Like many entrepreneurs, Joseph Fasone was inspired to launch Pilot, a business internet service provider, by a personal pain point: frustration as a buyer.  

In 2010, when Fasone was 16 years old, he landed a job at WeWork, and soon after, decided to quit high school to make it his full time gig. Back then, the co-working company was just starting out, and Fasone's duties involved finding and contracting internet services for the New York startup's spreading locations.  

"I finally hit the realization that no ISP was built to deal with a company growing as fast as WeWork," says the now 24-year-old. Not only was the service costly, he says; he also couldn't get the incumbent telecom providers to give him an order form within 48 hours. Smaller players, by contrast, didn't provide the bandwidth capacity the offices required. "I saw an opportunity," he says.   

Today, his company supplies services, including high-speed internet and low-latency connections to cloud providers like Amazon or Salesforce, to companies along the eastern seaboard including Boston and Washington, D.C. It has 1,250 business clients and over 75,000 end users. It has also attracted $32.3 million in venture funding from the likes of Union Square Ventures and the Foundry Group.