Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour on Raising $1BN, CNN and CNBC Deals & the Polymarket Feud

Kind of what happened with Kalshi in the election was a bit of a ChatGPT moment for our industry.

Kalshi is one of the fastest-growing companies on the planet. In the last week, they announced a $1 billion raise at an $11 billion valuation. Dave, Tariq joins me for his only interview following these announcements.

An industry truly becomes an industry when there's a rivalry. Without Polymarket, we wouldn't have pushed our marketing and pushed our product as hard.

Did you ever cross paths with SBF? And what did you learn from observing FDI since implosion? Ready to go? (instrumental music plays) Tariq, dude, it is so fucking good to have you on the show. I mean, holy cow, what a rampage Kalshi's been on, my friend. Thank you so much for coming back.

Thanks for having me. Super excited.

Now, dude, I got to start on the main thing. A billion dollars. Uh, the first thing I have to ask, why does Kalshi need a billion dollars?

That's a good question. But what we've realized in the last, um, I would say six to nine months, given the sort of acceleration of what we've seen, um, is I think the opportunity ahe- ahead of us is may- maybe even bigger than we had all possibly imagined. There's a few symptoms of that. So, one, I don't know if you know this, Harry, but, um, Kalshi this year, um, is at- at this scale at least, you know, I think the fasted growing company in America outside of AI. I think Anthropic is growing faster, and I'm not sure about Metacore and Cursor, but we're, you know, growing at that sort of, uh, at that- that pace, at that rate. Um, and number two, what we're seeing, which is even more important, the- the qualitative, uh, thing that we're seeing is there's a- there's a real and rare shift in consumer behavior. You know, people are kind of turning from, like, passive watchers of events or news or- or sports or other things that they engage with in real life to active participants. You know? That- that natural behavior of wanting to predict the future or debating about something is turning into activity on Kalshi. That is rare. Like, when you see this shift in consumer behavior, I mean, you've seen it in Airbnb with the hosts and- and Uber with riders, when, you know, we're seeing a new class of people, in this case prediction market traders, becoming a thing, that's indicative of a very, very massive opportunity ahead of us. And, you know, when you have a massive opportunity ahead of you, you- you want to go big, you want to bet big, and so we're- we're really scaling up for that opportunity here.

Totally get you. What does a billion dollars get for you that you couldn't do without?

I think one... So, okay, we are at a point right now where, so we're growing incredibly fast, um, we are also profitable right now, um, you know, and, um... So it's a good question. I think the next phase is how do we build a global brand? How do we build a brand that people know, they talk about, they associate with, um, and how we put the story of the company and the story of the brand out there? Um, and so there's a lot of marketing that's coming. Obviously scaling the team. So, we're still 100 people. And number two is, we're a financial market, we're a financial, uh, company, and so as the volumes increase, as liquidity increases, uh, y- you know, as a regulated f- like, we're a federally regulated comp- uh, financial exchange. It's a little bit like a bank or some of the kind of regulated clearing houses you hear about. You have re- reserve requirements, and added capital on the balance sheet, think of it a little bit as a safety cushion. S- things that adds sort of, um, uh, uh, it enables us to do things in- in- in, like faster. Like, more capital enables you to do things faster in financial services, and that's usually a good thing.