Joel Milligan

Entrepreneur & Engineer

I build companies, products, and tech communities

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Joel Milligan

About me

Founding AI/Platform Engineer at Neno · Technical leader with extensive startup experience

I'm Joel, great to meet ya. Hope you've enjoyed my site so far, and I'll tell you my story if you stay a bit longer.

I've taken quite a journey through life: from award-winning live piano performances, to writing and publishing academic papers, to building and scaling multi-million dollar companies from 0, I like to do it all.

This path started early when I wanted to be — if you can believe it — a concept artist. That led me to teaching myself how to play music and wanting to be a composer. From which that goal lead me to self-teaching Python over 9 months and I was hooked: programming became my new joy.

A decade later and I'm still in love with building. This natural attraction led me down the path of creating NanoAPI, a startup that I founded and fundraised for; taking it through the illustrious TechStars Berlin, where we learned what it takes to build a multi-billion dollar company.

These days I'm a founding engineer at neno, where I build both the product and the platform it sits on. I also sit on the board of the non-profit Tech Makers, and organize the CTO Clinic. My free time (what little I have left) I enjoy spending on new side projects and mentoring new startup founders.

A thread runs through all of it: I care about ownership. I care about people owning their data, their tools, and their systems. Owning the process of helping others to build genuinely useful tech and owning the ability to scale that tech.

What's next for me you ask? I have no plans to leave neno until it exits the stratosphere, but after that my bucket list items are to build a successful game, write a novel, and drive the Mongol Rally.

Hope you join along for that journey - Joel

Projects

Each world above links to one of these. Here they are in plain text — for you, and for search engines.