Joseph Fasone, 23

FOUNDER, PILOT

At 16, Joseph Fasone 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. Seven years later, he’s the founder and CEO of his own promising startup, Pilot, a fiber-optic internet service provider for businesses in New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. and Boston. 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 it offers three more tiers—one 10 times faster, another 100 times faster and a third 1,000 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 telecom’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.”

—Helen A.S. Popkin and Samar Marwan