Mike Kadin knows what a voice is worth

Mike Kadin was pushing a stroller toward a coffee shop when a podcast made him cry. On another occasion, an interview unsettled a belief he had carried for years. Audio could also send him into fits of laughter while washing dishes, an activity whose entertainment value generally requires outside assistance. When he introduced RedCircle in 2019, these were the experiences he chose to explain his business.

There is something revealing about that choice. Kadin and his co-founder, Jeremy Lermitte, had built marketing technology at Uber. They could have led with infrastructure, scale or the size of an advertising market. Instead, Kadin began with the listener at the sink. He wanted to build a business around people whose voices could make an ordinary errand feel different.

The question was how those people would get paid. A devoted audience could be large enough to matter to its creator and still be inconveniently small for an advertiser. Between the recording and the bank deposit stood a procession of negotiations, instructions, approvals and spreadsheets. Kadin had found a place where an engineer might be useful to an artist.

A physics teacher starts fixing the workflow

His first classroom was literal. Before podcast advertising, before Uber, Kadin taught high school physics and mathematics. He had studied electrical engineering and education, with an interest in chip design and computer architecture. His public education history lists Brown University. The route into software began with the desire to make the teaching day run better.

He taught himself to build for the web to speed up his work. That led to software for educational institutions and nonprofits. By DrupalCon Portland in 2013, he was describing himself as a developer interested in open source tools for schools, learning platforms and new ways to create educational experiences online. His organization was Merlin Education. The engineer and the teacher were still working on the same problem.

Teaching also gave him practice dealing with a roomful of different personalities. Software might behave consistently when given the same instructions; people tend to bring more interesting complications. In his account of that period, understanding individual students was part of the job. Later, he would have creators, advertisers and engineers to understand, each arriving with a different definition of a good result.

Billions of messages, then a smaller room

At Uber, Kadin spent five years building infrastructure for messaging and marketing. He and Lermitte worked on systems that carried email, text messages, push notifications and calls. Their tools served thousands of marketers around the world and facilitated billions of interactions. They knew how much machinery could sit behind a message that looked simple to its recipient.

By the winter of 2017, he was leading the communications platform team and thinking about a smaller working environment. He wanted a close team and a longer-term purpose he could get behind. In the evenings and on weekends, he began experimenting with Go, a programming language, and a way to stitch podcast episodes together. The side project gave his technical curiosity somewhere to go.

RedCircle followed in 2018. Lermitte became his co-founder, and former Uber colleagues joined the early team. Their shared background mattered: they had already worked on the practical difficulties of reaching people at scale. Now they were applying that experience to independent voices, where the audience might feel less like a customer segment and more like a room of regulars.

The musician has a business question

Kadin’s interest in sound runs well beyond listening to podcasts. He sings in a cappella groups, plays drums, piano and guitar, and practices beatboxing. Asked about a lasting early memory of sound, he returned to the music and effects of childhood video games. The melodies had survived when plenty of ordinary details from the same years had disappeared.

That makes his concern for creators easier to understand. He approaches audio as something people make and people remember. Yet he is also willing to ask the decidedly unromantic questions: how do advertisers find a show, how does a recording arrive on time, and who checks that the promotional code is correct? A beautiful performance can still have an administrative problem.

Talking to podcasters supplied another correction to the business plan. Kadin learned that earning money was only one concern. Creators also wanted more people to hear what they were saying. Audience growth could matter even more than immediate income. RedCircle’s work therefore included distribution and cross-promotion as well as advertising. A marketplace needs shows worth hearing and people who can find them.

“Our view is that these middle-class creators are deserving of being rewarded just as much as everyone else.”

Mike Kadin, 2023

The useful audience between unknown and famous

That phrase, middle-class creators, describes the part of podcasting Kadin keeps returning to. His argument makes room for people who have built an audience without becoming a household name. In RedCircle’s 2021 funding announcement, he argued that much of the listening happened outside the shows owned by major media and technology companies, while money remained concentrated toward the top.

The company raised a $6 million Series A that September, co-led by EPIC Ventures and Refinery Ventures. The announcement tied the investment to expanding the team and improving tools for independent podcasters. Funding gave the project more room; the point of the project remained getting revenue to the people recording the shows.

Kadin’s advice to an aspiring podcaster is considerably less glamorous than a funding announcement. Make something people want to hear, and give them a reason to return. Building an audience takes time. In a 2023 conversation, he also warned would-be founders against choosing a business merely because a category is fashionable. Attachment to the work matters when the work becomes difficult, as it reliably does.

A deal should not require a change of address

One of his more telling decisions arrived in March 2024. RedCircle introduced OpenRAP, extending its automated host-read advertising system to podcasts using other hosting services. A creator could keep the existing home for a show and connect to RedCircle’s advertising workflow. That removed a fairly substantial condition from the invitation to do business.

The underlying idea was practical. Accept a deal and upload the recording; software handles the insertion, measurement, reporting and payment. Through an industry connection standard called VAST, RedCircle could carry that process across hosting boundaries. The beta had already connected more than 100 podcasts representing over six million monthly downloads, according to the company’s launch announcement.

For Kadin, the difficulty had always included the manual actions required to complete a sponsorship. Finding a willing advertiser did not finish the job. Someone still had to distribute the brief, manage the campaign and make sure the money arrived. OpenRAP expressed a belief about where RedCircle’s value belonged: in making the deal work, even when the podcast lived elsewhere.

Somebody has to listen to the advertisement

As the work grew, checking it became its own problem. In 2025, RedCircle launched Mic Check to compare uploaded host-read advertisements with the approved talking points. The software transcribes a recording, looks for discrepancies and returns feedback before the ad runs. A missed instruction or incorrect code can be corrected while it is still a private inconvenience.

In July 2026, Kadin announced an extension to programmatic advertisements, the prerecorded ads selected and inserted automatically. These rely on labels identifying the advertiser and category. If a label is wrong, a creator’s decision to exclude that kind of advertising may not accomplish much. Mic Check examines the audio and corrects the associated information so the filters have something useful to work with.

This is a particular use of artificial intelligence, shaped by an existing business and its recurring mistakes. The company reported that errors in host-read ads fell 75 percent during its first three months using the quality tools. The claim belongs to RedCircle; the underlying ambition is easy to grasp. Reduce the amount of human time spent catching avoidable errors.

A familiar voice has to mean something

By August 2026, Kadin was talking about a further distinction: hearing a familiar voice and hearing a credible endorsement are different experiences. RedCircle does not use AI versions of creators to perform host-read ads. In his discussion with Rob Greenlee, he emphasized the host’s judgment, language, humor and experience with a product as ingredients in the advertisement’s value.

Sometimes that judgment produces an awkward answer. A creator tries a sponsor’s product and does not like it. Kadin described taking that feedback back to the advertiser and canceling the spot rather than insisting on an endorsement. It is a small, consequential test of the business: whether the relationship can survive somebody declining the script.

He is also watching creators spread across audio and video, and arguing for direct audience relationships alongside distribution on large platforms. His concern is what creators can carry with them: the listeners who return, the ability to reach them and a way to earn from the work. For someone who once learned web development to improve a teaching day, it is a recognizable ambition. Give people better tools, then leave them room to do the part only they can do.

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