Company: CRCL
Filing Date: 2025-06-02
Form Type: S-1/A
Source: 0001193125-25-132755
Chunk: 6

Company: Circle Internet Group, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-06-02
Form: S-1/A
Chunk 6
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’ve been on, how it led to the vision behind the founding of Circle, and the path of
execution that leads us here today. I also want to share with you my thoughts on what it means for Circle to become a public company, and how I think about Circle’s role in the global financial system in the coming decade.

Becoming an internet maximalist

I was fortunate to have been brought up with
an Apple II computer in my home, and gained access to the pre-internet online world in the early 1980s. With limited means, this was a big deal. I was also brought up by parents whose worldview and moral
philosophy was shaped by the idea that if we could connect more deeply with people, and connect people around the world, that we could drive transformative and positive outcomes for the world.

As a political science, philosophy, and economics student in college, my worldview was anchored in a belief that countries with free information and free markets who
connected and traded together would lead to a world of greater political and economic stability. It was during that time, in 1990, that I got hooked on the internet—the pre-commercial version of
command-lines, weird message boards, and disparate servers filled with random scientific and government data.

It was in those moments that I became an internet
maximalist. It was as clear as day to me that open global computer networks, connected through open technology protocols that anyone could build on and use, would lead to a wholesale transformation of society and the economy.

I spent the next 20 years committing myself to building out internet software platforms and infrastructure that helped to realize those ideas. I ultimately co-founded and helped to lead and take public two global internet technology firms through the Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 eras, when the open internet transformed software, media, communications, and retail commerce in
irreversible and ultimately unpredictable ways.

The great financial crisis—an inflection point

Also nearly 20 years into my journey as an internet maximalist, the world went through this century’s most significant global financial crisis. The 1990s and 2000s
had represented a period of dramatic economic growth and globalization, and the internet had surely played no small part in fostering that economic velocity. But it all came crashing down in 2008.

As a student of political economy, I needed to understand what happened. This huge part of the global economic system—the financial services industry—had
failed us massively. As I dug