Kalshi vs. Everyone: Co-Founder Luana Lopes Lara on the lawsuits and the long game

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Luana Lopes Lara (1:23)

I think there's a lot of misconceptions about prediction markets out there. There's nothing wrong with speculation. Kalshi has always been about how do we bring any thesis about the future into the markets, right? So that any thesis you have about the future, you have a market that perfectly mimics that. And that's what you can expect for us. That we want every new financial innovation, every new financial structure to be on Kalshi first, or at least a very close second.

We want to be the biggest derivatives exchange in the world.

Bob Safian (1:54)

That's Luana Lopes Lara, co-founder, president and COO of Kalshi, the prediction market that has exploded in growth over the past two years. Luana gamely talks to me about what it's like to become an overnight billionaire, what's behind Kalshi's ongoing courthouse battles, and why betting on Kalshi is different than FanDuel or DraftKings. We touch on financial market features like hedging and insider trading, and get into how Kalshi resembles ballet, Timothée Chalamet's strange dentist-chair Kalshi ad, and what the platform reveals about the US midterm elections. My prediction? You'll be fascinated. So let's get to it. I'm Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

I'm here with Luana Lopes Lara, co-founder, president, and COO of Kalshi. Luana, great to see you.

Luana Lopes Lara (2:56)

Great to see you too. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited.

Bob Safian (2:59)

I'm excited about this. You are the world's youngest self-made female billionaire.

That is amazing. Congratulations. Thank you. Is it weird to be part of the Billionaires Club? Like how different is your life?

Luana Lopes Lara (3:13)

I mean, it's definitely weird. I don't know how much my life changed. And I feel like when I think that people always say this, but I actually think it's true that it's in a lot of ways, like my life is still the same. I mean, I wake up, go to the gym, come to work, stay in the office the entire day, go back home, hang out with my husband and my dog and go to sleep. But I think that what's most exciting is about, I think it's just another kind of metric, maybe, that shows how far the company has gone, how hard we've worked and it's kind of fade off in that way.

Bob Safian (3:45)

The growth has been just phenomenal. I mean, you launched in 2021 Last year at this time, Kalshi was valued at $5 billion. I think by early this year it was up to $22 billion. Like that scale at that speed. What makes that possible? Like, is there luck in it?

Luana Lopes Lara (4:03)

It's a great question because actually, though, like we started the company in 2018, right? So in a lot of ways, it looks like an overnight success that it was like up two years ago. We just started growing a lot around the election. But it was a result of now eight years of work. When we started the company, it was very important for us to be legal and regulated from the start. So it took us four years before we could launch the product, launch anything, really have any user to work with the federal government, to figure out how to kind of bring prediction markets to the US in a safe and regulated way.

A lot of things helped us grow this much now, but I think it's just like the compounded effort that we've done and the team has done for so many years on the tech and the users and talking to them. It's just like in the moment that we won the lawsuit against the CFTC to be able to bring a lot more markets to Kalshi. And when that happened, the product was ready to really grow and go from there.