Joël Heil Escobar

Joël Heil Escobar
Joël Heil Escobar

Since childhood I’ve been amazed by tech innovation. I loved (and still love) robots, rockets, computers, airplanes and literally everything that seemed sci-fi and futuristic. I tried out every new console I could get my hands on and saved up for years to build my own PC.

Trying out new things is still my favorite thing to do: building apps, tinkering, shipping. It led me to start a YouTube channel about Minecraft mods and tech at 10, a web dev and video editing agency at 14, affiliate and dropshipping stores and a podcast about startups and entrepreneurship.

This fascination for building own stuff led me to study computer science at CODE University and Stanford .

Along the way I also co-founded the Young Founders Network , Germany’s largest community for founders under 25 with over 2,200 members, where I scaled the team to over 100 volunteers and together we raised over €250k for entrepreneurial education.

Work

2026
2025
2024
2023
earlier

Problem
What I built
Result
    Live project ↗ Source ↗

    Notes

    Essays
    Beliefs
    • Every day life
      • have a bias towards action
      • if you're the smartest person in the room, switch the room
      • you can't control what happens, only how you react to it
      • we overestimate one year and underestimate five
      • no success without focus
      • avoid luxury, play the long financial game
      • prioritize sleep
      • be minimalistic
    • Building products
      • sell before you build
      • get very close to your customers: work in their office if you can, talk to them daily if not
      • build something a few users love, not something many users like
      • if it takes more than a sentence to explain, it's too complicated
      • work on the idea you think about when you're not trying to think about work
      • deciding what not to do matters as much as deciding what to do
      • telling people your idea isn't dangerous, good ideas don't sound worth stealing
      • fail fast and often
      • if everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough
      • stay optimistic when your world is melting down
      • acknowledge luck and risk in achievements, yours and others'
      • in the beginning of a company there is no management
    • Learning
      • being a student is easy, learning takes actual work
      • build projects to learn a topic, don't just read about it
      • understand instead of memorizing
      • active recall and spaced repetition beat rereading
      • don't copy knowledge you haven't grasped
      • take breaks (pomodoro) and move during them
    • Work and growth
      • shipping fast beats the best strategy
      • rely on systems, not willpower
      • be ruthlessly truth-seeking
      • guard each yes
      • make progress that makes future progress easier
      • ask boldly, revise beliefs quickly
    Books
    Resources

    Connect

    I'm available for freelance work: product builds, technical co-founder gigs, and landing page or product rebrands. Get in touch by email, or find me on GitHub or LinkedIn.