Building for Community, Not Shareholders

Last night, I went to the KiN (Kaslo infoNet) AGM, where they went over the past year of operations, finances, wins, and challenges. Sitting there, it really hit me how much I love living in a small community in BC. KiN is this tiny non-profit ISP that has somehow managed to connect remote communities around the North Kootenay Lake with fibre internet — something the big ISPs wouldn’t even bother considering.

Coming from the tech startup world, where everything eventually bends toward whatever makes shareholders the most money, it’s great to see an organization built on the opposite values. Startups will swear up and down that they “care about the customer,” but at the end of the day, it’s the shareholder slide in the pitch deck that carries the most weight. Take AirBnB: Brian Chesky once touted the 6, 7, 11‑star experience — dreaming about delighting users in ways hotels never could. Now? They’ve stripped away that mentality and optimized the platform into a revenue‑extraction machine. Or look at Netflix — the company that once promised to replace cable TV… and then slowly transformed itself into cable TV.

Back to the AGM: the discussion turned to whether new customers should pay the full install fee instead of having installation costs shared across the entire customer base. That model — the “you pay your own install, everyone else looks after themselves” approach — is exactly how traditional telcos operate. But KiN was created as a community service. The whole point is that someone living up a logging road in the mountains pays the same rate as someone living in town. It’s more like a public service model than a typical business.

And sure, some people wonder whether that’s even sustainable. But KiN pulled in more than 1.8 million last year and is on track to do the same again. That’s enough to keep expanding the network, build proper redundancy around the lake, and ensure no single line break can take out an entire region — all while offering customer service that big ISPs haven’t delivered in decades. For example, if you call them, they’ll generally pick up and connect you in touch with the right person in the organization immediately instead of waiting an hour in a queue and then having to be bounced around to different departments before being told that they will be at your house next week in an 8-hour window.

If KiN were a VC‑backed startup, the playbook would be simple: raise another round, expand aggressively, dominate the region, then flip the whole thing to a telecom giant. But is that actually better for anyone who lives here? Bigger organizations almost always lose sight of the people they’re meant to serve. Eventually the “customer” becomes an abstract metric, and the most important stakeholder is someone who will never set foot in the Kootenays.

Listening to all this gave me a lot to think about for my own project — a community hub meant to connect people in the Kootenays with each other. I’m exploring business models that let it sustain itself long‑term without turning into yet another platform that forgets why it existed in the first place. If KiN can stay true to its values while serving an entire region, maybe there’s a path for my project to do the same.