20VC: Kalshi's $1BN Raise, the Polymarket Feud, and the Battle to Replace Traditional Media

**Tarek Mansour** (0:00)
I think this is kind of what happened with Kalshi in the election, it was a bit of a Chad GPT moment for our industry. 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.

**Harry Stebbings** (0:13)
Did you ever cross paths with SBF? And what did you learn from observing FTX's implosion? This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and Kalshi is one of the fastest growing companies on the planet right now. In the last week, they announced their $1 billion raise and an $11 billion valuation. They announced partnerships with CNN and CNBC, and today, their founder Tarek joins me for his only interview following these announcements to give me the exclusive lowdown. But before we dive into the show today, are you drowning in AI tools? Chat GPT for writing, Notion for docs, Gmail for email, Slack for comms, and you're constantly copy pasting between them all losing context and losing time? This is the AI productivity tax, and it's killing your output. At 20VC, we're all about speed of execution, and Superhuman is the AI productivity suite that gives you superpowers everywhere you work. With the intelligence of Grammarly, Mail, and Coda built in, you can get things done faster and collaborate seamlessly. Finally, AI that works where you work, however you work. Superhuman gets you from day one with zero learning curve, and it's personalized to sound like you at your best, not like everyone else, using generic AI. Get AI that works where you work, unlock your superhuman potential. Learn more at superhuman.com/podcast. That's superhuman.com/podcast. And speaking of tools that give you an edge, that's exactly what AlphaSense does for decision-making. As an investor, I'm always on the lookout for tools that really transform how I work. Tools that don't just save time, but fundamentally change how I uncover insights. That's exactly what AlphaSense does. With the acquisition of Tegus, AlphaSense is now the ultimate research platform built for professionals who need insights they can trust, fast. I've used Tegus before for company deep dives right here on the podcast. It's been an incredible resource for expert insights. But now with AlphaSense leading the way, it combines those insights with premium content, top broker research and cutting-edge generative AI. The result? A platform that works like a supercharged junior analyst, delivering trusted insights and analysis on demand. AlphaSense has completely reimagined fundamental research, helping you uncover opportunities from perspectives you didn't even know how they existed. It's faster, it's smarter, and it's built to give you the edge in every decision you make. Twenty VC listeners don't miss your chance to try AlphaSense for free. Visit alphasense.com/twozero to unlock your trial. That's alphasense.com/twozero.
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**Tarek Mansour** (4:17)
Thanks for having me. Super excited.

**Harry Stebbings** (4:19)
Dude, I got to start on the main thing, a billion dollars. The first thing I have to ask, why does Kalshi need a billion dollars?

**Tarek Mansour** (4:26)
That's a good question. What we've realized in the last, I would say, six to nine months, given the sort of acceleration of what we've seen, is the opportunity ahead of us is maybe even bigger than we had all possibly imagined. There's a few symptoms of that. So one, Kalshi this year is at this scale, at least, I think the fastest growing company in America outside of AI. I think Anthropic is going faster, and I'm not sure about Mercure and Corsair, but we're growing at that sort of, at that pace, at that rate. And number two, what we're seeing, which is even more important, the qualitative thing that we're seeing is there's a real and rare shift in consumer behavior. People are kind of turning from like passive watchers of events or news or sports or other things that they engage with in real life to active participants. That natural behavior of wanting to predict the future or debating about something is turning into activity on Kalshi. That is rare. Like when you see this shift in consumer behavior, I mean, you've seen it in Airbnb with the hosts and Uber with 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. And, you know, when you have a massive opportunity ahead of you, you want to go big, you want to bet big. And so we're really scaling up for that opportunity here.