About
Chris Hacken
Entrepreneur and operator. I founded and sold Loop Internet, and I'm now building Dragonfly, Peak Utility Group, and a venture still in stealth — writing and podcasting about the work of building hard things.
I started building an internet service provider in 2015 — first as NEPA Fiber, later rebranded to Loop Internet — to fix something that had bothered me my whole life: Northeastern Pennsylvania always seemed to be the last place to get decent internet. Dial-up long after everyone else had DSL. DSL long after everyone else had cable. I grew up watching the rest of the country leap ahead and decided to do something about it.
Before that, I worked in a datacenter, wrote software, and started and sold a small web hosting company. I spent eight of the hardest weeks of my life at Marine Corps Officer Candidates School, which taught me I could endure far more than I thought.
Building an ISP is perhaps the most capital-intensive business on the planet, and I bootstrapped it on credit cards and grit. We went from a handful of wireless customers to deploying real fiber in the ground, fighting make-ready fees, pole attachment battles, and curb-to-curb restoration ordinances along the way.
On October 1, 2025, we sold Loop Internet to Greenlight Networks— the culmination of a decade of work. Today I'm building again: Dragonfly.com, Peak Utility Group, and a third venture still in stealth.
This site is where I write about that work and host The Build Podcast — long-form conversations with the founders, operators, and builders creating real things in the real world.