Today’s guests are John Hathaway, founder of Shucks Maine Lobster, and Fletcher Kittredge, founder of Maine-based internet service provider GWI.
Love Maine Radio #313: John Hathaway and Fletcher Kittredge
Guests
John Hathaway, CEO and president of Shucks Maine Lobster
After opening companies all over the world, including a successful real estate development firm, Hathaway returned to his home state of Maine to open Shucks Maine Lobster, a business that supplies raw lobster meat to international and local companies. Soon after it had started, Shucks won two Seafood Prix d’Elite Awards at the Brussels Seafood Expo Global/Seafood Processing Global for the best new seafood product. Shucks now employs about 80 people in Maine. He worked to classify Maine lobster as certified sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), and is currently the president of the Fund for the Advancement of Sustainable Maine Lobster, a client group of the MSC. He created the Shucks Maine Lobster Chef World Series and has also served as a state senator.
Fletcher Kittredge, founder and CEO of GWI
In 1994, after moving to Maine from Cambridge, Massachusetts, Fletcher Kittredge founded Maine-based internet service provider GWI. In the last 20 years, GWI has grown to 55 employees and $16 million in annual revenue, and it has been named five times to Inc. magazine’s list of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States. Currently, GWI provides service in all 16 Maine counties to both residential and business customers. GWI is a telephone company as well as an ISP and partners with a growing list of Maine municipalities to build and operate municipal fiber networks. In 2009, GWI was a partner in the Three Ring Binder project that created a 1,100-mile fiber optic network, spanning Maine in the form of three connected rings. In 2011, MaineBiz named Fletcher as Maine’s Large Business Leader of the Year. Prior to GWI, Fletcher worked for Massachusetts-based research laboratory Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) for nine years as a network software developer. Fletcher graduated from Colby College with a BA in English and Harvard University with an MS in computer science.