Robert Van Hoesel
CEO FirstLook at FirstLook.gg
Randstad, Netherlands
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRobert Van Hoesel is an entrepreneurial web developer and CEO with 11+ years building community-first products for games, enterprises, and governments. As co-founder of Crowded and FirstLook (now part of Pragma), he combines hands-on engineering with product and growth experience to deliver modular, content-driven community platforms and playtester tooling used by studios worldwide. He also leads The Casuals, where his team powers the largest Age of Empires IV community project, AoE4 World, showcasing his knack for niche, high-engagement fan tools like replay parsers and leaderboards. A repeat founder who scaled and exited consumer brands (Woodify, Young Creators), Robert blends bootstrapped profitability with a deep focus on player engagement and practical analytics. Notably, he operates both for-profit and hobby projects (e.g., Mastometrics), reflecting a persistent curiosity about community data and developer-facing utilities.
11 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Media & Culture Social Issues, Media & Culture Social Issues at Bromley, Kent ELCDropoutVWO-IB, VWO-IB at Van der Capellen SGVWO, VWO at Deltion Sprint LyceumAdvanced English English, Advanced English English at Cambridge EC
Stackoverflow
61reputation
9kreached
3answers
0questions
Github Skills (200)
controller10
windows10
gcp10
prosemirror10
wysiwyg10
date-fns10
serverless10
collaboration10
javascript10
linux10
dotnet10
browser10
drawing10
redactor10
pulumi10
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
aoe4world/data
Jan 2022 - Jan 2023
All AoE4 Unit Stats, Technologies, Buildings and other data in hosted json
Contributions:15 reviews, 85 commits, 17 PRs in 11 months
technologiesaoe4hostedunitstats
stormgateworld/web
Feb 2024 - Apr 2024
Community Website with Leaderboards, Profiles and more for Stormgate.
Contributions:48 reviews, 32 PRs, 55 pushes in 2 months
rts-gamestormgate
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