rural-broadband
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The Intern, the Long Wire and the Work of Connecting Montana
Jason Williams entered Blackfoot as a law-school intern and returned to lead it through a costly rural fiber conversion. His advantage is not technological bravado, but a lawyer’s patience for trade-offs and a willingness to say where the company arrived late.
Scott Behn Counted a Year in Minutes
The former Aureon chief spent a career making invisible systems dependable. His favorite number was 525,600 - every minute a customer expected the network to work.
Danny Gardner Put Wi-Fi Where the Wires Run Out
A student project, a solar panel and a stubborn question became Mesh++. Danny Gardner’s routers travel lightly because the places that need a signal rarely come with convenient walls, wires or outlets.
Jim McKenna Bet Maine's Last Mile Could Travel Through the Air
A former nuclear-submarine officer built a Maine internet company around one stubborn engineering belief: fiber should carry the distance, and wireless should finish the trip.
Jase Wilson
Jase Wilson grew up in rural Missouri, earned a Master of City Planning from MIT, and has spent two decades trying to wire America together. After helping land Google Fiber's first network in Kansas City, founding and ultimately losing Neighborly - a civic fintech built on municipal bonds - he pivoted to Ready.net in 2019. Now, as founder and CEO, he runs a Y Combinator-backed vertical SaaS platform that helps state broadband offices manage billions in federal BEAD grants and track sub-grantee performance, with $14.6M in total funding and a team of 62.