Former VC & Entrepreneur from Silicon Valley; employee #9 at Gigster (YC/Andreessen), mentor at top accelerators, now leadership at e-Residency, a government startup from the Republic of Estonia
Joel is a serial entrepreneur who founded his first business at 18 years old. By the time Joel was 21, he was working with the SBA advising small businesses ranging from Native American Reservations to Drone companies. At 22 Joel became CMO of a startup in Silicon Valley, and shortly after moving to Palo Alto, he began working with StartX, the accelerator for Stanford founders. In 2015 Joel launched his own startup focused on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and hardware devices specifically for sleep applications. However, the venture didn't take off and Joel moved to venture capital for a short time until moving to Gigster pre Series-A as employee number 9. Joel continues to stay actively involved with early stage startups mentoring through MIT Launch, Startup Weekend, and various Accelerators/Incubators.
After helping build several teams at Gigster and the series B fundraise with investors like Michael Jordan and Andreessen Horowitz, Joel relocated to Berlin to help build launchcircle, a Rocket Internet venture focused on creating the future of work starting with custom software development with top freelance engineers from places like Google, McKinsey, and Oracle. After working with Rocket Internet, Joel moved to work in government innovation and now leads the Business Development team at the e-Residency program for the government of Estonia, one of the most forward thinking nations in digital.
