Joseph Fasone

Joseph Fasone was 16 when he decided to skip his senior year of high school and become IT director at WeWork, then a freshly launched New York City co-working space startup. Now, he's the founder and CEO of his own promising startup, Pilot, a fiber-optic internet service provider for businesses across New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, D. C. and Boston. He even landed a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for Enterprise Technology. And just as WeWork built a company on empty real estate, Pilot takes advantage of the unused fiber optic cables already under a city. “The infrastructure was there, but there wasn't the right service provider,” Fasone says. Pilot has raised $32.3 million to build a service that’s faster than its competitors by orders of magnitude. Typical Internet speed is around 18.7 megabits per second. Pilot’s slowest service is 100 megabits per second, and offers two more tiers—one 10 times faster, another 100 times faster and a third 1000 times faster. Its nearest competitor is Verizon Fios, which is speedier than Pilot’s base option but slower than its others. "We built the entire business from the ground up, thinking, How do we reinvent this experience?” Fasone says. Given telcom's consolidation craze, Pilot looks ripe for acquisition, but Fasone claims he isn’t interested. “We're really looking forward to having the ability to bring this service to dozens of cities around the globe and build a freestanding organization where we control our own destiny.”