Joel trained as an engineer in Canberra, with a thesis on a fully renewable Australia by 2050, before leading hardware development at Seeing Machines and later moving into innovation and strategy roles at the Canberra Innovation Network and Merkle. Having worked construction sites himself before university and later experienced burnout firsthand, he founded Foremind in 2022 to bring counselling and psychosocial hazard management into one platform, work the ABC profiled in 2023 as suicide prevention for construction sites.