When regulators tried to shut them down, Tarek Mansour took them to court, and made history.
This week on HD in HD we're joined by the co-founder and CEO of Kalshi, the first fully regulated financial exchange for trading on events. He’s redefining how markets work by building a platform where people can trade on everything from elections to the economy, and proving that prediction markets can be both legitimate and transformative.
In this episode, we also get into:
why entrepreneurship has no clear destination, so you might as well enjoy the journey
how trading shaped how he thinks about risk and decision-making
how Kalshi survived its showdown with regulators
the bet that event trading can make humanity more rational
ABOUT US:
We’re proudly sponsored by Brex—a brand I co-founded, now supporting over 30,000 businesses like Anthropic, DoorDash, and Scale AI, helping them make every dollar count.
I’m grateful for their continued support as I bring you all conversations with some of the most exceptional founders of our generation. For more information, please go to: https://www.brex.com/?ref_code=bmk_audio_HDinHD
Connect with us here:
Tarek Mansour- https://x.com/mansourtarek_?lang=en
Brex- https://x.com/brexHQ
Henrique Dubugras- https://x.com/hdubugras
This episode was produced and distributed by our friends at Atomik Growth: https://atomikgrowth.com/
00:00:00 Intro
00:01:13 Brex Sponsorship
00:02:11 Early Years in Lebanon
00:08:41 Success and Stress
00:29:23 Expected Outcomes and Variance
00:41:43 MIT Experience
00:45:59 Goldman Sachs
00:53:08 Y Combinator
01:00:48 Legal Challenges
01:08:14 Raising Funds
01:14:02 The Election Market Challenge
01:35:45 Winning the Lawsuit
01:40:25 Mainstream Success
01:44:01 The Role of Support Systems
