Kalshi CEO criticizes conventional business advice, advocates risk-taking

Most startup founders collect advice like frequent flyer miles. Tarek Mansour, the 30-year-old CEO of prediction market platform Kalshi, would rather light the whole loyalty program on fire. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Mansour dismissed the standard playbook for building a company, calling conventional business wisdom “usually mostly trash.” From regulatory underdog to $22B valuation Kalshi closed a $1B Series F funding round led by Coatue in May 2026, valuing the company at $22B. That’s double the $11B valuation the company carried in late 2025, a pace of appreciation that most publicly traded companies would envy. Mansour co-founded Kalshi with COO Luana Lopes Lara in 2018, and the platform opened to the public in 2021. The company has grown to command roughly 95% of the US prediction market share, according to Mansour’s own claims. Kalshi famously sued its own regulator, the CFTC, to defend its right to list event contracts on topics like politics, sports, and weather. The company operates as a CFTC-regulated exchange, giving it a legal moat that unregulated competitors struggle to replicate in the US market. Chaos by design Mansour’s philosophy extends beyond...