The Internet Never Reached His Hometown. So He Went to Fix It.
Maryville, Missouri isn't the kind of place that makes you think about bandwidth. It's a small town in the rural northwest corner of the state - the kind of place where the internet, for much of Jase Wilson's childhood, simply wasn't a given. That detail doesn't appear in most bios. It should be the first one.
Wilson studied urban planning and design at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, graduating in 2005, then headed to MIT as a Research and Teaching Assistant in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning from 2006 to 2008. At MIT, he wrote a thesis on the intersection of technology and urban design - specifically on addressing the digital divide in civic and digital services. He wasn't just describing the problem. He was building the curriculum of a career.
Before founding anything, he founded something else: his reputation as the person who could make a city do something it hadn't done before. In Kansas City, Wilson served on Mayor Sly James's broadband cabinet and co-led the collaborative RFP response that landed Google Fiber's inaugural network. At the time, Google was picking its first city. The fact that it was Kansas City - not Austin, not Chicago, not Portland - was not an accident. Wilson was part of the machinery that made it happen.
The internet is the 21st century equivalent of fresh water.- Jase Wilson
That experience catalyzed his first startup. In January 2012, Wilson founded Neighborly in Kansas City - a fintech platform built around a deceptively simple idea: that the "humble municipal bond," as he called it, could be the foundation of community-owned infrastructure, including broadband networks. Municipal bonds were the bedrock of how America had built everything from schools to parks to highways. Neighborly wanted to democratize access to them.
The company attracted real believers. Ashton Kutcher backed it in 2015. The platform pivoted toward fiber-optic infrastructure financing, helping communities own their networks rather than lease them from carriers. Wilson's pitch was direct: "It's our infrastructure, and ISPs, please come and compete." He was describing something close to a utility model for the internet - publicly owned, competitively serviced.
Then, in October 2019, Neighborly collapsed. Not slowly. It failed suddenly, at what was supposed to be the closing step of an interim financing round. The startup that had attracted celebrity backing and an MIT founder's vision went under in the middle of a transaction.
Neighborly failed in October 2019 at what was supposed to be a financing closing - the kind of failure that happens at the worst possible moment. Two months later, Wilson founded Ready.net. There was no sabbatical. No reset period. Just another company.
Wilson founded Ready.net in December 2019. The company went through Y Combinator's Summer 2020 batch - building in the middle of a pandemic, selling software to broadband providers and state offices during a year when everyone suddenly understood what it felt like to be without reliable internet. The timing was not coincidental. The crisis had made the infrastructure argument undeniable.
Ready.net started as a cloud-based operational support platform for ISPs - a white-labeled system that let broadband providers manage subscribers, handle billing, and run support operations. Then the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act arrived in 2021 and put $42.45 billion on the table through the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program. The game changed.
Wilson pivoted Ready.net toward what state broadband offices actually needed: software to manage the full lifecycle of grant administration. Not just applications, but sub-grantee vetting, progress monitoring, NTIA compliance tracking, geospatial mapping, audit-ready reporting, and performance testing. The platform became the back-office infrastructure for how states like Arizona, Arkansas, California, Virginia, Minnesota, and others decided who got money, tracked whether they deployed it, and kept federal regulators satisfied.
Resilient systems are essential for both public safety and economic opportunity.- Jase Wilson, Resilient Digital Infrastructure Summit, Sept. 2025
In October 2022, Ready.net raised a $10.5M Series A. The investors included Arbor Ventures, Caffeinated Capital, Thiel Capital, and Sprint VC - a mix that reflected the company's position at the intersection of government tech, infrastructure, and enterprise software. Total funding reached $14.63M.
In September 2025, Wilson keynoted the Resilient Digital Infrastructure Summit in Washington, D.C., presenting seven principles for resilient critical infrastructure. The speech addressed something he'd been building toward for two decades: the idea that America's digital infrastructure isn't just a telecommunications problem. It's a national security and economic opportunity problem. The infrastructure America depends on must support the AI revolution and withstand threats ranging from natural disasters to tactical EMPs.
Ready.net now runs under a platform it calls the Utility Intelligence Platform - software that helps state broadband offices execute at scale, identify compliance issues early, manage reimbursement workflows, and maintain continuous audit readiness. The company employs 62 people. Its co-founder and COO is Mike Faloon.
Wilson also operates Broadband.Money, a resource site tracking federal broadband funding allocations and providing tools for state offices and providers navigating the grant landscape. His Twitter handle is simply @jase - four characters that suggest someone who got there early and has been building in public for a long time.
Wilson has maintained a decade-long life-logging practice - tracking productivity metrics, sleep quality, and flow states with the same rigor he applies to broadband infrastructure. He's interested in cold therapy, biohacking, and the science of performance. He also chairs the recurring giving circle at the National Coalition of Domestic Violence annually. He holds Bitcoin. The profile is not what you'd expect.
What makes Wilson's career unusual isn't the arc - founder builds company, company fails, founder builds again. That's common enough. What's unusual is that both companies were working on the same underlying problem: that American communities are underserved by the infrastructure they need, and that the financing and operational tools to fix it are broken. Neighborly attacked the financing side. Ready.net attacks the operational side. The thesis never changed. Only the entry point did.
He grew up in a place where the internet didn't reach. He studied at MIT how cities could fix that. He helped land Google Fiber in Kansas City. He tried to build the financial infrastructure for community-owned networks. He survived the failure of that company and immediately built again. Now he runs the software that manages how billions of federal dollars become actual broadband infrastructure in actual communities.
The strange specific detail: the man who is quietly powering America's digital buildout grew up somewhere digital infrastructure had never reached him. That's not background color. That's the whole engine.