Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour on Raising $1BN, CNN and CNBC Deals & the Polymarket Feud

What happened with Kalshi in the election was a bit of a ChatGPT moment for our industry.

Kalshi is one of the fastest-growing companies on the planet. In the last week, they announced their $1 billion raise at an $11 billion valuation. Tarek joins me for his only interview following these announcements.

An industry truly becomes an industry when there’s a rivalry. Without Polymarket, we wouldn’t have pushed our marketing and pushed our product as hard.

Did you ever cross paths with SBF? And what did you learn from observing FTX’s implosion?

Ready to go? Tarek, dude, it is so damn good to have you on the show. Holy cow, what a rampage Kalshi’s been on, my friend. Thank you so much for coming back.

Thanks for having me. Super excited.

Now, dude, I’ve got to start on the main thing: $1 billion. The first thing I have to ask is, why does Kalshi need $1 billion?

That’s a good question. What we’ve realized in the last 6 to 9 months, given the acceleration of what we’ve seen, is that the opportunity ahead of us is maybe even bigger than we had all possibly imagined.

There are a few symptoms of that. First, I don’t know if you know this, Harry, but Kalshi this year, at this scale at least, is, I think, the fastest-growing company in America outside of AI. I think Anthropic is going faster, and I’m not sure about Metacore and Corsair, but we’re growing at that pace and at that rate.

Number two, what we’re seeing, which is even more important, is a real and rare shift in consumer behavior. People are turning from passive watchers of events, news, sports, and other things that they engage with in real life to active participants.

That natural behavior of wanting to predict the future or debate something is turning into activity on Kalshi. That is rare. When you see this shift in consumer behavior, you’ve seen it with Airbnb and its hosts and Uber and its riders. When you’re seeing a new class of people—in this case, prediction-market traders—becoming a thing, that’s indicative of a very, very massive opportunity ahead of us.

When you have a massive opportunity ahead of you, you want to go big. You want to bet big. So we’re just really scaling up for that opportunity here.

Totally get you. What does $1 billion get you that you couldn’t do without?

I think, first, we’re growing incredibly fast. We’re also profitable right now, so it’s a good question. I think the next phase is: How do we build a global brand? How do we build a brand that people know, talk about, and associate with? How do we put the story of the company and the story of the brand out there?

There’s a lot of marketing that’s coming, obviously, and we’re scaling the team. We’re still 100 people.

Number two is that we’re a financial market. We’re a financial company, so as the volumes and liquidity increase, we’re a regulated—we’re federally regulated—financial exchange. It’s a little bit like a bank or one of the regulated clearinghouses you hear about: You have reserve requirements and added capital on the balance sheet.

Think of it a little bit as a safety cushion. That added capital enables us to do things faster. More capital enables you to do things faster in financial services, and that’s usually a good thing.

Dude, do you agree with the concept of kingmaking—that large, large amounts of money can anoint a winner in a category? Do you believe that’s a thing?

Maybe I’ll respond to it in terms of the Kalshi strategy. With the Kalshi strategy, that’s not how we think about it. I may lean a little bit more on the other side, which is that a better product will trump anything, any day.

You’ve seen this with DoorDash and Uber Eats, right? Uber Eats had, I mean, infinite capital compared to DoorDash, but Tony built a better product and Tony won, right?

I don’t feel too dogmatic, but maybe I’m a slight no on this one. What do you think?

I unwaveringly do. I think we’re seeing it today, where VCs are essentially choosing a category and then just plowing money in, knowing that if you build the right infrastructure, it massively increases your likelihood of success if you have the right founders who are good resource allocators.

Maybe with the “if” at the end, right?

The problem is that the “if” is a bit conditional, right? Oftentimes, a lot of money can create inefficiency, and companies start making a bunch of unforced errors when a lot of money comes in.

But if that “if” is true, I think capital tends to be correlated with success if the company is an A-plus execution company.

Dude, how much of Kalshi’s activity is sports betting? And how do you respond to people who say it’s just a sports-betting platform?

It’s pretty similar to what happened last year, actually. Last year, the question I was receiving was, “How much of the activity is elections?” Obviously, a lot. That was the big topic.

The way I would answer it is: How much of the attention was on the election, in terms of what people were talking about in October 2024? If you think about it, out of 10 tweets I saw on Twitter, 9.5 were about the election. Maybe that correlated with the volume on Kalshi, and it did. It was exactly that.

You’re seeing the same thing happen with sports, but per unit of time, it really is about what is most on top of people’s minds. NFL Sunday is massive in America, and that’s on top of people’s minds. But when there’s a Fed decision, that’s on top of people’s minds, and that’s where the trading volume is.

When there’s a Mumdani election, that’s when the trading volume is. The volumes will basically ebb and flow to whatever is in the news, whatever is trending on X, and whatever is top of people’s minds.

I think it’s a matter of time, because we’re seeing incredibly strong evidence or traction in the culture markets, for example. I actually think what’s happening with Taylor Swift, movies, and how successful they’re going to be—anything around culture like that—is a massive, unaddressed TAM right now.

It’s a matter of time until we scale the number of markets and scale the liquidity. I think those markets will one day be very big. Sports is very big right now, but I don’t think it’s permanent. I think it’s a moment in time.

It’s funny, I spoke to pretty much every one of your ambassadors before the show, by the way, including Colin at Sandwich. He even told me about investing back in 2019 because it was the biggest TAM he’d ever seen in potential. I thought that was an interesting and bold statement, which I completely agree with you on when you look at the untapped element of movies, culture, and everything in between.

With that, you have people realizing that there’s untapped TAM, and you see Robinhood come in with alternative products. How do you think about Robinhood’s entry? I know Vlad pretty well. I’m always very impressed by their product suite. How do you internally think about that?

Maybe let me answer that question generally and then specifically. In 2024, we won the fight against the government. We sued the government, and then we won that fight on October 7, 2024.

I think that accelerated prediction markets. It really spearheaded them into the mainstream, and this has continued into this year. When you see this type of success, I think what happened with Kalshi in the election was a bit of a ChatGPT moment for our industry.

What happened with ChatGPT and OpenAI is that everybody flocked. Everyone was like, “There’s a gold mine here. We’re going to go after it.” That’s happening in prediction markets.

I always think of it as there are either small markets that not a lot of people care about or massive markets that a lot of people care about, as long as you live in a free, open market and a free, open society.

Obviously, I’m running a free market, so I have to believe in competition. It’s great. The competition you’re seeing from CME, from DraftKings and FanDuel, from some of the offshore players, some of the startups, and some of the brokers is a sign that the opportunity ahead is massive. It’s a very big opportunity.

Specifically, on Robinhood: Incredible company, amazing execution. I think Vlad has been able to move into new products pretty successfully, and they’ve been an incredible partner of ours on the prediction-market front.

I think them pushing for more innovation in the space is a very positive thing. It’s going to make all of us get better, and we’re very excited about it.

Totally get you, and I share that view on Vlad. He’s just such a good dude. It’s so funny: I had him on the show when the market cap was in the dumps, and he was in the dumps. I had him on the show when the market cap was riding high, and this man was lighter than air. He was so happy and so positive.

I was like, whoever says that your happiness isn’t correlated to market cap lied.

Why is the competition so intense with Polymarket? We’re great friends with Alex at Deal. The Deal, Rippling, and you and Polymarket are similar in ferocity. There's probably even Trump's you. But why is your so intense?

There’s a little bit of spectacle around these things. When I get asked this question, I think a little bit about boxing. I always wonder: do these boxers actually hate each other, or are they doing it for the show? Do they go back after they punch each other in the ring, hang out with each other in the back room, and move on? I’ve always wondered that, and probably there’s some truth to that.

I think people like rivalries, and they scale them, amplify them, and grow them. It’s more fun to watch a Kalshi-Polymarket rivalry than not watch a Kalshi buy order. I think people enjoy that dynamic.

I get you, but Rippling and Deel hate each other, and Deel hates Rippling.

I don’t know if there’s that. We’ve had our differences, and we’ve had real conflicts. There’s no question about that. I think both companies have made mistakes in the past. Maybe, fortunately, neither of us has escalated to the level of Rippling and Deel.

We’ve both been playing games against each other for years now because we’re competitors, and there was one last year that they promoted. There’s a whole backstory to it, but that was a mistake. I made it clear to the team: don’t ever do this again.

Can I ask, what do you learn from that? Specifically, when I left my old fund, I was very quick in leaving and left no time for a transition. I was quite thoughtless toward my old partner, and I really regret that. I should have given more time and been more thoughtful and caring. With the benefit of hindsight, I would have done it differently. Benefits of age. When you reflect on the mistakes that you mentioned there, is there a takeaway for you?

The way I think of it is that an industry truly becomes an industry when there’s a rivalry, because that rivalry will push you beyond the limits of what you thought you could achieve. That’s just how these rivalries work. Look at Messi and Ronaldo: they’re both considered potentially the greatest of all time. I think Messi is the greatest of all time, but that’s a debate for another day.

They live in the same era, and I think there’s a correlation in that—or causation. I don’t think they just happened to be born at the same time. Look at Tom Brady and Manning. When Tom Brady reflected on that back in the day, he said they were the most ferocious on the field and fought each other. But over time, he became grateful for that because he realized that without Manning being there, and vice versa, he would never have achieved what he achieved.

I think that’s happening in prediction markets. Without Polymarket, we wouldn’t have pushed our marketing and our product as hard. Without us, they wouldn’t have pushed their marketing and their product, and maybe they also wouldn’t have pushed the regulatory piece that we’ve unlocked as hard. That infighting is going to push both of us to scale this industry and reach heights that we honestly wouldn’t have been able to reach otherwise.

In the long term, it’s actually net positive for the customer. The people who are happiest here are these early evangelists in prediction markets, who have now seen their market grow from this weird corner of the internet into a massive industry. It’s literally starting to look like a stock market.

I do respect Shayne and Polymarket more than any other competitor.

I don’t like rivalries like that, you know what I mean?

I think it depends on what you mean. There are a lot of really great companies in the space, especially bigger, legacy companies. I respect CME a lot. Even though they’re an incumbent and a legacy company, as a business, it’s really an incredible business—what they’ve built and the moats that they have.

Traditional players like DraftKings and FanDuel have really effective marketing machines. They’re some of the best spenders of dollars on the planet. In absolute terms, Polymarket has done an incredible job at marketing. They built a good brand, and we learned from that. I think Kalshi has gotten really good this year on that front.

What do you not do in brand today that you would like to do?

This week, we announced the first and then the second large-scale news network partnership with a prediction market. We announced an exclusive partnership with CNN, and then CNBC announced the same thing the next day. Those have always been dream partnerships of ours, and there’s more to come.

The idea of embedding prediction markets in the news has so much symbiosis. The news can get better from prediction markets because prediction markets are a way of extending the news. Think of it this way: the news covers what’s happening now, while prediction markets can extend the news to cover what’s about to happen next, which is the next episode, the next iteration of news.

Prediction markets can benefit from the news because the news can create that habit. I read something about whether the Fed is going to raise interest rates or about the economy, and I can maybe directly trade on it and put on a position. They really gel well together.

There are obviously sports leagues, and I think some authority figures and affiliates. But the bigger thing for us, which I think we’re learning over time and starting to do a better job at, is that we have to tell the story of the company.

We haven’t done as much of that because what I realized is that the story actually resonates. It resonates with our customers, it resonates with partners, and it also resonates with aspiring entrepreneurs who are starting whatever they’re starting.

When you look back at the story of Kalshi, the one thing I always tell people is that I think the thing that stood out for us was resilience. I think we’re competent, I think we’re smart, I think we have a great strategy, and we work hard. But I think it’s resilience.

We were so deeply committed to making this thing work. In some ways, the beautiful outcome here, maybe the outcome itself, is giving us a beautiful lesson: you truly can will something into existence. You really can, and it’s amazing to see that play out.

I’ve had my doubts over the years, obviously, but it really did work out. I think we have to get that story out there.

Totally get you. I spoke to Don Stalter before this show, and he asked you, tied to that resilience: what was your lowest day, and what did your mind tell you on that lowest day?

It’s really hard. I’ve had so many low days throughout the last several years. I’ll tell you one: we lost 3 anchors for our fundraise, and I had to call my mom up crying while walking through London in the rain. She told me, “The harder it is, the better the story comes out of it.” Harry Stebbings

Yes, it is.

And I always remember that.

One of the harshest moments in the history of the company was when we spent 3 years getting regulated up front. Then prediction markets were legalized, and we could finally launch. We got blocked from launching on launch day.

At the end of 2021, we started working on the election market to get it in time for the 2022 midterm election. We had a team, and we bet 2 entire years on that. Then the government pocket-vetoed it. They delayed their approval until after the midterms so they wouldn’t give it to us in time.

The day that happened, you could feel in the room that something had changed. People just lose confidence in you when things like that happen. They question the strategy, and they question the decisions.

We lost a lot of the team over it. I could feel that the trust and the faith in the company had plummeted. It was 0 at that point. It’s one of those moments where you walk out of the office and feel physical pain in your stomach. There’s this feeling of hopelessness, that it’s done—that this is it.

I also called my mom, and I told her, “I honestly think this is it. This is the end of the road.” She’s religious, and she said, “Well, don’t worry.”

I asked one of the saints that I know who is popular in Lebanon. I was like, “Don’t worry at all. I asked the saint. I got the signs that I need. This company is going to be massive.”

Obviously, that’s a very hard thing for me to stand on, but the one thing that’s always been very good about Luana and me is that we’ve gotten gut-punched so many times in the history of the company, through really hard gut punches, and we still stood back up. So we took a day to recover. The next day, we came back and we were like, “We’re going to try again for the 2024 election.”

Then we tried another year, until the end of 2023, and the government blocked it again. That was the second time—a gut punch, the same exact deal. We lost another big chunk of the team, and it was a horrible situation.

This was the moment where we were going to try a third time, and this time we were going to sue the government over this election market. So, 3 years of going through that absolutely intolerable pain, up until, obviously, we got rewarded at the end of 2024, when we actually won. But it took 3 different tries and 3 different years.

The hardest days are the stories that you tell. Did you ever doubt your leadership?

The answer is yes. At times, even today, you always doubt. As you know, when you’re building a company that’s going after a large market, first it’s not working, then it starts working, then it goes back to not working. You do that 10 times, and then it works really, really well, but then everything starts breaking. This is maybe the phase we’re in.

Then you start fixing some of the things, but more things start breaking. You have to continuously shift yourself as a founder and then as a CEO, and evolve yourself. There are always questions like, “Am I going to be able to do this next phase?”

What are you not sure that you’re able to do today?

I think that, for us, it’s the time in the company when we need to evolve into a more structured organization and build the right set of processes and systems in the company. We haven’t done that before. That’s going to be the next big challenge: Am I going to rise to the occasion and be able to do it while accelerating the growth of the company and not compromising the growth? That’s a hard problem.

The reason why these problems are hard is that there’s no answer. There’s no recipe; there’s no book. It really depends on you, your company, and the circumstances. You have to go through it, and you have to make a bunch of mistakes as you go through it. You never know if it’s going to work out exactly the way that you want it to work out.

What function do you think is weakest today?

That’s a good question. I think marketing, at the beginning of the year, was where I spent a lot of my time. I think it’s less about some specific department lacking, but more about consistency now. How do we move that into a scaled, consistent set of habits in the company rather than a series of sprints?

Can I ask you a weird one? If the world is financialized by Kalshi, is that actually good for the world?

There are 2 very important dimensions here. The answer is unequivocally yes. More free markets generally tend to lead to more positive outcomes. Always.

But the thing that struck me is that the current financial markets don’t relate to a lot of people. Trading stocks, options, or futures—people don’t really understand them, and the game is sort of rigged. It’s rigged on behalf of Wall Street against mansion against the average person.

You can never win against Wall Street on where a stock is going to go or where an option is going to go, because they have all the asymmetric information. The thing that got me excited about building this is that there’s actually an opportunity to build a financial market for a market that relates to anyone, that anyone can relate to.

One of my core beliefs is that everyone is an expert on something. Everyone reads the news about certain things or has a passion about something specific. The vast majority of people have specific passions or are really excited about a specific vertical.

Kalshi is really a way to get them to participate in a financial market on that vertical that is their home turf, where they are not facing somebody who has more information than them—a hedge fund or, you know, I’m sure you’ve seen pro sports traders.

Yeah. They have every insight on every player, every injury, and every weather and wind pattern. The standard guy or girl betting on an NHL game on Sunday, I think you said, doesn’t have that.

Is it not just increasing access to a different field where there are pros?

I think it’s part of it. I don’t think Citadel and Wall Street have asymmetric information on, for example, our political process. You saw it with the election. The best traders in politics—what bills are going to pass, who’s going to win the election—they’re people who love politics. They’re not Wall Street.

Wall Street is good, and they can get smarter over time. But where Wall Street is really good is seeing what hedge fund, mutual fund, and whatever else is buying which stock. They can know where a stock is going to go better than the average person.

A lot of people have a lot of insight about politics. Why? Because they’ve been following politics for a decade or 2. You see it in the numbers. These are some of the most successful traders on Kalshi.

But there’s another facet to this that is very, very important: The prediction-market user is not just a trader. Actually, out of every 100 prediction-market users, maybe there are 1 or 2 traders who are actually trading on the market. The rest of the users are what I call social lurkers—people who sit and watch on the sidelines.

It’s really a form of news. It’s a form of media. It’s a way to come and get truth about what’s going to happen next in a world where it’s been really hard to figure out what’s happening.

You see this at every big election. People flock to Kalshi because you go on the traditional news networks and you don’t know who won until 5, 6, or 7 hours after Kalshi. That’s extremely valuable. If you can see and get a little bit smarter about the future, we can make better decisions over time, allocate resources better, and manage risks better. I think that’s a very positive thing.

It’s a really interesting insight that 1 or 2 out of every 100 are traders, and the rest are what I call social lurkers—people who sit and watch on the sidelines.

The question then becomes—and a lot of your ambassadors ask this—why partner with a legacy media brand like CNN or CNBC when you could actually own the vertical? You have some money, dude. You could build the media brand and the media platform and own the entire stack.

Why partner with legacy media? And how long before that legacy partnership becomes cannibalism?

I think they’re not mutually exclusive, and I think that’s a fair question. I just think that right now we’re so early that it’s hard to think about cannibalism or think about any of this as a zero-sum question. We’re just so early.

The number of people who deeply understand prediction markets is still so small. There’s so much education to do, and I think the news and partners like CNN and CNBC are really an incredible way to get people to understand what these markets are about.

At the end of the day, the mission of the company is that we want to bring more truth to a lot of these processes, whether it’s the election process—right now we’re using polls and pundits, and people say whatever they want—or weather, climate, or the economy and how we make decisions about the economy.

The best way to do that is to put it in the places where people go to get their information. Imagine if election-night coverage were informed by prediction markets, which actually work better than what we’re doing today. That is a net positive, and the best way to do that is, well, let’s go to the place where people are going to get their information about the election. I think news networks are an amazing way to do that.

Do you not think you can create the next news network?

I think we can. They’re not mutually exclusive. I think we can do both.

Over time, there are different—I mean, even today, there isn’t a single news network that owns all the audience. There are some news networks, like CNBC for finance and business, while CNN is for politics. I think they’re not mutually exclusive.

When you look at activity, what’s more important? Is it breadth or is it depth? Is 99% of trading and interest in a very small number of inventory, or is that breadth massively important?

Your team and I were talking before this about the World Cup, doing some PR in Brazil, and just getting the brand in Brazil. Is breadth everything, or is it having that 1% that everyone gives a shit about?

It’s a great question, and we think about this a lot.

Yeah. The unfortunate truth is that the answer is kind of nuanced, in between. You cannot go fully vertical because then your product offering is not diverse and interesting enough. And you cannot go fully wide because then you don’t concentrate enough liquidity in specific events. That’s what makes it an interesting marketplace problem. It’s not an easy problem.

My mental model is that you have to have breadth. Product diversity and making sure that people have enough content to engage with, and markets that are related to the news or the things that they read on X, are important, right? It’s a bit similar to X: if you go on X and read about one specific thing all the time, that’s not going to make it a very interesting experience. You have to have diversity, even if there are specific topics that account for the vast majority of the eyeballs. It’s just a constant balancing act between the two.

Totally get that. Can I ask you, moving to the fact that we spoke about becoming a news network—and that also takes money—Don said you fought hard to protect early investors’ pro rata, even when top-tier funds wanted to squeeze the shit out of us.

Oh, I see. That’s interesting. My mental model for this is that we’re playing a long-term, iterated infinite game. There are a lot of rounds to that game, and every decision is a round. I think it’s very important that throughout the game and throughout the rounds, you build a reputation where people can trust you and trust that, when you have a trade-off ahead of you, you will not be quick to prioritize yourself; you will try to do right by people to the extent you can.

It’s the same thing with the people that believed in us early. Even though maybe we don’t need them as much right now, in my mental model, you need them in terms of reputation and doing right by them, because that compounds. If you’re somebody that does right by the people around you, over time people are going to want to work with you. I think the best people—whether they’re investors, partners, or team members—want to work with people that do right by them.

Does Sequoia really move the needle in your company?

Alfred Lin is incredible.

Yes. When I had Alex Bouaziz on the show, he said that Alfred is the one person he doesn’t have who he would most like to have.

Yeah, I know.

Why is Alfred incredible, and what specifically makes you say that?

Alex has been telling me so often over the years about Alfred. Alfred is a very unique investor in many dimensions, but a few things that I really appreciate and admire about him stand out. One, he’s not the type of investor you would usually imagine a VC to be; he’s kind of the antithesis of that. VCs love to make strong, simplistic statements. You tweet something like, “The way to win is to have a great team,” and Alfred’s answer to everything is this very nuanced, gray, uninteresting, uninspiring answer. But it tends to be the right answer.

Most investors like simple structures and frames: “The margins are going to get compressed, so the business is going to be very hard.” Whereas Alfred is like, “Well, what if margin compression over time is actually going to be slower than expected, and then you’re going to grow into it?” It’s a lot of gray-area math and nuance, but that helps push you to get to the right balance in every decision.

Number two, he’s always a kind of counterbalancing actor. The thing I learned with Alfred is that every time I go to him with idea A, he will argue for the other—for not A—and if I go with idea not A, he will argue for A, always, systematically. He will always argue the other side. Always. This is to push me back to the middle, to push me back to, “Hey, every decision comes with trade-offs, and every problem solution comes with problems.”

And the last part is—again, maybe there’s a theme here—when the company is doing poorly, Alfred is the most optimistic and will come in, be excited, and push you. When the company is going well, Alfred gets pissy. He just wants to make sure that you don’t get over your head, that you don’t forget dark times are coming again, and that you’re careful.

But he’s really been there for us from the very beginning. He’s been a huge believer at times when people really didn’t believe. It was really hard to believe at Calibrate in Calibrate times, and he was always consistent.

One of the most bullshit statements I think founders say, and that has proliferated, is, “You never want people to join your company because an investor has invested.” I think that’s utter crap. If Sequoia invests, it does increase the chances of success. It means you’ll have another round of funding. It means more good people want to join, and people want to make money for their families. So, it’s completely logical that you would get more people wanting to join after Sequoia invests.

Do you agree with me, or do you take the stance that you shouldn’t take people who only join because of your investor?

The best people want to win, right? They want to join a winning team. I think having great investors is one sign, out of many others, that you are on a winning team. So, expecting people to disregard that altogether is probably pushing out or excluding some people that are winners—people that really want to win.

At the same time, you have to make sure you’re picking people that are going to really work hard and do whatever it takes to win, as long as they believe that this is a winning company and a winning formula. My answer is that I don’t think people who see having Sequoia on the cap table as a strong signal are bad people at all.

No, but I think you still have to do your due diligence in the interview. Is this person just joining for a free ticket on the ride, or is this person joining to make that ride cool and accelerate even harder? Are they going to do whatever it takes and work however hard to make it happen? If the answer to that is yes, then by all means you should hire that person.

What investor do you not have that you would most like to have? If Alex’s was Alfred, who’s yours?

In the most recent round, Neil Mehta came in in a small capacity. I’ve always wanted to have Neil involved. He’s just such an incredibly smart person every time I talk to him.

Why didn’t you let Neil come in in a bigger capacity?

It wasn’t the most immediate one. We just chatted toward the end of the round, and we decided to do something small, I think. Who would I really love to have? I have a lot of respect for Ribbit and Mickey. I have a lot of respect for Founders Fund. I have a lot of respect for Altimeter. A lot of the crossover funds in the public markets are also great. Learning from people is very important.

One of your investors asked something that they asked not to be attributed, which I’m honoring. They said, “Did you ever cross paths with SBF?” And what did you learn from observing FTX’s implosion? I’ve got to know who this investor is.

Yeah, the answer is yes. Actually, the funny story is that when I was a freshman at MIT, SBF interviewed me for Jane Street. I’ve known him since then. When he came into the U.S. with FTX, we met once. We were never really close. He was honestly kind of cold toward us when things were going well.

I think we at Kalshi had a history of people looking down on us a lot. We were a smaller company, and we weren’t as successful. We were doing all these things—we were taking the regulated route and focusing on regulation. We were like, “We want to do it right. We want to do it clean, compliant, regulated first.”

In those years, it was very unsexy to be that company. You had FTX—everything was crazy. All the unregulated, offshore, free-for-all companies were the sexy companies. Those were the companies breaking rules and winning, and we were seen as this safe, boring loser. We were committed. We were like, “We are not going to do this unless the government approves it.”

I’ve always been unwavering in my belief, and the same with Luana: regulatory first. The reason is that I think in financial services and healthcare, the only way to build something that will stand the test of time and truly go mainstream is to work with regulators, to do it clean, and to do it right.

Maybe the learning came afterward. At times you have doubts, right? Investors ask, “Why are you not growing like FTX? Why are you not doing this? Maybe you should go offshore. You should do that.” You start doubting yourself. Maybe the learning was simply to stay true to your approach. If you really have high conviction, forget everything going on around you, no matter the valuations and no matter what’s building. Stay true to your approach.

When did you stay true to your approach when you should have changed? For example, I believed for many years that audio was our platform.

We don't do video. People don't feel as comfortable on video. It should be audio. I was stupid, and we should have moved to video much sooner. When did you stay true to your approach when you should have moved, and what did you learn?

This is going to sound a little bit unusual. I was too product-driven for too long. I think I was always like, “We’ve got to build the product and make it absolutely perfect, and it needs to grow really fast organically, and then we basically do more marketing and build a brand.” I actually think you have to build both together.

If I were doing it again, I would really be thinking about building both together. Your product’s never going to be perfect, right? It evolves, shifts, and improves over time. The brand—you have to learn it. It’s a muscle, right?

Growth, marketing, and brand are not things that you just turn on all of a sudden. It’s not like, “Oh, now we’re ready to grow.” It is a muscle. It’s something you have to embed in your company.

I changed my mind on this. Maybe it’s the YC thing: “Build a great product and people will come.” I think you should build a great product, but build a great marketing engine and scramble to do both at the same time. That’s now my best answer to this.

Do you think we’ve moved too far in that direction when you look at the “distribution is everything” rage bait, everyone having videos, everyone having a podcast, and the Cluely, “I’m going to take pictures doing obscene things”? Do you think we’ve moved too far?

Here’s the way I would put it: if you take that statement to the extreme—maybe you should do marketing and not really focus on product—that is definitely a recipe for failure. In the order of things, build a great product, but make sure to think about your marketing motion early enough. Don’t think about it years late, which is what we did and was a big mistake.

The second is, build a great product and then think about your marketing. The third is, build a great marketing machine and then think about your product. That is my view.

Because no matter how many eyeballs you have, you have to build a great product, right? There are a lot of people who have had massive eyeballs. You see influencers and celebrities with massive eyeballs. Their tweets get tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of likes sometimes, and they launch a product that doesn’t really work, right?

That’s the age-old story. I’m not a believer in this whole “distribution first, and that’s all that matters.” I think you have to have a great product. That’s a precondition to success. But you also have to build a good brand and a marketing motion in today’s age, because technology has become easier.

Building tech is not the way it was 10 or 15 years ago. You also have to build a good brand and a marketing motion.

Cristiano Ronaldo announced last night that he was investing in Perplexity. Clearly, fantastic judgment as a fellow Perplexity investor. My question to you would be, what celebrity would you most like to have in Kalshi?

That’s a very good question for Luana, because hers is Taylor Swift. It’s funny because a lot of the coverage this week was tying her to Taylor Swift. Well, now she’s richer than Taylor Swift, apparently.

She’s just younger.

I mean, look, my almighty GOAT is Messi. We have talked to—I think we’re talking to his team right now. We’ll figure something out.

I think he’s the greatest athlete of all time. He really embodied this. He’s obviously great on the pitch and everything he’s done, but he loves soccer more than anything on this planet, and you can feel it. You can feel it so heavily in everything around his life, right?

He’s made it. He’s become rich. He’s become famous. All he cares about is getting on that pitch and winning. You can feel that hunger. The man never really spent obscenely. He’s stayed with the same person, who’s now his wife, since he was, I think, 14. He has his family, and that’s his source of joy outside of work.

He is so deeply committed to getting that ball and scoring. I love that so much, because it was never about anything other than soccer for him, and you could feel that.

You mentioned the humility there, the not getting distracted, and the one-partner focus. I’m a bit worried, dude. The age of founders today is so much younger than it was even before. I’m meeting 17-year-olds with term sheets for $5 million every week.

They’re talented, absolutely, and there’s talent there, but when I was 17, my emotional maturity was here. I think most of us were here. Do you worry that we’re overestimating the emotional maturity of a generation of very, very young founders?

I will say that each generation is more mature than the prior one. I think you can definitely feel that. So often I talk to 17- and 18-year-olds now, and they’re more mature than I was when I was 17 or 18.

As you go through battles and the ups and downs, it humbles you, right? You have to go through some of that. I agree with you that younger people who are coming at it clean, and the first time they have an idea they get a $5 million term sheet, may get a wrong set of expectations about what they’re about to get into and how good they truly are.

I think Luana and I have been lucky. We’ve always looked at ourselves as the underdogs and had a massive chip on our shoulders. Our internal view of ourselves is not that we’re these almighty beings. We’re always asking, “What are we doing wrong? Who’s better than us?”

We think a lot more that way. In some ways, it’s a bit more tiring in the day-to-day, but it’s made us lucky because we’ve humbled each other over the years. We stay very grounded on what we’re lacking at every stage of growth.

There are a lot of things we’re lacking. There are so many great people out there. Truly, right? If you compare yourself to some of the greats, they’re all operating on such a different level, and there’s so much for us to learn.

Dude, if it’s okay with you, I want to do a quick-fire round. I’ll pepper you with questions, and you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?

Yeah, sounds great.

What’s a prediction market that should exist but you’re too scared to list?

That’s a great question. I think it’s markets around the evolution of geopolitical conflicts. They could have a lot of utility. That information could be very, very useful, but I think they have downsides. We always avoid markets where you can get paid or not paid based on something bad happening.

It’s really hard, isn’t it? How do you balance news and information and the benefits that come from transparency with the acknowledgement that, with that, is financialization? It’s a dilemma for any technology. You see this in AI. Technology comes with a lot of positives, but there are risks, and you have to balance between the two.

Which founder brand in tech do you think is most brilliantly crafted? For example, I think the Collisons’ brand has been expertly crafted and phenomenally maintained. It’s a fantastic brand that they should be very proud of, I’m saying that nicely. That would be my brand that I aspire to. It’s a Chanel brand of knowledge and premium.

I think Eric and Cream have done a very good job building a story and a brand around the founders, the team, how the company came to be, and the quality of their execution. I’m learning a lot from those two and others.

What’s the biggest misconception people have about Kalshi today?

One of the misconceptions is that people sometimes think Kalshi is gambling. It’s not. It’s information and news.

When I think about gambling, it’s a very, very different model. There’s a financial market for two reasons. One, it has economic value, but the second one—the really core one—is that in gambling, there’s a house. You walk into a casino, and the revenue of the house is equal to its customers’ losses. That’s how they make money. They’re betting against the house.

In our model, it’s an open, transparent financial market that is neutral. You’re trading against somebody else. Whether you lose or make money, we’re not incentivized either way. We make as much money either way. We take a transaction fee on top, whether you win or lose.

That’s why the dynamic is much more akin to the New York Stock Exchange and traditional financial markets than to a traditional casino or sportsbook.

What’s one piece of advice on hiring that is most controversial or unconventional?

The vast majority of people are not in the top 10%. It sounds like an obvious statement, but most people who come through your door should probably not be at your company. I think people always forget that most teams are not great teams.

They can be, right? Not everybody can be in the top 10%. Maybe the way to frame this as a contrarian or controversial take is that most people are mediocre—not in a bad way necessarily, but just mediocre for the job that you're trying to hire them for. It's really, really, really hard to find the top 5–10%.

I do not think you can only have A players if you have a company over 250 people. By definition, A players are extremely rare if you want to keep that high bar. Post-250, I don't think you can. Do you agree?

I don't know. We're not at 250 yet, so we'll see.

What are you at today?

100 and change. 110, 120.

What's the worst part about your culture?

That's a great question. We're a little bit chaotic, but it's by virtue of being very flat, low on process, very low on politics, and just really focused on product, customer, and shipping. Every decision is product, customer, shipping. Don't think about anything else.

When that happens, you're choosing, in my view, between 2 different pains: either product velocity or chaos and disorganization in a company. So you either cave on product velocity, or you cave on chaos and disorganization in a company. I don't think you can get both.

I know you love walking meetings. What's the most memorable walking meeting, and why?

I do love walking meetings. How do you know that?

Dude, I stalked the shit out of you. You know why the show's done well, and I don't mean this arrogantly? Just because most people don't prep. They don't really put the time in to get to know you.

That's amazing.

I spoke to 23 people before this.

That's amazing. That's amazing. Let me think. I think I've had so many walking meetings over the years, but I spent a lot of time just walking with Victor Lazarte and thinking about a bunch of different things.

I think he's incredibly smart. He's a very, very smart guy. We never just have an agenda. We just sort of talk about different constructs and try to build mental models of the world and what's happening. He's always helped me think bigger, and he pushes back on my thinking.

We have a lot of walking meetings. I love him. I think he's fantastic. He was brilliant on the show.

Final one for you. Your dad was an entrepreneur. What unconventional lesson that you haven't shared before did you learn from your dad about entrepreneurship that you've applied?

Well, my dad was actually a doctor, and then he started a consulting firm. One of the things that is a little unusual is that I grew up mostly with a single mom, so my dad was not super present.

Yeah, I saw your tweet actually recently about broken relationships with fathers.

Yeah, I actually thought there was a lot of truth to that, I think. You don't realize it subconsciously. I think it embeds some sort of chip on your shoulder. It's very hard to escape if you had the same relationship with your father.

Dude, I so appreciate you. I so appreciate you putting up with me pushing you on everything from Polymarket to your familial relationships. Thank you for joining me today, man.

Thanks for having me. This was awesome.