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/

00:01:13 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