Kristin Johnson’s long bet on the connection next door

A restaurant owner has a particularly unforgiving relationship with the customer. Dinner arrives, or it doesn’t. The table is ready, or somebody is standing by the door. Long before Kristin Johnson became the co-founder and CEO of Hotwire Communications, she worked as a chef, owned restaurants and ran a catering business. It is an unusual apprenticeship for telecommunications, a field whose vocabulary can make an ordinary household connection sound like a minor space mission.

Johnson’s first lessons in commerce came even earlier, helping her grandparents serve customers, count stock and keep the books in their stores. She later earned a BA at Lawrence University. Asked to imagine an alternative career, she has said she would still choose to run a company. The product could change. The attraction of building an organization remained.

Today, her organization operates fiber networks for residential communities and businesses across the United States. It sells a service that people increasingly expect to notice only when it stops working. That gives a former restaurateur plenty to think about: the customer may never admire the machinery, but will certainly remember being kept waiting.

The decision beneath the pavement

Hotwire’s own operating history starts in 2002, with television, internet and telephone services for apartment communities. Construction of its fiber-to-the-home network followed in 2003. Johnson and fellow co-founder Michael Karp were building around a proposition with a long horizon: the connection entering a home would become part of its essential infrastructure.

Johnson has explained that owning the network mattered because it gave the company control over service quality. It also committed Hotwire to the less glamorous responsibilities of infrastructure. A network owner has to build, maintain and improve the thing that carries the promise. The promotional brochure is comparatively light work.

Her compact description of the early calculation was that “broadband would be the next utility.” The phrase puts the business on a different clock. A utility must serve people after the excitement of installation has passed, through changing devices, changing habits and changing expectations. Johnson’s wager required patience with construction and a willingness to spend before the full demand arrived.

A neighborhood is a demanding customer

Hotwire’s residential model often begins with a homeowners’ association or a multifamily property. The company contracts to supply connectivity across a community, putting a collective decision ahead of the individual household relationship. Johnson’s business therefore has to work at two scales: the agreement that wins a property, and the everyday experience inside each home.

Brookfield described that model in July 2025 as bulk fiber service supported by long contracts, including commitments to pay for service and provisions linked to inflation. At that point, the platform had more than 300,000 billing customers. These are the economics that make a network legible to an infrastructure investor. The household still wants a connection that works in the room where it is needed.

That gap between the contract and the living room helps explain Johnson’s emphasis on service. A neighborhood agreement can assemble demand efficiently; it cannot answer a resident’s question by itself. Her company has to translate the scale of a shared network into something that feels usable to one person. Nobody has ever been comforted by being told that their problem is statistically small.

Keep the people; give them room

For Johnson, the company’s history also lives in its employees. In her public account of hiring, she says the first two people she brought into Hotwire have stayed with her and continued to help build the business. She connects those early appointments to a rule she still values: choose people who care about the mission and the customers, then allow them to work.

Her instruction is to step back once the right people are in place. Coming from a founder, that is a useful admission that being present for every decision can become its own obstacle. The person who created the organization eventually has to make room for other people to shape it.

Several of those relationships have lasted through substantial changes. Jonathan Bullock joined through Hotwire’s 2012 acquisition of Connexion Technologies and now serves as chief strategy officer. Mandy Esposito joined in 2018 and is now chief operating officer. Their careers overlap with the company’s expansion from its earlier regional footprint into additional markets. Continuity, in this setting, is practical knowledge carried from one stage of growth to the next.

“get out of the way and let them do what they do best.”

Kristin Johnson, on hiring and trust

The comparison she asks her team to make

Johnson’s service ambitions reach beyond the telecom industry. Her customer experience team has described her urging comparisons with luxury brands such as Ritz and Mercedes. The point is revealing. An internet provider can measure itself against another internet provider and still leave the customer wishing the experience belonged to a different industry altogether.

In 2025, that thinking appeared in the team’s work on home network assessments. Technicians could diagnose coverage and show residents where a connection needed improvement. The design drew on the visual logic of home energy assessments and the presentation habits of consumer brands. It made a technical problem easier to see, discuss and act upon.

There is a recognizable host’s instinct in that approach, although a career in catering does not explain every management decision. People should not need professional vocabulary to get comfortable in their own homes. Johnson’s stated standard asks the company to consider how service feels, as well as how the underlying system performs. The router is an unlikely place to learn hospitality, but the customer is already there.

Capital arrives with a longer guest list

On April 29, 2021, Blackstone announced an investment in Hotwire alongside its founders. Its Infrastructure Partners and Tactical Opportunities businesses participated. For Johnson, the partnership offered resources and reach to expand a company whose network already served communities in Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas.

By June 2025, a further change was underway. Brookfield Infrastructure agreed to acquire Blackstone’s stake. The announced plans included extending the network within existing markets, entering new ones and developing fiber-to-the-home service. Johnson welcomed Brookfield as an owner alongside management and emphasized preserving Hotwire’s operating values as the footprint expanded.

The scale of the business had changed considerably. The proposed transaction was reported to value Hotwire at around $7 billion, including debt. The figure captures the distance between the early community business and the platform that attracted another infrastructure investor. The more useful question for her leadership is how an organization keeps a local service relationship while its financial partners and geographic ambitions grow.

Another way to extend a network

Johnson founded the Empowering Communities Foundation in 2020 and serves as its chairwoman. It took the company’s expertise into a different kind of assignment: connecting people who lacked affordable broadband. The work paired access with equipment and the knowledge needed to use it.

An initial $1.5 million commitment from Truist supported a partnership involving Community Education Alliance, Dell and Hotwire. The plan covered more than 2,100 underserved households in East Spencer, North Carolina, Broward County, Florida, and Philadelphia’s Belmont neighborhood. Private LTE networks and Chromebooks were part of the approach.

The foundation’s Home Page Program later brought connectivity, laptops and learning tools to the South Dade Migrant Community. Hotwire described engineering and construction teams building the community network, with ongoing technical support. The detail matters because access is a sequence of tasks. A device needs a connection; its user may need guidance; both need somewhere to turn when the arrangement fails.

This work gives Johnson’s early utility argument a social consequence. Once schooling and everyday participation depend on a connection, a network’s boundary helps determine who can take part. Extending that boundary requires the same patient operational work as serving a paying property, with a different funding arrangement.

Who gets to build what comes next?

Johnson also advocates for women in engineering and for introducing younger students to technical careers. Her public comments connect that ambition to recruiting female engineers and supporting STEM programs. It is an aspiration directed at who will design and operate the next generation of networks, as well as who will use them.

Industry recognition has followed her work. She entered Nova Southeastern University’s business entrepreneurship hall of fame in 2020 and was an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Florida finalist in 2021. Cablefax has included her among its industry honorees repeatedly, including its 2026 list. Awards mark moments; the decisions about recruitment, responsibility and advancement continue between ceremonies.

Asked which human ability would become more valuable as artificial intelligence and automation advance, Johnson chose compassion and empathy for employees and customers. It is a modest answer from someone whose business depends on sophisticated infrastructure. It also fits the career. The grandparents’ stores, the restaurants and the residential networks all put people on the receiving end of an operational promise.

Johnson has spent years building the system behind that promise. Her next chapter involves more geography, new investment and the continuing question of who gets connected. The test at the front door remains familiar: has somebody thought carefully about the person waiting on the other side?