Founder · Builder · Game Thinker
Isaac Eaves
He logged 10,000 hours inside other people's games. Then he built one where the boss fight is your kid's to-do list.
Co-Founder & CEO · Joon (YC W22) · San Francisco
He logged 10,000 hours inside other people's games. Then he built one where the boss fight is your kid's to-do list.
Isaac Eaves runs Joon, a San Francisco company with a deceptively small ask of children: do the dishes, finish the homework, get to bed - and watch a creature in your phone grow stronger for it. Kids level up when they complete real-world tasks their parents set. The chores are real. The rewards are pixels. The trade has turned out to be remarkably fair.
It works because Eaves is not guessing about what holds a child's attention. He spent his own childhood proving it, one all-night session at a time. Joon is the rare product built by someone who was, quite literally, its target user. He took it through Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch and, by reported accounts, raised around $2.1 million to keep building.
“I didn't have an attention problem. I just had a problem putting my attention on things I wasn't interested in.”
Before California, before Berkeley, before the pitch decks, there was a 13-acre farm in rural Virginia. Eaves lived there until he was ten - dirt bikes, open fields, and long stretches of RuneScape. When the family moved to suburban Maryland outside Washington, the screen got bigger and the ambition got sharper.
He found his father's Linux equipment and did what a certain kind of kid does with it: he built custom Minecraft servers, then figured out how to get other people to pay to play on them. It was a business before he had a word for it. The lesson stuck. If you build a world people want to be in, the money is a detail.
School was the part that did not take. He skipped high school often, usually to go skateboarding. He has described being the student who disrupted class - not from a lack of ability, but a lack of interest in sitting still for things that bored him. The same wiring that made classrooms a struggle made him capable of ten-hour stretches on anything he actually cared about.
He routed himself to Santa Barbara City College, then transferred to UC Berkeley, where he graduated in 2018 with two degrees at once - computer science and business administration. The double major reads like a thesis statement: build the thing, and know why anyone would pay for it.
There is a tidy version of this story where the farm kid discovers code, goes to a top school, and launches a startup. The real version is messier and more honest. The gaming was not a distraction from the work he'd eventually do - it was the apprenticeship. Thousands of hours spent learning, in his bones, what makes a digital world worth returning to. Most founders study engagement in a deck. Eaves lived it as a player first, and that head start is hard to fake.
The Minecraft years matter for a second reason. Running a server is not just building - it is operations. Uptime, unhappy users, the constant small fires of keeping a community alive. He was learning customer support and product management before either had a name on his resume. By the time he reached Workday's product org years later, the instincts were already wired in.
His first real swing: an app showing live crowd data at bars, so you'd never walk into a dead room or a 40-minute line. It didn't take off. It did teach him what stuck and what didn't.
Stuck on the bar app, he heard his uncle - running innovation at a large Canadian vertical farm - gripe about bad software. Isaac pitched a two-week prototype, got a yes, flew north, and a startup followed.
Between ventures he worked in product management at Workday - the enterprise side of software, where roadmaps are long and the stakes are spreadsheets. Then he left to build for kids instead.
Eaves' core insight is borrowed straight from game design: a child will grind for hours toward a goal if the feedback is fast, visual, and rewarding. Joon takes that engine and bolts it onto the parts of growing up that usually require nagging.
Brush teeth, finish reading, pack the backpack. Real-life tasks become missions inside the app.
Complete the task in the real world. The game asks for proof of the actual behavior, not just a tap.
Finish quests and your in-game companion grows. Progress you can see beats a reward you're promised.
Eaves did not build Joon alone. He co-founded it in 2021 with Brad Brenner and Kevin Bunarjo, splitting the work the way good early teams do - Eaves on product and strategy, the others covering operations and engineering. The division is not bureaucratic. It is the difference between a founder who wants to design the experience and a team that can actually ship and run it.
In the winter of 2022, Joon joined Y Combinator - the accelerator whose alumni roster reads like a who's who of modern software. For a company aimed at families rather than enterprises, the YC stamp did two things: it sharpened the pitch, and it opened the door to the venture capital that, by reported accounts, totaled around $2.1 million. Money buys runway. Runway buys the chance to be patient with a product that takes time to prove.
What sets Joon apart is the precision of who it is for. Most kids' apps fight for attention by being louder. Joon does something stranger: it borrows the attention a kid already gives a game and quietly redirects a slice of it toward the unglamorous business of growing up. Homework. Routines. The small daily reps that compound into a functioning young person.
Eaves has been clear that he is not interested in building another time-sink. He has lived the inside of those loops and knows exactly how seductive they are. The discipline of Joon is in what it refuses to do - it is engineered to reward real-world action, not screen time for its own sake. The creature only grows when the kid actually does the thing.
No straight line here. A farm, a server, a skateboard, a degree, a bar app, a farm again, then a company. The detours were the point.
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”
Ask Eaves what got Joon off the ground and he names three things: persistence, empathy, and a growth mindset. The first one he learned the hard way. He spent roughly two years working part-time before the company found real traction - a stretch that taught him his favorite, least romantic startup truth.
The empathy is structural. He is building for kids who learn and focus differently than the classroom expects, because he was one. The product is less a lecture and more a peace offering between parents and children who are tired of the same fight every night.
"Everything takes way longer than you think."
If a kid will grind for hours to beat a game, the same loop - fast feedback, visible progress, a creature that grows - can help them grow up. Eaves wants Joon to be the thing families reach for when the nightly battle over chores and homework gets old. Not a lecture. A better game.
It is a strange thing to build a career out of the exact trait that got you in trouble at school. Eaves seems to relish the irony. The restless focus that made classrooms unbearable is now the engine of a company, and the games that once worried his teachers are the blueprint for his product. He took the thing he was told to put down and turned it into the thing he picks up every morning - a founder who finally found the level he was built to play.