Team

Joel

Degree3 was founded by Joel Downs, creator of Answerbag.com, which in 2003 was the first English-language Social Q&A site and is still the third-largest alongside Yahoo! Answers and Answers.com. Joel has been developing websites in various capacities since 1994, and he has a passion for question-answering systems, community sites, and making user-generated content truly useful.

Previously, Joel served as VP of Product Development and GM of Answerbag for Demand Media, where he was responsible for product development on Answerbag, eHow.com, and Demand Studios.

At Intermix Media, Joel led a team to build Grab.com, a casual games community site and grew it to over two million monthly visitors. Before Intermix, Joel worked as a Product Manager with Yahoo! Games.

Joel started his career by co-founding an online videogame magazine called Gamers.com and a PC hardware and games review site called FiringSquad both of which were funded by CMGi. At the time, Gamers.com housed the largest database of casual and hardcore video games in the world. Joel graduated UC Berkeley with a BS in Mechanical Engineering. Go Bears.