spent his working life in Swiss industry, running IT for a mid-sized manufacturer, and has spent three decades reading and writing on the private provision of services that states usually reserve for themselves, security and defence among them. That is also what he brings to Club Hayek Zurich, which he helped found as a forum for Austrian economics in the city.

He first backed a Honduran venture in 2018 and has since discussed the project publicly in the Free Cities and liberty podcast circuit, where the recurring theme is what building on a small Caribbean island actually takes: legal certainty, patient capital and infrastructure that has to exist before the first resident arrives.