Kalshi CEO’s Bold Vision For The Future of Markets | Tarek Mansour
Episode publishedPodcast: EmpireEmpire
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What I was interested in is building the New York Stock Exchange, but 10x bigger. Like that was the sort of vision, that was the thing that excited us at the core, and for us, it's like the minute we have to waiver on that commitment, it just becomes less interesting to build this We are building the everything exchange, the exchange where you're gonna be able to resolve any qualitative difference of opinions with a trade. Yep. Right? And so that's that TAM is gonna be very large long term.
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Thanks for having me. I'm very excited.
Yeah. Pumped on this. Dude, I wanna start with, I wanna actually start with, like, some turning points in the business. So I was trying to think about, from an outsider's point of view, like, turning points for for Kalshi. Things that came to my mind were the twenty twenty four election. Yep. Susquehanna joining as a market maker. To me, it was, like, one of those moments where I like, oh, these guys are actually pretty real. And that was really before I knew much about prediction markets and Kalshi. But maybe the first thing was just regulation. And so, actually, I'd love to hear the story ab
So let let me tell you maybe I'll just give you the kind of, like, the key turning points in my view, and then I'll talk a little bit about the story of Kalshi. But I think the first key moment was when we first got regulated as a financial exchange in The US, like when the federal government approved us first, so I think that was the first sort of, I would say, crucible moment where we got the license finally, like now prediction markets are sort of legal.
When was this? What year?
2020, end of and 2020, so it says, you then I think there was a launch of the exchange, then I think the critical decision to sue the government, then winning that lawsuit, and actually in between them there's the Susquehanna launch and then this year sort of the entry in sports and the launch of our brokerage, the brokerage side of the business. The story is, it's a very unusual story for a business and it breaks a lot of patterns in many ways, but, you know, so we started Kashi out of MIT, straight out of MIT, and I always say this, but, and this is very important, like Luan and I did not wa
That was not you?
It was like totally not me, you know, like what I was is a trader, like, you know, I mean, my story is like I was born in California, I grew up in Lebanon and my life back in the day was I grew up, you know, it was decently harsh, it was like war and terrorism and a bunch of things and I always had a little bit of an obsessive brain. And so I was obsessed with math forever, got really good at it, got into MIT. And then at MIT is where I sort of like started spending a lot of time in finance. I went to Goldman, Citadel, a bunch of other places.
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