Mar 17, 2026 · 1 hr 16 min · 15 segments
Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara are the co-founders of Kalshi, the first federally regulated prediction market in the US. They sit down with John and Matt Huang to discuss growing their revenue 11x…
Tarek MansourGuest
Luana Lopes LaraGuest
John CollisonHost
Matt HuangHost
Could Calci have been started 10 or 15 years prior? Or was there some moment of openness in the CFTC? Was there some tech enablement that was required? Were stablecoins required?
I do think that there is a part of it that crypto at the time was auger and there was like some very early prediction markets.
the existence of that made the CFTC also be like, we need a legal regulated alternative to this.
It is a better source of signal than most other mechanisms of getting signal, right? But there wasn't a real pain, I think, 10, 15 years ago in the way that there is pain in the last few years.
Like the incentive structure for most things that we read these days is clickbait, whether it's a lot of traditional news or social media or other.
So there was more of a pressing problem, I think, that helped create the wave and the sort of adoption that you're seeing in prediction markets that I don't think happened or would have happened 15 years ago because the problem wasn't that.
And that's because like most of our users, like 80% of our users are actually just looking like consuming information.
They're just coming in and seeing who's going to win the Texas primary yesterday and seeing like, okay, the, this, the polls are saying they're tied, but they're not tied and all those things.
And those, that consumption of information is way more important and relevant now.
on algorithmic feeds and just maybe people wouldn't have been as interested 10 or 15 years ago.
Could Calci have been started 10 or 15 years prior? Or was there some moment of openness in the CFTC? Was there some tech enablement that was required? Were stablecoins required?
I do think that there is a part of it that crypto at the time was auger and there was like some very early prediction markets.
the existence of that made the CFTC also be like, we need a legal regulated alternative to this.
It is a better source of signal than most other mechanisms of getting signal, right? But there wasn't a real pain, I think, 10, 15 years ago in the way that there is pain in the last few years.
Like the incentive structure for most things that we read these days is clickbait, whether it's a lot of traditional news or social media or other.
So there was more of a pressing problem, I think, that helped create the wave and the sort of adoption that you're seeing in prediction markets that I don't think happened or would have happened 15 years ago because the problem wasn't that.
And that's because like most of our users, like 80% of our users are actually just looking like consuming information.
They're just coming in and seeing who's going to win the Texas primary yesterday and seeing like, okay, the, this, the polls are saying they're tied, but they're not tied and all those things.
And those, that consumption of information is way more important and relevant now.
on algorithmic feeds and just maybe people wouldn't have been as interested 10 or 15 years ago.
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