Investment is about investing in people: What kind of game is Circle playing?

Writing: Yu Shiyi

In the cryptocurrency industry filled with rugged heroes and tech geeks, there is a management team that stands out as quite different.

If Tether is like a mysterious financial magnate operating in the gray area, then Circle is like an old-fashioned banker dressed in a tailored suit, carrying a briefcase, lobbying on Capitol Hill in Washington. They don’t wear hoodies, don’t shout “To the Moon,” and even deliberately maintain a demeanor that makes the crypto community feel “boring.” But it’s this boredom that might be their greatest value.

But it is precisely this “boring” quality that allowed Circle to successfully list on the NYSE in 2025, becoming the world’s first publicly traded stablecoin company.

There’s an old saying in investing: “Investing is about investing in people, investing in teams.” Today, we will take a comprehensive look at Circle’s core management team, to see what kind of background this group, who claim to be working on an “Internet currency protocol,” actually has.

Part One: The Leader — A Prophet Who Correctly Predicted the Times Three Times

1.1 From a Baseball Card Boy to a Serial Entrepreneur

In 1984, in Winona, Minnesota.

A 13-year-old boy walks up to his parents and says, “Lend me $5,000, I want to start a baseball card business.”

His father is a psychologist, his mother a media editor. This well-educated couple made an unusual decision — they gave him the money.

This boy named Jeremy Allaire didn’t collect cards to play like other kids. Instead, he used a trendy electronic spreadsheet to predict player performance, stockpiling low before the season and selling high after. He doubled his principal in the end.

Recalling this on the Fortune podcast, he said with a smile: “Basically, I was doing Moneyball — using data-driven methods to find undervalued assets.”

A 13-year-old boy using quantitative thinking for value investing — that’s essentially baseball-card version of Buffett.

1.2 Seeing the Future Three Times

Allaire’s career can be summarized by three precise paradigm shifts:

First: 1993, Foreseeing the Internet

While studying political science and philosophy at Macalester College, his roommate worked in the campus IT department and pulled a high-speed internet line into their dorm. It was the early 1990s, most people didn’t even know what a homepage was.

From the moment this young man studying politics and philosophy went online, he began thinking about how the internet would change the global political and economic structure. He paid attention to the post-Soviet Eastern European situation, helped Noam Chomsky (a renowned MIT political scholar) establish the world’s first online archive of political writings, and built a decentralized communication platform called “NativeNet” for Native American tribes in the Midwest.

In 1995, with his brother J.J. Allaire, armed with his brother’s $18,000 savings, he founded Allaire Corporation in a one-bedroom apartment in St. Paul, inventing ColdFusion — the world’s first commercial web application server. Millions of websites like Myspace, Target, Toys R Us depended on this technology. The company grew from $1 million in revenue in 1996 to $120 million in 2000. IPO in 1999, acquired by Macromedia for $360 million in 2001.

Second: 2004, Seeing Online Video

While CTO at Macromedia, he added video playback to Flash Player. Then he realized: broadband + Flash’s global distribution = everyone can publish videos on the internet, breaking the TV monopoly.

In 2004, he founded Brightcove, the world’s first internet video publishing platform. Clients spanned over 100 countries, serving 25% of the videos on the top 10,000 websites globally. IPO in 2012.

Third: 2013, Seeing the Next Generation of Money

After the 2008 financial crisis, Allaire reignited his interest in global political economy — but this time not academically. He began researching what fundamental flaws existed in the global banking and monetary systems.

In a Fortune interview, he said: “After the 2008 financial crisis, my interest in global political economy was seriously reignited… but at that time, I was just a ‘armchair scholar’ running a video company, with nowhere to put these ideas.”

In 2012, after encountering Bitcoin, everything clicked. He and old comrade Sean Neville brainstormed the prototype of Circle at Allaire’s kitchen table. In 2013, with $9 million from Jim Breyer, Accel Partners, and General Catalyst, Circle was officially born.

Three startups, three successes — this is extremely rare in the global startup history.

1.3 Crossing the Valley of Death

If just “seeing accurately” makes Allaire a good trend analyst at best, his real strength is his ability to survive adversity.

Circle’s history was far from smooth: initially making a Bitcoin payment app (Circle Pay), then pivoting to stablecoins; buying the exchange Poloniex and losing money selling it; attempting SPAC listings twice, with the first canceled by partners; in 2023, SVB collapsed, $3.3 billion USDC reserves frozen, USDC temporarily depegged to $0.87 — almost everyone thought Circle was finished at that point.

He said: “No one believed me. But I pulled many rabbits out of the hat.”

He cut non-core businesses, laid off hundreds, preserved the backbone of USDC operations, and finally successfully IPO’d in June 2025. Emerging from the valley of death, the stock price rose from $31 at IPO to nearly $200 at its peak.

1.4 Key Signals in Recent Speeches

January 2026, David Rubenstein Show: Allaire clearly states that Circle is still in an “early stage,” and it will take 10 to 20 years of infrastructure building to realize its full potential — a CEO talking about a 20-year time frame.

January 2026, CNBC Squawk Box: When asked about the growth prospects of the stablecoin market, he said a 40% compound annual growth rate is “a quite reasonable baseline.”

March 2026, New York Economic Club: He made a very bold judgment — AI Agents will replace a large part of current human-executed work at scale. Then he turned the conversation: “Millions of transactions per second happen between AI Agents — traditional banks can’t do that. It’s completely absurd to have AI刷 Visa cards or wire money through banks.”

Davos 2026: When asked how to avoid hype, he said: “I think with a very long-term perspective, trying to imagine what the world might look like in five, ten, fifteen years… Yes, many things are flying around everywhere, but we are diligently and gradually building what we believe is right.”

1.5 A Detail That Reflects Allaire’s Temperament

In the crypto circle, bigwigs usually read “Zero to One” or “Principles.” But Allaire mentioned in a podcast that his intellectual influences are Camus and Nietzsche, and the host jokingly called him “the philosopher of coins.”

He majored in political science and philosophy in college — not computer science. In 1992, he submitted a policy proposal on “National Information Networks” to the Senate Science and Technology Subcommittee. His thinking is not engineer-style but “system designer” — understanding the underlying logic of how the world operates, then using technology to reconstruct it.

His core personality traits are: not radical, not narrative-driven, extremely long-term, and not afraid of regulation but actively embracing it. This is unusual in the crypto world — but for a CEO of an infrastructure company, it might be exactly what’s needed.

Part Two: President Heath Tarbert — Circle’s “Regulatory Nuclear Weapon”

2.1 An Underprivileged Baltimore Kid’s Comeback

The weekend in September 2008 when Lehman Brothers collapsed.

At 32, Heath Tarbert was sitting in an office in the West Wing of the White House, surrounded by stacks of legal documents. As Deputy Legal Advisor to the White House, his job was to help the legal team respond to the systemic collapse of the US financial system.

Outside the window, Washington’s autumn was as beautiful as ever. Inside, the global financial order was disintegrating.

This young man learned more that weekend than in any business school course — financial regulation is not just on paper but the last line of defense in maintaining order during a crisis. Later, he participated in drafting the Dodd-Frank Act, the most significant financial regulatory reform since the Great Depression.

Tarbert was born in Baltimore, the first in his family to attend college — his parents never went to university. In high school, he earned the “Eagle Scout” rank — the highest honor in the Boy Scouts of America, achieved by only 4% of scouts, roughly equivalent to a provincial-level “Three Good Student” award multiplied by ten in China.

Then this poor kid built an astonishing academic record: JD from Penn Law, a doctorate in comparative law from Oxford, CPA and CFA certifications — and he even served as a legal clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. In later podcasts, he said that experience taught him “humility” — working as an assistant to the smartest legal minds in the US, he quickly learned that listening is more important than speaking.

2.2 A Person Who “Turns Circles” in the Power Center

Tarbert’s career path is like someone who has walked through all the key nodes of the US financial regulatory system: White House Legal Advisor → Senate Banking Committee → Assistant Secretary of the Treasury (also serving as G7/G20 Deputy FinMin) → 14th Chairman of CFTC → Chief Legal Officer at Citadel Securities → President of Circle.

During his two years as CFTC Chairman (2019-2021), he presided over 20 public meetings — more than the combined total of the previous seven years — and approved 41 final rules. Some say he is the most diligent chairman in CFTC history, others say he is the most knowledgeable regulator of cryptocurrency.

Once, in a podcast, when asked “Why leave Citadel Securities to join a crypto company,” he didn’t give a cliché answer. He said: “I see the US falling behind Russia and China in digital currency — that makes me uneasy.”

A former CFTC chairman saying “uneasy” is significant. He’s not chasing trends but viewing stablecoins from a national security perspective.

In February 2025, Allaire announced on LinkedIn that Tarbert would become Circle’s first-ever President. The implication is clear: Tarbert has worked in or made key decisions in every major regulatory agency Circle faces. He doesn’t guess rules — he makes rules.

Part Three: Chief Strategy Officer Dante Disparte — The “Diplomat” Who Emerged from Libra’s Ruins

3.1 The Comeback of a Puerto Rican Boy

If you traveled to Southern Africa in 2015, you might meet an Italian-American in a checked suit, fluent in French and Spanish, inspecting Land Rover dealerships on muddy roads.

That person is Dante Disparte. At the time, he was Managing Director for Sub-Saharan Africa at Land Rover — managing operations across 170 countries.

This scene is hard to associate with a “crypto executive.” But that’s what makes Disparte special: he didn’t grow up in crypto but emerged from the real-world business mud.

Disparte grew up in Puerto Rico, the first in his family to graduate high school and attend college. Later, he earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and a risk management master’s from NYU Stern, speaking six languages. Someone joked that his name Dante is like the author of “The Divine Comedy” — fitting, because his career has been about finding paths to heaven amid “hellish” policy environments.

3.2 What Libra’s Death Taught Him

In 2019, Facebook announced Libra, a global stablecoin. The world’s central banks and finance ministries nearly exploded.

Disparte was one of the founding executives of Libra (later renamed Diem), responsible for global policy and communication. Over the next two years, he witnessed how a tech giant with the world’s largest user base was forced to retreat, compromise, and ultimately give up under joint pressure from regulators worldwide.

Libra died. But Disparte survived — and he brought an invaluable “failure list” to Circle.

What caused Libra’s death? Not technology failure, not market rejection. It was Facebook’s size, arrogance, and late attempt at “legitimacy engineering.” Regulators saw not “a better payment tool,” but “a company with 3 billion user data trying to control global currency.”

Disparte’s job at Circle is to ensure Circle never makes the same mistake.

In March 2026, he testified before the UK House of Lords, saying a sentence that silenced the room: “You cannot have a future economy without future money, and you cannot put new money on old rails.”

He added: “Sandboxes are good ideas and good for financial innovation, but they are waiting to die.”

It might have been the first time a senior crypto executive bluntly challenged UK lawmakers at a hearing. But Disparte is that kind of style — he doesn’t just “report,” he “educates.” Perhaps he is confident because he comes from Libra’s ruins and understands better than most what can go wrong.

Part Four: Co-Founder Sean Neville — The “Code Father” of USDC

On a certain day in 2017, Sean Neville drew a sketch on his notebook.

The sketch depicted the payment flow of USDC: settlement chains, reserve mechanisms, Ethereum smart contracts conceived as a programmable “central bank,” alongside roles of various service providers — FX, risk control, issuance.

Eight years later, he posted this yellowed notebook page on Twitter. The comment section exploded — because the architecture on the sketch is almost identical to how USDC operates today.

Neville is Circle’s co-founder and the true technical architect of USDC. He and Allaire have been old comrades for over 20 years — from Allaire Corporation (senior software engineer) to Macromedia/Adobe (chief scientist) to Brightcove (senior architect), and then to Circle.

If Allaire is the one who “sees the future,” Neville is the one who “creates the future.”

Their temperaments are very different: Allaire wears suits to testify before Congress, Neville wears plaid shirts coding away. Allaire loves grand narratives — “economic operating system,” Neville pursues the ultimate experience — “instant, global, free, fun, open.” But this complementarity gives Circle both a visionary outlook and grounded execution.

In late 2019, Neville stepped down as co-CEO. He didn’t make a big fuss explaining why, only leaving a sentence: “Remaining stubbornly optimistic about our ability to improve the collective future.”

That phrase “stubbornly optimistic” later became the team’s spiritual motto.

In 2025, Neville founded Catena Labs (raised $18 million led by a16z, with investors including Tom Brady), focusing on giving AI Agents bank accounts. At Money20/20, he said something that left a deep impression: “Stablecoins are essentially AI-native currencies. AI Agents don’t need credit cards — they need money flowing at internet speed.”

The new venture after the founder left the parent company is actually a strategic validation of the parent’s core narrative. It’s not a breakup but a “divide and conquer” approach.

Part Five: Two Roles Often Overlooked but Extremely Important

5.1 Li Fan — From Fudan to Silicon Valley, the AI Iron Lady

Among Circle’s many white male executives, Li Fan (Fan Li) is a very unique presence.

She started in computer science at Fudan University, then went to Baidu — not working on fringe projects but as Vice President leading a 1,000-person team responsible for China’s largest search engine. Later, she became Senior Vice President of Engineering at Pinterest, building an AI team from scratch, leading 400 engineers to develop recommendation engines. Business Insider named her “one of the world’s most important engineers,” and Fast Company called her “one of the most creative people.”

Many found it strange that she moved from Lime, a shared scooter company, to Circle — a “token issuing” company. Why would an AI expert go to a crypto company?

But if you understand Allaire’s vision — that billions of AI Agents in the future will need a native payment layer — then Fan’s joining makes perfect sense. She’s not here to “manage servers,” but to ensure Circle can handle the flood of transactions in the AI era. When Allaire said in Davos that “it’s completely absurd for AI to刷 Visa cards,” Li Fan is the one responsible for creating “non-absurd alternatives.”

5.2 Nikhil Chandhok — Witnessing How Consumer Products Explode

Chandhok’s background explains why Circle’s products are not as difficult to use as typical “blockchain projects.”

He was part of YouTube’s early team — saw a video platform grow from zero to billions of users. Later, he co-founded VEVO (one of the largest music video platforms globally), then worked at Meta on AR products.

Someone who has seen how consumer products explode is now responsible for developer and institutional product lines like CCTP, CPN, Arc — he knows that “experience determines adoption.” The biggest bottleneck in blockchain has never been technology but “ordinary people can’t use it.” Chandhok is here to fix that.

Part Six: The Board — A Hidden Strategic Signal

Circle’s board composition might be the most overlooked but intriguing investment clue.

Adam Selipsky (joined July 2025): Former CEO of AWS — the person who took AWS from a startup to over $100 billion in annual revenue. Also among the first members of the US Department of Homeland Security’s AI security committee. Harvard undergrad + Harvard Business School MBA.

Kirk Koenigsbauer (joined 2026): President and COO of Microsoft Experiences & Devices Group. Led the migration of Office to the cloud, built Microsoft 365, established Microsoft’s security business. Also a board member of Thomson Reuters.

Sean Neville: Co-founder, continuing governance as an independent director.

Interpretation: When a company’s board includes the former CEO of AWS and top executives from Microsoft, you know this isn’t about “crypto hype” — it’s serious about becoming a global financial infrastructure. These people won’t endorse a meme coin project.

Another interesting fact: Circle is among the most heavily invested overseas blockchain companies with Chinese capital — IDG, Baidu, CICC, Everbright, Yixin have all invested. This means Circle has strategic resources in the largest Asian-Pacific markets.

Part Seven: The Team’s Three-Layer Structure

Abstracting the entire team reveals a very clear three-layer architecture:

Layer One: Internet Infrastructure Idealism (Allaire + Neville + Li Fan + Chandhok)

“Making money into an internet protocol” — a group of people who built ColdFusion, Flash, Brightcove, Baidu Search, Pinterest recommendation engines are now building monetary infrastructure. Their DNA isn’t finance but internet protocols at the core.

Layer Two: Wall Street Risk Control System (Fox-Geen + Walia)

CFO Fox-Geen spent 25 years in finance at McKinsey, JPMorgan, PwC. Chief Compliance Officer Mandeep Walia comes from Facebook, PayPal, LendUp compliance systems. They ensure that every month, Deloitte’s reserve audits are published without fail, and every dollar is safely held in short-term US Treasuries and cash.

Layer Three: Regulatory Lobbying Machine (Tarbert + Disparte)

Former CFTC Chairman + former Diem founding executive. Their work isn’t product development but “legitimacy.” Circle treats regulation as a product — this itself is a moat.

The goal of Circle’s three-layer architecture: to build a compliant on-chain US dollar network.

Part Eight: Talking Risks

8.1 CEO Compensation Is Relatively High

Allaire’s total compensation is about $16.26 million, including salary, equity incentives, etc. This number warrants some attention. The reason I say “some attention” is because this income appears more than twice that of Coinbase CEO Armstrong, which seems high — especially since the company isn’t yet consistently profitable.

But unlike Armstrong, who holds 9.7% of shares (worth billions) and options worth $56.7 million, Allaire, as Circle’s founder, also holds a large amount of Class B shares (about 15.87 million). Since Circle just went public, equity incentives make up a larger proportion of total compensation — a common pattern before and after IPO. The detailed breakdown in the prospectus shows about $900k basic salary + roughly $9 million in stock awards + about $2 million in other benefits, totaling around $900k (the S-1 disclosed $12 million, and reports of $16.26 million may include additional pre- and post-IPO equity grants). Slight variations don’t change our understanding: it’s slightly high but mainly equity-based, aligning his interests with shareholders, within normal range.

8.2 The Founder Holds Three Key Roles

Allaire is simultaneously founder, CEO, and chairman — a governance structure worth watching. It has pros and cons, but as a veteran entrepreneur with multiple successes, it’s currently seen as a good thing.

8.3 Drift Protocol Incident

In April 2026, Circle was criticized for slow response to the $230 million theft in Drift Protocol, lacking 24/7 emergency response and real-time anomaly detection. This exposed operational vulnerabilities — not a legal failure, but community opposition arose. Circle later issued a statement explaining their workflow, emphasizing that their freezing is a capability, not a power, mainly to cooperate with law enforcement. They also pointed out that as a decentralized stablecoin issuer, they are just one part of the protocol, which can establish large-scale anomaly freeze or pause mechanisms — a reasonable explanation, since if Circle could freeze at will without legal basis, it would feel very strange to users.

8.4 Industry-Wide Risks

Negotiation pressures from Coinbase’s split model, offshore competition, declining interest rates affecting reserve income, regulatory policy uncertainties — but these are industry-wide issues, not team problems.

Part Nine: Thiel’s Judgment

In my articles, I often use perspectives from various masters to analyze projects. For Circle, it’s mainly about understanding the paradigm shift from 0 to 1. It’s hard to use inductive reasoning; deductive reasoning is needed, and Thiel’s views are most important.

From his “Seven Questions” to evaluate the team, I believe the answer is: in the “compliant stablecoin infrastructure” track, this might be the best team in the world.

Not because everyone is a superstar — but because every key position has the right person. Technical founders, protocol prophets, regulatory nuclear weapons, global diplomats, AI engineer iron ladies, product veterans, Wall Street ledger gatekeepers — combined, they form a complete capability matrix.

But more fundamentally, the team at Circle is betting on something very different from most projects in crypto.

Most crypto projects bet on technology, narrative, and sentiment.

Circle bets on: “Being needed by the US dollar and US Treasuries, being needed by the future financial system.”

And this need has become a reality with legislation. Today, Circle’s ceiling is not crypto but the US dollar system itself. They are not just starting a crypto project; they are “becoming part of the global financial infrastructure.”

From baseball cards to stablecoins, from “National Information Networks” to “Economic Operating Systems,” Allaire’s vision keeps expanding, but the underlying logic has never changed: technology should make value flow more freely, efficiently, and inclusively.

As Neville said, “stubbornly optimistic” — amid the turbulent waves of cryptocurrency, faith might be the hardest asset to value and the most precious.