Work across a few different worlds
Joel Augé grew up in Espanola, Ontario and started performing music professionally at 19. Six years of touring across Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom followed — about 1,000 concerts, 30,000 CDs sold, and eventually a recording and songwriting deal with Sony/BMG/Integrity Music out of Nashville.
When the music industry changed, he pivoted into tech. He co-founded HitGrab Inc. in 2008, built MouseHunt into one of Facebook's most popular social games, grew the team to 25 people, and worked with Facebook as an Alpha partner on their Credits currency system. The company was self-funded, and later received additional investment from fbFund and Accel Partners. He then founded Fan.si, raised seed capital in Silicon Valley and Canada, and built fan engagement apps for major artists like Shawn Mendes and The Weeknd before exiting the company in 2021. With brother Pierre and Martin Spears, he co-invented a portable directional laser detection device through Target Effects, serving as sole-source provider to CANSOFCOM and JTF2.
Since 2019, he has served as Chief Growth & Innovation Officer at Crossroads Christian Communications (YES TV) — a 160-person Canadian broadcaster with over six decades of history. Alongside the technology and growth work, he's spent five years as part of a leadership team rebuilding organizational clarity from the inside out: moving a large, legacy organization from what he and his co-authors call the Purpose Gap — capable people rowing in slightly different directions — toward a single shared mission that now runs through every department. That work is becoming a book: The Problem of Capable People, co-authored with CEO Kevin Shepherd and COO Melissa McEachern.
He also co-founded RecourseLLM with Pierre, an AI orchestration architecture focused on routing tasks to specialized models, and co-hosts the Brain Podcast on AI and emerging technology. He lives just west of Toronto with his family.