The Kalshi founder and CEO joins Rich Kleiman to discuss how regulated prediction markets are reshaping finance, news, and decision-making.
When Kalshi founder and CEO Tarek Mansour first started thinking about prediction markets, he wasn’t trying to disrupt sports betting. He was trying to solve a problem he witnessed firsthand on Wall Street.
Speaking with Rich Kleiman on the LionTree Podcast in partnership with Boardroom Talks, Mansour traced the origins of Kalshi back to 2016, when he was working at Goldman Sachs during Brexit and Donald Trump’s first presidential run. Institutional investors were scrambling to position themselves around uncertain political outcomes. The trades were complex, indirect, and often wrong. “We could build something better,” Mansour recalled thinking, a simple, transparent market where people could trade directly on the probability of future events.
That idea became Kalshi in 2018. But what separates Kalshi from earlier prediction market experiments is what Mansour calls a “regulation-first” mindset. Instead of launching offshore or operating in a gray area, the company spent four years securing approval from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), becoming the first federally regulated U.S. exchange for trading on future events. It was a slow and expensive process, but Mansour believed legitimacy was the only path to scale.
Today, Kalshi processes tens of billions of dollars in annual trading volume across markets tied to inflation prints, Federal Reserve rate decisions, elections, weather events, and even pop culture outcomes. Unlike traditional sportsbooks, Kalshi does not act as the house. Users trade against one another, and the platform earns a transaction fee. That distinction, Mansour argues, fundamentally changes incentives. “If your revenue equals your customers’ losses, you have a different business model,” he said. On Kalshi, the goal is liquidity and accuracy, not maximizing losses.
The conversation also explored why prediction markets are gaining cultural traction at a moment of deep polarization. Polls are distrusted. Pundits are dismissed as biased. Social feeds reinforce echo chambers. Markets, Mansour argues, create accountability. When participants put money behind their beliefs, exaggeration becomes costly. “Markets don’t lie,” he said, emphasizing that prices adjust quickly as new information emerges.
Subscribe for the biggest stories in the business of sports and entertainment, daily.
Institutions are paying attention. Hedge funds increasingly incorporate Kalshi data into trading models, while policymakers and analysts watch event markets for real-time signals on economic expectations. Mansour sees this as only the beginning. He envisions prediction markets embedded in the daily fabric of news consumption, a reference point for public discourse rather than a niche financial product.
There are guardrails, of course. Kalshi bans insider trading, monitors suspicious activity, and avoids markets that could incentivize harm. But at its core, Mansour believes the mission is simple: Bring more objectivity to how society thinks about the future.
If successful, prediction markets won’t just forecast events; they may reshape how we debate them.
Read More:
‘Backrooms’ Proves the Internet Is Hollywood’s Biggest Untapped IP Vault
Pete Crow-Armstrong Still Getting Used to Calling Aaron Judge a Teammate on Team USA
How Anajak Thai Became One of Los Angeles’ Most Exciting Restaurants
Now That Paramount Has Outbid Netflix, What’s the Plan for Warner Bros.?
Inside the Making of the Coolest Golf Collab of the Year (So Far)
