Mike Kadin

Founder and CEO RedCircle

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Mike Kadin is the co-founder and CEO of RedCircle, a podcast hosting, distribution and advertising platform built on the premise that independent creators should have the same monetization infrastructure as large media publishers. Founded in 2018 with Jeremy Lermitte, whom Kadin met on Uber’s early engineering teams, RedCircle combines free unlimited hosting with a programmatic advertising marketplace and a paid subscription product, so that a show does not need a Big Media parent to earn from its audience. Kadin’s argument for the company is a data claim as much as a product one: he has said publicly that roughly 65 per cent of podcast listening happens outside the top shows owned by major media groups, and that the advertising market had not caught up with where the listening actually is. His route to the company was unusual — an electrical engineering and education dual degree, several years teaching high school physics and mathematics, then a move into software that took him to Uber, where a Go side project for stitching podcast episodes together turned into the business.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded RedCircle in 2018 with Jeremy Lermitte and has led it as CEO since.
• Raised a $6m Series A announced in September 2021, co-led by EPIC Ventures and Refinery Ventures, with participation from SignalFire, Bloomberg Beta and MathCapital.
• Angel backers in that round included Eckart Walther, a contributor to the original RSS specification, alongside Justin Wohlstadter and George Strompolos.
• Built RedCircle’s advertising marketplace and its Exclusive Content subscription product, which the company reported was generating six-figure annual revenue for some creators by 2021.
• Led Uber’s communication platform engineering team, having joined the company in 2013 among its earlier engineering hires.
• Began his working life as a high school physics and mathematics teacher, and taught himself to code to improve his own classroom operations.

Professional Journey

Kadin trained as an electrical engineer, concentrating on chip design and computer architecture, and took a concurrent degree in education along with teaching certification. He started his career in the classroom rather than in industry, teaching high school physics and mathematics. He has described that period as formative for reasons that were not technical: managing a room of students taught him to read and cater to very different personalities, a skill he has connected directly to managing engineering teams later. It was also where he began programming, initially to automate parts of his own teaching workload.

He moved into software full time and joined Uber in 2013, early enough to be part of the company’s foundational development teams. He rose to senior engineering manager and led the communication platform team. By the winter of 2017 he had reached a familiar inflection point for early employees at a company that has since become very large: he wanted a smaller, tighter team and a longer-term mission he could align himself to. While still at Uber he had been building a side project in Go that stitched podcast episodes together dynamically — the technical primitive behind inserting ads into audio after the fact.

That side project became RedCircle, which he founded in 2018 with Jeremy Lermitte, a colleague from Uber who had been the founding product manager on the communications platform team. The company’s design followed from what Kadin saw as a structural gap: hosting and distribution had commoditized, but the money in podcasting had concentrated around a small number of shows owned by large publishers, leaving the majority of actual listening unmonetized. RedCircle’s answer was to bundle free hosting with cross-promotion, a self-serve advertising marketplace that brands could buy into programmatically, and listener-payment and subscription tools, so that independent shows had a full monetization stack rather than just a feed.

The company raised a $6m Series A announced in September 2021, co-led by EPIC Ventures and Refinery Ventures with participation from SignalFire, Bloomberg Beta and MathCapital, and a group of angels that included Eckart Walther, one of the contributors to the original RSS specification — a fitting investor for a business built on open podcast feeds. At the time of that raise the company reported thousands of monthly active podcasters, several million dollars paid out to creators during 2021, and tens of thousands of subscribers to its Exclusive Content product. Kadin has since become a regular voice in trade coverage of the programmatic audio market, appearing on ExchangeWire’s MadTech podcast and a range of podcasting and marketing shows to argue the independent-creator case.

Education

Brown University

Bachelor of Science (Sc.B.), Electrical Engineering, with a concurrent degree in education

Kadin has confirmed the dual electrical-engineering-and-education degree and his teaching certification in his own words in interviews. The awarding institution above is reported consistently in secondary sources but has not been confirmed against a primary record.