Dan Hoffman

Founder & CEO Circles (circl.es)

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Dan Hoffman is the founder and chief executive of Circles, a company built on an idea simple enough to sound trivial and specific enough to be a product: that when people are arranged in a circle rather than in rows, they talk to each other instead of at a presenter, and that with a facilitator and a structure around that conversation, a group will get further than an expert lecturing it. Circles sells both halves - a software platform and a network of trained facilitators who run sessions combining dialogue, outside prompts the company calls sparks, and collaborative problem-solving - to companies, schools and member communities including Harvard Business School, Square and YPO. It is a considerable distance from the business that made his name. Hoffman spent twelve years building M5 Networks into one of the pioneers of hosted unified communications, sold it to ShoreTel in 2012, ran ShoreTel’s cloud division, and was named a Henry Crown Fellow by the Aspen Institute in 2014 before moving his family to Barcelona for two years. Circles came out of that break, and its .es domain is a direct reference to it.

Career Highlights

• Founded M5 Networks in 2000 and led it as CEO and president for twelve years, building it into a recognised pioneer of hosted unified communications for business.
• Sold M5 Networks to ShoreTel in a transaction announced on 1 February 2012 and completed that March; M5 continued as a ShoreTel business unit under his leadership.
• Served as president and general manager of ShoreTel’s cloud division following the acquisition, and briefly as chief strategy officer.
• Named a 2014 Henry Crown Fellow by the Aspen Institute.
• Founded Circles after a two-year sabbatical in Barcelona, building both the platform and the facilitation practice around structured peer dialogue.
• Won adoption for Circles among business schools, technology companies and peer-membership organisations, including Harvard Business School, Square, YPO and the Millennium school network.
• Began his career at an early internet service provider that sold in 1998, and worked on a venture-backed roll-up in Asia that did not survive to 2000.

Professional Journey

Hoffman’s first ventures bracket the dot-com boom almost exactly. He joined an early internet service provider that was sold in 1998, then worked on a venture-backed roll-up in Asia that had failed by 2000. Neither is named in the public record, and he has described the sequence himself as a success followed by a failure, which is a fair summary of the period.

M5 Networks followed in 2000, and it is the company he is known for. The bet was that business telephony would move off the premises and into a hosted service, at a point when that was an unproven proposition rather than the obvious future it later became. M5 grew into a New York-based pioneer of hosted unified communications, and Hoffman ran it as founder, president and CEO for twelve years - a long tenure for a venture-era founder, and long enough to see the market thesis vindicated. In February 2012 ShoreTel announced it was acquiring the company; the deal closed the following month, and rather than treat it as an exit, ShoreTel kept M5 intact as a business unit and put Hoffman in charge of it as president and general manager of its cloud division. He later served briefly as the company’s chief strategy officer.

The period that followed reset his trajectory. In 2014 the Aspen Institute selected him for the Henry Crown Fellowship, a programme that puts mid-career entrepreneurs through a values-based seminar series and requires each fellow to commit to a venture aimed at a societal problem. He then took his family to Barcelona for two years. Circles came out of that combination - the fellowship’s emphasis on dialogue and examined leadership, and the distance from the operating treadmill that made it possible to notice what he wanted to build next.

Circles is a deliberate inversion of how organisations usually do development. Rather than deliver expertise from the front of a room, it convenes small groups in facilitated circles where the material for the session is largely the participants’ own experience, structured by a facilitator and seeded with outside prompts. The company sells the software that organises and runs these groups together with the trained facilitators who lead them, which makes it part platform and part practice. That has found a market in three distinct places: business schools wanting cohort learning that outlasts a course, companies wanting peer development that is not a training vendor, and peer-membership organisations like YPO, whose forum model Circles closely resembles and extends. The company was founded in Barcelona with a distributed team and is now headquartered in Brooklyn.

Education

Harvard University

The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

MBA, Entrepreneurial Management

The Lauder Institute, University of Pennsylvania

Master’s degree, International Studies

No graduation years were found for any of these, and all three rest on secondary biographical summaries rather than institutional confirmation.