Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour: How to Build Moats Against Incumbents; How to Hire Engineers | 20VC #931

Three, two, one, zero. You have now arrived at your destination. Tarek, I've heard so many good things an- ... We met before through, obviously, Alex at Deel, but then I spoke to Alfred at Sequoia, I spoke to Shreyas, who I had on the show, I spoke to Ali Partovi. I feel like I know you incredibly well already. Thank you so much for joining me first, Tarek.

Super excited. Uh, really excited for this. It's gonna be fun.

This will be a great conversation, so I want to start with a little bit on you. So tell me, how did you make your way into the world of startups first? And brilliant clicking of the fingers there. (laughs)

(laughs)

And then how did you come to found Kalshi most recently?

Uh, Louann and I were another type of, uh, people, uh, in school that were sort of like tinkering with a bunch of products and, and trying a bunch of different projects where like, you know, you always had this sort of like clique that is just like, "Oh, we're, we're like ... We wanna be entrepreneurs. We wanna be entrepreneurial, and we're trying a bunch of different things until you, you, you find something that, that maybe works and kind of go with it." So that wasn't us. We were pretty convinced that we were going into, um, uh, finance. You know, I was gonna be a trader. Uh, you know, my charter was gonna be at Citadel or kind of one of the quant funds. And, uh, I would say it's one of those examples where the dri- ... the idea drove us like out of our path to basically ... It, it just sort of like attracted us to itself, uh, to basically go and build it. Um, and so, I mean, I'll give you a little bit of background, but I ... You know, I- I'm, I'm originally from Lebanon, and I show up to MIT, um, and, you know, when I got to MIT, you know ... In Lebanon, I was like the math nerd. I was, you know, really, really smart, really good at, at school. When I get to MIT, I was like, "Holy shit." Like, I'm actually, at the very most, pretty average.

(laughs)

Uh, and I got, like, super pumped. I was like, "Holy shit." Like, I, I have to, you know, outwork everyone. I need to beat everyone." And then the thing that became kind of, "Okay, like, what do I need to do next?" Is like, "I need to go to Goldman." Because that was the cool thing to do at the time. I go to Goldman and I, like ... You know, I loved it. I was just, you know, everything about it, uh, and ... Uh, not necessarily Goldman. I, I just like loved trading, and then I found myself at night, you know, everyone was kind of thinking about w- ... You know, how do we trade this, and how do we pitch this to the client? And, you know, I was in this kind of thing called equity exotics desk, where you, you know, you bundle exotics, uh, uh, and sell them to clients. Um, and I wasn't thinking about, "How do we trade 'em?" I was thinking, "Why on Earth are we even trading these things?" I mean, we, we did this things in 2016 where, um, uh, people wanted to hedge themselves against Brexit or get exposure to Brexit, and what we would do is, like, we would take a bunch of option swaps, put them in one bundle, and then, uh, sell it to investors, and sell it as a good proxy for what they're actually looking for and then sell it for 40% premiums.