Creator Science with Jay Clouse · 2026-06-17 · 54 min
Sid Yadav is the CEO and co-founder of Circle, a community platform trusted by creators like Jay and thousands of others to build membership businesses. Today, Circle has ~280 employees and has raised around $30 million. Before Circle, he was the third hire at Teachable, where he helped build the infrastructure for the creator economy before the term even existed. He spent four years as a tech blogger, writing about startups five to ten times a day, and was one of the first people to ever cover YouTube - back when it was a dating platform! The one thing Sid says separates successful communities from the rest Circle Eclipse: what it is (AI partner + connective tissue + Discover marketplace) and why 80 of 100 engineers have been on it for 4 months The “course as wrong abstraction” insight: why Sid saw self-paced courses heading toward terminal decline as early as 2018 By the end of this episode, you will understand why the most successful community businesses aren’t built around content - they’re built around a specific transformation.
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