Q&A: Kalshi’s CEO Tarek Mansour Isn’t Interested in Management Advice

Kalshi’s chief executive doesn’t want your advice, and he isn’t shy about saying so. Tarek Mansour, the 30-year-old cofounder who has helped turn the prediction-markets company into a $22 billion juggernaut, told The New York Times in a recent Corner Office interview that most of the guidance handed to founders is “usually mostly trash.” His approach to running one of the fastest-growing companies in finance has been to largely ignore the playbook altogether.

“The worst advice that most people get is that you should go and seek out a bunch of advice. There’s really no recipe to any of this stuff,” Mansour said. “People are over-reliant on advice, and people love giving advice because it makes them feel smart and powerful. It’s usually mostly trash.”

A Small Company With an Outsized Footprint

For all its market presence, Kalshi remains a lean operation. Most of its roughly 200 employees work out of an open-plan office in Manhattan’s meatpacking district — they don’t even fill an entire floor of the building. Yet Kalshi and rivals like Polymarket have become fixtures of American sports and media, sponsoring major events and feeding data into coverage of politics, financial markets, and beyond. Users on these platforms can wager on everything from the final score of a soccer match to the outcome of a clinical drug trial to what President Trump might say in a speech.

Mansour and cofounder Luana Lopes Lara met as classmates at MIT and launched Kalshi in 2018, less than a year after graduating, initially pitching it as a financial exchange for contracts tied to real-world events. The path wasn’t smooth — the company spent years navigating regulatory hurdles before the Commodity Futures Trading Commission approved it as a financial exchange in 2020, with approval to offer contracts on U.S. election outcomes following in 2024. “Every day you wake up and you’re like, ‘What am I doing?'” Mansour said of the early grind.

From $2 Billion to $22 Billion in a Year

Kalshi’s valuation has since exploded. The company was valued at $2 billion in June 2025 before surging to $22 billion after a $1 billion Series F round led by Coatue in May 2026 — and the Financial Times has reported the company is exploring a new raise that could value it as high as $40 billion. That growth has made both Mansour and Lopes Lara billionaires at 30, with Forbes estimating each of their net worths at roughly $2.6 billion.

Asked whether he considers himself a manager, Mansour has been characteristically blunt: he doesn’t think he’s particularly good at it. He said he skips management books and founder podcasts almost entirely, describing himself and Lopes Lara as “probably very sort of entrepreneurially illiterate.” His management style instead leans on a flat organizational structure and a willingness to restructure on the fly — an adaptability he traces back to growing up in Lebanon.

Kalshi’s own data suggests the company’s edge isn’t concentrated among Wall Street veterans, either. Less than 2% of what the company calls “super predictors” account for 70-80% of trading volume, and Mansour has noted that the best forecasters on the platform tend to be ordinary users rather than finance professionals.

Risk-Taking Comes With Regulatory Heat

Mansour’s disdain for convention extends to his one piece of advice for other founders: take risks. “Try as much as you can to take as much risk as you can,” he said, though he added the caveat, “don’t take my advice as gospel.”

That appetite for risk has landed Kalshi in regulatory crosshairs. New York filed a lawsuit against the company last month alleging it operates an unlicensed gambling platform, with the state seeking civil penalties of $100,000 for each unauthorized sports-betting offer — a total the filing estimates could reach roughly $36 billion. Appearing on CNBC the day after the suit was filed, Mansour defended the company’s federal compliance approach, framing the pushback as resistance from “a legacy incumbent industry” threatened by a disruptive, fast-growing sector that consumers are actively adopting.

Whether or not Mansour’s anti-advice philosophy holds up as scrutiny intensifies, it’s hard to argue with the trajectory so far. As prediction markets continue jostling for space alongside traditional sportsbooks, Kalshi’s rise — regulatory fights and all — has made it one of the most closely watched companies in the industry, run by a CEO who insists he’s mostly just making it up as he goes.