Tarek Mansour is the co-founder and CEO of Kalshi.

Kalshi is a regulated prediction market exchange valued at $22B in 2026 where people trade on the outcomes of real-world events – things like inflation prints, Fed decisions, elections, or weather events. Instead of betting against a house, users trade against each other in a market, and prices reflect the collective probability of an outcome happening.

Before starting Kalshi, Tarek worked as a quantitative trader at Goldman Sachs as a structured credit and equities analyst and at Citadel as a global macro trader. During his time at these firms, he realized a common thread: a lot of trading stemmed from an opinion on a future event.

We covered the idea behind prediction markets and how they offer a more direct way to trade on beliefs about the future. The conversation follows the long, difficult path to building a regulated exchange in the U.S., from early skepticism to ultimately winning a landmark legal battle. We also discuss how these markets can improve forecasting, enable new forms of hedging, and change how information gets priced.

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Timestamps:

(0:00) Intro

(0:23) Kalshi’s genesis

(5:05) Regulation-focused from inception

(11:06) Suing the government

(18:02) Gambling vs. financial markets

(20:58) Defining insider trading

(25:38) Incentive structure of the system

(32:40) Investing vs. trading

(35:31) Hedging use cases

(41:38) Scaling a lean team

(44:02) Defining Kalshi’s culture

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Links:

https://x.com/jaltma

https://x.com/mansourtarek_

https://kalshi.com/

https://uncappedpod.com/

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[email protected]