# Kalshi’s Tarek Mansour vs. the Federal Government

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/long-strange-trip-ceo-to-ceo-with-brian-halligan-7578456/kalshi-s-tarek-mansour-vs-the-federal-government
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/long-strange-trip-ceo-to-ceo-with-brian-halligan-7578456/kalshi-s-tarek-mansour-vs-the-federal-government.md
Podcast: [Long Strange Trip: CEO to CEO with Brian Halligan](https://stenobird.com/podcast/long-strange-trip-ceo-to-ceo-with-brian-halligan-7578456)
Published: 2026-07-09T09:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.megaphone.fm/CPUAI8839617620.mp3
Audio file: https://pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.megaphone.fm/CPUAI8839617620.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/long-strange-trip-ceo-to-ceo-with-brian-halligan-7578456/episodes/kalshi-s-tarek-mansour-vs-the-federal-government
Duration seconds: 3809

## Resource

Tarek Mansour calls himself a paranoid risk manager - the guy who can list 20 ways a hot air balloon will go down before it leaves the ground. Then he bet his entire company on suing its own regulator. Kalshi spent years walking through the desert. The CFTC pocket-vetoed its election markets ahead of the 2022 midterms, people left, and the company took a layoff while the government piled on audits and enforcement actions. Death by a thousand paper cuts. Instead of pivoting, Tarek and co-founder Luana Lopes Lara sued the federal government against the guidance of nearly all their investors and advisors. They won, three and a half weeks before the 2024 election, and Kalshi now claims 95% U.S. market share in prediction markets. We get into how two co-founders run 150 people with nearly everyone reporting directly to them, why it’s intentionally chaotic, why the two of them disagree by design, and Tarek's poker-player theory of expected outcome vs. outcome. He also breaks down his obsession with marketing timing - like launching the Timothée Chalamet spot 12 hours after the Knicks news broke - and his "hole in the ship" rule: a founder has to be the one staring at the leak. Tarek and Luana's dynamic reminded me a lot of me and Dharmesh at HubSpot: total opposites, and one plus one equals three.

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## Transcript

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