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Luana Lopes Lara

lines on the record: 59
first: 2022-06-19
most recent: 2022-06-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Personality wise, also, I'm very optimistic, as I said, he is more on the pessimistic paranoid side. What I always say about co-founders is that the most important thing is to finding someone that you really, really like because it doesn't matter you're going to be with this person almost, I would say like 18 hours a day, 20 hours a day for hopefully a lot, a lot of years and you need to be able to respect each other, admire each other and trust each other blindly. And I think that we really have that. He's the Vesco founder in the world. I'll definitely not be here without him and I think he wouldn't be here without me either. So I think it's about less about like complementing skills. I think it's more about just finding the right person to go on this crazy and extremely hard journey with.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As part in our form, Antarik was an amazing skier growing up. He was a professional skier. And both of us were very into math, so I used to do like math Olympiads and stuff in Brazil. And he used to do the French math Olympiads and things like that. I think when we really complement each other is not necessarily on our skills, but because we did study the same things, it were very similar that way. But it's really our personalities and our views on different things. I think that Tariq's very good at I think is actually the best that if he sees one problem that really needs to be solved, it goes very deep into solving that problem and just he'll figure it out. And I'm way more of like a breath kind of person. I like doing a lot of different things and trying to figure out and move them. So in terms of running a company, it ends up working very well together because I'm better at working with different people, making sure things are moving and he's way better at finding one thing that needs to be solved and figuring that out.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So to start with the belly thing, I 100% agreed. I think I used to train eight to ten hours a day on top of normal high school things like math and science. And till today, I think it really changes how I work with the team and how I see different challenges at Gaussian. I'm like talking about Tark and I. I'm extremely optimistic person. He's way more on the pessimistic side. They even call us like ying, ying here in the office of like how we deal with things. And I think a lot of my optimism really comes from ballet and being able to, you know, if you work hard, things are going to work out and that kind of mentality that is very much around in ballet. But about Target and I, yes, we are funnily enough from completely different parts of the world. He's from Lebanon. I'm from Brazil. We have very, very similar background. I do consider ballet a sport almost. So I think it's both. As you said,”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Silicon Valley, because there's this general culture of moving fast and breaking things, and you see Uber that went unregulated and was able to figure it out. And a lot of like crypto companies trying to do this. So there was always a lot of pressure of why are you trying to do this this way? Like you're going to take two years and a half to even know if people want your product. That makes no sense. And for us, it really went back to this is what we wanted to do. This is the mission. What do we believe is the right path to get there? And we tried to like not listen to too much noise. I think there's Silicon Valley. There's so much noise about everything. And like these companies doing amazing. And then next week, then things like that. So we just try to stick to first principles and do what it needed to be done for the company to succeed. And at that point in time was for us to, you know, sit down and work very hard and deal with the uncertainty and do the work that no one wanted to do.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a great question. Indeed, everyone told us we were crazy at every point in time, but I think for me the sovereign has come from a couple of different things. I think from Ballet, I guess, I've always learned about, you know, sacrificing and delayed results and, you know, in Ballet, you're like working very hard. You're almost not eating and you're doing all these things because you want to accomplish your goals. And you really see this like delayed gratification and sacrifice to achieve bigger things. And I take this to my core today. I think that if things are very easy to be done, they would already be done or they're not that important to be done. And I think that if you're willing to put on the work and you're willing to work hard and everyone else and you're willing to tackle the heart problems, you're going to be able to make more change and make more impact than other people. I think that for us, it was especially tricky to be in”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. Maybe if we were other types of majors in college, we wouldn't have needed Y combinated. But till today, we always ask ourselves, what would Michael Cybel say? He's the CEO of YC and he was our mentor in NYC. And we're still very close to YC. They help us so much. See nowadays all the partners are willing to get in a phone call with you at any point in time and things like that. When people ask me, is YC worth it? I don't think Auschwitz would be where it is without YC. Maybe if you're a second time founder and you know a lot about a lot of things you don't need it, but for us it was definitely an instrumental part of Kaushi's history and why we're here.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was really about getting the help and the setup and the support we needed that we needed for the future, for the next episodes of the company and learn as much as we could. We had a very weird Y combinator experience because while most people at YIC, they're trying to build traction, build product, iterate very quickly, get users in and show a lot of like, you know, the hockey stick graph going up and to the right at Demo Day, which is like the final presentation to investors. For us, our goal was try to start getting the regulatory process kicked out. And so for us, it was very weird. We had weird goals. It was a lot harder to try to show our progress and things like that. But the lessons we got from there were invaluable and like nonetheless, I think that we learned a lot about hiring. We learned a lot about company culture, about product iteration, user feedback, testing, all of those things that maybe”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so Y Combinators is a startup accelerator in California. A lot of amazing companies came out of there like Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, Reddit, and I think Twitch and others. And I think Paul Graham started it with a couple of other people programs, I guess, very famous persons. So maybe they'll turn on some lights for people. But yeah, so why we decided to go to YCominator? As I said, both me and Tariq, our background is computer science and math. We had no idea how to run a company, how that worked, hiring, raising, thinking about product, nothing. All we knew is like, I don't know, statistical learning theory and like information theory and something like that. So for us, the way we saw it was like, obviously a major step from just being true kids now in their masters trying to start a company to really like legitimize what we're doing. But more importantly,”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's no competition that keeps us up at night, but we have a lot of unregulated, like some crypto base, some unregulated offshore kind of companies that do try to do what we're doing, but nothing that keeps us up at night, nothing that's regulated or are doing things the same way, and if the same strategy we are.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the company and making sure that we have everyone freely bringing stuff up and trying to solve problems themselves and being transparent about issues is something that has really impacted how the company has worked so far. And from the Citadel side, we are very much a performance-based company. We want people to perform. They have goals and they need to meet the goals. We want to win. And I think especially as I said in the beginning, we welcome competition and we're happy to do that in a very competitive company and competitive people. We really take the performance and execution side of Citadel to our culture as well.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In citadel is the other side of the coach, which is a very matter of fact. There's no cult. There's no philosophy. There's no too much thinking. And it's more about you have results. You're good. If you don't perform, you're out and you're out very fast. And that's what a lot of my friends that stay there. It's like a very stressful environment from that perspective. And at Bridgewater, there's a lot more of philosophy and thinking about things from first principles. And at Citadel, there's more of a we just want to win and perform right now. I think both of them have a lot of impact on how Cauchy is. I think the transparency point at Bridgewater is something that I think is an amazing thing. And I think that that's something we take to core. I think transparency and having everyone's voices heard and concerns heard is very important. I think especially at a startup really allows us to move fast. And both me and my co-founder have an insane amount of things to do every day. We can't be on top of every single thing.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bridgewater and Citadel could not be more different culture-wise, I think Bridgewater is very much slower moving institution, at least from the engineering point that I was in. It's a way bigger, slower kind of institution and processes.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ourselves outside of solving it, and we wanted to be the one solving it, so that's why we went through and started the company and went from there.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Raise rates. Everything inflation will do this. That's how we're going to come up with this very complicated portfolio of things and volatility swaps and things like that to be able to put this position in the market. And we started being like, why is there not a real exchange where you can just directly put this opinion and directly hedge this and directly have exposure to this and why are only this very, very big players that can call their banker Goldman Sachs and do these things? Why is it not accessible to everyone? And that's when we really got the, I guess, the bug in our head and being like, okay, like now, why doesn't this exist? We started putting, I think, two hours a day looking into this. And then it was like 12 hours soon enough. And we started calling 65 lawyers in a day. And it was really, it was never for me, never about starting a company. I probably was going to go into finance and be happy there. But for me, it was, I just found this problem in Tariq and I just couldn't get.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More trading side research. And I love the finance industry. I think that it's a fascinating, I'm very competitive person. I think it's fast-paced. It's intellectually challenging. And it really is finance history in the world history is just kind of like everything is about the how economies are moving, in my opinion. So I was fascinated by that. And I was very close friends with Tariq from the very beginning of college. And he was also very fascinated by finance. And we both started noticing in all of our work experience that most trading is actually based on events. So he was a golden tax. He noticed that everyone was, it was 2016 when Brexit was happening. So people were calling his exotics desk. That's where he worked. Like, I want to get exposure to Brexit. I want to hedge Brexit. How do I do that? Me, for example, when I was at Bridgewater, most of the trades that we were building systems for were around like, we think European Central Bank will.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I should add something that's even more random before. So I'm from Brazil, but I used to be a professional ballerina before going to college. So that's very completely different. But from MIT to starting the company, studying computer science and math, I think from the beginning, I thought I wanted to be more of an engineer and building things my dad is an electrical engineering. My mom is a math teacher. I thought that's what I wanted to do. But very early, I realized I liked the math side a lot more than I liked the engineering side. And at MIT, I talked to a bunch of my professors and they were like, well, if you like math, you like statistics, you should try finance. Go work there. So I worked at Bridgewater versus more on the engineering side that I went to Five Rings Capital, which is a small prop shop in New York, mainly doing quant research. And then I went to Citadel Securities to do trading. So I tried, I guess, finance the finance industry from a lot of different angles, from the more engineering side.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we have, we actually, when we started the company, we thought most of it would be concentrated in specific categories. So we were like, what category is going to be? Is it going to be economics, financials? And what we learned very quickly, it's actually what's closest to in the news and closest top of mind. So whatever is like front page at Wall Street Journal was all over CNBC. That's usually what's going to concentrate the most volume. So I guess some examples of this, the Omicron wave at the end of the year, at the end of last year. Interestingly enough about the data point again, our markets were predicting the Omicron wave before Thanksgiving. They were already predicting we were going to hit another wave that would be a lot bigger than all the other ones. But the Omicron wave, all of January, the most important markets and the ones with the most volume were the COVID-related ones. So it's really about what's stopped of mind, what people think they have better opinion or edge on.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We'll have like thousands and thousands of employees, and we need to become great managers, great leaders, and we have a lot of investors. I think Ali Partovi from NEO, he is probably the closest investor I have to me, and he's been a mentor from the very start of the company, strongest and biggest personal mentors. He's also an investor in the company. I met him through that, but he is just fantastic. So Ali Bartovi is probably one of my biggest mentors.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I think in the company, I like to divide it, I guess, into the investor side of things or the co-worker, like the co-workers, co-founders, I guess my co-founder, but also other founders, for example, in the YC batch that we were in. So in the founder side, we are very close to a lot of other founders around our stage. And I think it's less about mentorship, obviously, but it's a lot about sharing experiences and where you're going through. And you're going to realize that a lot of things that you're going through, they just went through last month and that's how they dealt with it. That's the mistakes they made and that's how they solved it and the problems you have, they might be having soon. So you really try to stay close to the community and learn and just like just learn from them as much as we can. Also to Tariq and I around, you know, like being better co-founders and managers if the company works out, which hopefully will to be a huge, hopefully under billion dollar company.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were very, very extremely excited to have him on board, and we're still very close to him. And other people we brought into the cap table were Henry Kravis, which I'm sure needs no introduction, and Ron Conway on the Silicon Valley side that's also invested in almost every single successful startup in Silicon Valley. So we really, at the Series A, try to bring all the brains that we could to help us in this very hard mission we're going through.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Type of like operator mind and also his way of thinking about this like very new type of companies, very new type of product and really category defining companies and products. So we decided to have Alfred on board and then after that we wanted to bring people that would give us the most knowledge we could about finance and about Silicon Valley and how to build the best of both for all in terms of a company, a company that is Silicon Valley based on like in nature very fast, but also very stable, secure and with customer protection at its core. So we went to find this angel swing best and I think Schwab was obviously one of our like top people that we wanted to have in the Cap Table. I'm sure that everyone can imagine why. And he was very excited about it. He told us he was very similar to and he was starting his company and how he saw the potential for Kaushi.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, so right after we got the regulatory sign offer when we got the license, I guess to be a DCM, which is a designated contract market, we went to raise R-Series A. And Sequoia went to lead Reries A and we brought Alfred Lynn into the board. And interestingly enough, Alfred actually, his PhD was around statistics and he was actually around prediction markets and exactly what we do. So he was like extremely excited from the start. He was like are one of the biggest challenges he gave us even before we raised around was Alfred Odas, we needed to figure out regulation and we were like, yes, we know that that is what we're working on. And when we actually got the regulatory sign off, we raised around from them. And then after getting Sequoia, I mean, Alfred is an amazing operator, right? Like he's been amazing at investing in companies that were really categoring, like Airbnb, DoorDash. So we really wanted.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're seeing a lot of markets with like hundreds of thousands of dollars of liquidity. And that's really a lot of progress from where we were a couple months ago, a couple months ago. I think we were at the tens of thousands and now we're like on the hundreds of thousands. Our goal is obviously for these to be extremely liquid as hopefully as liquid as other derivatives or stocks. And we really see one of our biggest challenges as a new exchange is beauty and liquidity. So that's really our strategy is like starting with retail. After retail, we're going to have hopefully broker integration so that people can go through their shrub account or their interactive broker accounts and trade on Caosi and being able to bring liquidity providers at around that same point in time so that you really match hopefully an increase in demand with an increase in supply there and go from there. In the next year or so, we really want to at least be on the millions of tens of millions of liquidity and more longer term we want it to be as liquidous.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just see so quickly the other market participants buying against that and bringing it back to fair value because there is a fair value in these markets, you really have a lot of very clear opportunity to bring it back to fair value because in the end, events have an end date where if you're right, you make money. So there is this fair value, there is this like settlement inside. It's not like stocks that if they're up forever, like maybe they will be, you don't know, you can predict. And I think that's what's actually very cool about these markets is that you do have opportunity to combat like this type of like attempted manipulation on the market itself. The markets themselves ensure you're always around fair value, always around forecast because otherwise there's just free money to be made. And traders are amazing in finding free money to be made. And there's a lot of research that confirms that.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, what I think is interesting about the, I guess, your first point about the difference between the pricing here and pricing in stocks is that events have a true fair value. There is an actual probability that is true to an event to whether it would be a yes or no versus stocks. There's no like real, what is this company worth? Like how much is Tesla worth or GameStop? And there's no real bounds. With events, there's a real probability. So if people start shooting a market up to 80, like let's say it's at 70, it goes to 80, it goes to 90 very fast, there is a lot of incentive for people on the other side to be like, wow, there is an insane amount of money to be made because I know, based on my research that the fair value is 60 cents, so you can buy the other side. And actually, there's a lot of research around prediction markets around elections, actually, that people try to manipulate or like buy a certain candidate to see the price go up.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Will rain all the time so that if my week is ruined, I will at least have some money from my hedge and go from there. So for us, it's keep growing the number and the quality and the markets that we're offering, but also just growing it with the users, getting more users, making sure we're getting the use case across and things like that and education and all of that.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We want to keep adding markets that are in the news that are relevant to people at that time. I don't know what's going to be happening the next few years. We try to have some longer-term markets like inflation, like loan lending, interest rates that are a bit more longer term. But for us, it's really about bringing markets that people are interested in. They have risk associated to. They have a lot of opinions on and opinions around. And we just want to keep doing that and growing the platform and growing the use case. getting event contracts to be more mainstream. I think our goal five years from now is that if you're like turning on your CMBC or your Boomber TV instead of saying we believe the feds are going to do this, they're like, well, the markets think this are going to happen and people on the streets when they are, oh, wow, I'm going to travel to Miami this next week for a vacation, I'm going to ensure the weather and I'm going to buy that it won't rain all the time and rain.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Them and help go from there. And obviously, it's a cultural mark, right? Everyone watches the Oscars this year with the slap and things like that. So also interesting for that point.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not therefore other industries, why is it not there for science? Why is it not there for entertainment? And go from there for us, it's really about understanding these risks. And for example, for the Grammys, it was actually very interesting conversation we had internally because for the Grammys, it was really about for us the influencers, right? There's a lot of influencers on TikTok, on Instagram Reels and stuff like that, that they are pretty much living off music and trends and things are going on and they have absolutely no way to hedge or do anything related to that. And the discussion internally was, well, but are they going to come hedge? And then one of the people internally that were very, very fascinated about this. They went around, found 10 influencers that they were like, oh my God, yes, because I'm preparing all of these videos about Grammy's content and all of these things that I'm putting weeks and weeks into this. So for us, it's really about finding these niche opportunities on hedging and price-based and bringing markets.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, for us, we really don't see it as a category based thing. We see it as what are the biggest events, where are the biggest news, what are the people have the most risk associated to. And interestingly enough, well, entertainment is one of the biggest industries in the world and the movie industry is massive, in the music industry also had Grammys markets, is also massive. And there's a lot of people with a lot of risks associated to this. There's obviously the studios that are running for things. There's like Netflix and I don't know, Apple TV employees that are working on movies and maybe their job is on the line because of this is generally just a massive industry that right now, if you work on it or if you're a company on it or if you're even selling merchandise associated to a movie or like Spider-Man, you have no way to hedge it. And for us, it's really about, okay, well, the farmers and the agricultural industry has a lot of ways to do this.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To have any manipulation incentive or anything like that, it is one of the hardest things about working on prediction markets. I think that a lot of the prediction markets that try to launch and exist before, they had trouble with this. But for us, we really take it to core. Like, for example, we use a lot of government-based data sources. We're getting to all the agreements with the private ones to make sure they're very universal, very respected, and things like that. But it's a challenge. And I think as we grow things, we hopefully get easier. But people can rest assured, like it's very clear how we're going to settle the markets. The government, the CFT review, all the markets and review that they are hard to manipulate or universal enough and things like that.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and there is a lot of, that was one of the biggest parts of the compliance process. The markets go through before they go live. A lot of our markets, for example, are based on government data, like inflation. It's based on CPI interest rates, obviously based on the feds. We touched on a great point, like Chinese, I think we have the Chinese COVID markets. I think for those, the Chinese expectation of the expectation of Chinese COVID cases or things like, for example, look at supply chain, right? Like how crazy I guess because Shanghai was in a lockdown. So it is actually the biggest, one of the biggest parts of our market creation framework and our compliance process there to ensure that every market has an Oracle or what we call a source agency that is universal, that is very reliable. And if needed, we have to be in data partnerships with them to make sure that people that work on the data cannot trade on the markets.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Making crazy comments and being superseded and having biased information around this, people just have unbiased good data that they can look at and prepare for the future and make their opinions and go from there. I really see this as long term after we become hopefully the New York Stock Exchange for events. Long term, that's how we change the world.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the market ends up being the best forecast for what's going to happen. I really see in the future people instead of going to, I don't know, the weather channel to see if it's going to have hurricane in Florida, they'll come to Cauchy to see what the market unbiased with like real skin in the game, collection of lots of people are thinking about it the same way with inflation that, I mean, a lot of the economists got completely wrong and didn't think inflation would get to where it is. And our markets actually, they got it right. Six out of the past seven months, our markets predicted inflation right. So if you are at Calci, you would not be surprised by inflation, even though it seems like the Fed and Janet Dellen and all of these are very surprised by inflation if they checked Causi, they wouldn't be. So I see as we grow, really this data component is like what really can have impact on every single American because it's just better data for everyone. I think one of my goals with Cauchy is to make, I mean, America and”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. So I am a huge market and data geek. As I told you, computer science and math, and that's one of the reasons I like finance the most when I started going into the industry. I really see Kaushi's future as also being this data and forecasting hub where people can come and have access to unbiased forecasting data. I think one of the powers of Cauchy is that he forces people to put their money where their mouth is. I think there's a lot of people out there that just make money on being radical and inflammatory and just saying things like you saw with inflation. Like people saying it's going to be crazy hyperinflation. People saying it won't be anything. And they have no skin in the game. And because of that, you really get the market, the cowshare forecasts to be people, they're putting money behind their beliefs. They just put more effort. They just do more research. And they're penalized if they're not correct.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, we don't offer margin trading at the moment. I think our decision is that it is a new asset class, and I think it's a lot safer for people to start for event contracts to grow and for people to start trading, start understanding how the asset class works and things like that with no margin without margin in the environment and then go from there. I think we really see this as a way to start. But yes, it is rooted on customer protection. It's rooted on reviewing for the long term, so we want to do things the right way.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We can't have our users be confused. We can have our users doing things that they don't understand or just bad behavior showing up in the platform. So it's not a regulatory thing. It's a really internal thing to the company that we're building for the long term and to build for the long term. We can't build a UI that's gamified or not take this very seriously and event contracts very seriously, which is what we do and our mission and what we want to keep doing.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a great question. The way we think about it is the gamification is kind of what you said. It's really about the UI and not about the asset class itself. If you think about trading stocks, right? Robinhood is, people think it's very gamified, but you're buying stocks that are the same way you can go to your Schwab account and buy stocks. So it's not about the asset class. It's really about the UI and the UX and the things around it. We really take a lot of responsibility in making event contracts reach its full potential and making sure they become mainstream and they're very safe and they grow in a sustainable and a good way. That's why we took the very long and hard regulatory path. And for us it's really about making sure the customers are safe. We're really building Kaushi for the next like 100 years. Exchanges like CME have been around for 200 years. We want to build Cauchy for the next 100 and the next 200. And for that, customer protection is very important.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bringing these things to everyone. If there's a big company von Heiserbosch, who's able to go and hedge the price of barley going too high, you should be able to hedge your interest rates going up because you're going to be, you have risks associated to this. So our goal really is democratize access to hedging and price-based and have small businesses, people, everyday people just being able to make money on these things hedge and go from there.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Associated with interest rates going up. So while they go, they come to Caoshi, they buy a contract saying that interest rates will go up and they are protected in case they do go up by the contract on Kaoshi. The other side of this is really the price basing value, which is pretty much the forecasting value of these markets. Or let's say you're planning on buying a home and you don't know how the mortgage rates are going to evolve in the next year. You can come to Kaushi and get that information because the market price for where the mortgage rate will be is the best fork for what the mortgage rate will be in the next year, in the next month for the different time frames that we offer contracts. So the second side is really this price basing that every person can come and have access to the best forecast in the world for free. And our goal is hedging and price basing are exactly what Wall Street does. That's what big companies do with their grain futures or things like that. And what really Calci is about is...”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So, like any derivatives market, our goal is to allow people to hedge or allow price basing in a certain market. So hedging means, let's say, with the mortgage example, with the mortgage example, you're going to buy a house, you are afraid of the mortgage rate being above, let's say, X percent or 5% or something like that, let's say. What you do is you can come to Causi and buy that it will be above that number. So that if it is above that number, you are losing money in your real life and in your mortgage and in your financial planning, but you're making money on the contract on Kaushi, which allows you to hedge that risk that you have in your day-to-day life. And we really see this with all of our contracts. So we see a lot of people trying to do this for interest rates. They think that if interest rates go up, they have like student loans tied to the 10-year treasury note, or they have, they're trying to refinance a home, and they have a lot of risk.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it goes up until the close date or the expiration that stated on the market. So for example, the moon landing market, right? Will we land on the moon by 2025? This market's open up until we land on the moon. Or the earliest of us landing on the moon or the end of 2025. And at that point, the markets closed and we waited for settlement. And that's when who is right or who's wrong is determined. Before that, you can trade between the same way you trade with stock. So you can, for example, buy AS for 40 cents, sell it for 60, buy it again at 62, and then sell it for 80. There's really just the normal trading mechanics like any other asset class out there.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Trying to buy the yes for 92 cents. So if you agree that you're willing to buy the yes for the yes for 95 cents, you are going to have a trade with the person that tried to buy the 5 cents. It's a central limit order book like any other exchange. So basically people say the prices they would like to buy at. And whenever the price is sum to one, a trade executes. So the prices you see on the website are the ones that haven't executed because people are not willing to take the other side. at the moment, but they're resting there waiting for someone to want to take it.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, of course. So I guess I'll start by the prices. So the prices go from zero to one and the mechanics is that if you were buying one side, let's say yes at 60 cents, it means there's someone buying the no at 40 cents. So whenever the number sum to $1, the trade is executed because it means that you guys agree on a price and it's going to match. However, the prices that you see on the website, they are the prices that you can buy at the moment. So they weren't executed yet. So basically you can think about it as people saying I would like to buy at this price, but no one is really going there and matching it. So let's say a 958 market. It means you can buy a yes. If the yes price on the website says 95 cents, it means you can buy a yes right now for 95 cents, which means there's someone trying to buy the no for 5 cents. On the other side, there's a no that you can buy for eight cents, which means there's someone”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Takes around two years for us, it's just that we've gotten amazing at this operation for the past few years. And nowadays we're able to do it very fast. But in general, this entire compliance procedure for most exchanges takes around for most exchanges, product iteration like this takes around one to two years. If you look around like Bitcoin futures, when they started and things like that, for us, because we just worked so hard on the operations and we really This is our product, as you said, like our product is not the interface, it's not the API, it's not the app. Our product are the markets. And we take this to core, really bring like product development procedures into market and we were able to work on this really operations for the past few years and nowadays we were able to get it to very fast, but other exchanges take a lot longer.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The way it starts is, I guess, the simplest way for product development to start, which is user requests and user feedback of we want to trade on this market. We think this market will be big or a lot of just like internal research, but 90% of our markets come from users. And then we do sit down at a table and debate whether our markets team are US debate champions. They were like Yale debate clubs like champions in the United States or something. exactly sitting down and debating whether we think the contracts can indeed be that good and can be compliant and all those things and if it passes the initial discussion then it goes through like a compliance process on making sure the markets are not easy to manipulate making sure there is economic purpose and hedging utility making sure the rules are clear and we have a good Oracle and if we need data partnerships and licenses are in place and all of those things that for other exchange”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The market, how fast we are at creating these markets. I think usually exchanges take around two years to create a new contract for us. It takes around the day to create a new contract and really have the setup. Like we are direct to consumer. You don't need a broker to access us and all of these things that make, I think, our value drop a lot stronger. And again, they also need to work with the CFTC to get the contracts through. Every contract, you need to work with the CFTC to get it through. But in general, the way that we think about competitors is that we want competitors to come in to really help grow the space. We say that for Cauchy to be as big as it can be and as successful as it can be, we need event contracts to be successful first and then we have to win in the space. But event contracts need to win first. So if we have more and more people coming in and helping push the space forward, that's actually very good for making event contracts mainstream and reaching our goal. And then we're very, very excited to complete with people.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, so we can think about competition in two different ways. I think you can think about startups in a way or like companies trying to get regulated as an exchange and going from there and then the bigger players. I think for startups, it's not that CFTC has a list of rules and you need to meet all the rules and you're automatically approved. The CFTC is a principles-based regulator and you're going to need to work with them and make sure you prove to them that you can comply with all the regulations, all the core principles, which is what they call the principles and the basis they have for regulation. And it's a very time consuming, very hard process for every exchange. There's why there's only, I think, 16 exchanges like this in the US. On the bigger company scale, I think it is obviously they don't CME, like the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, if they want to, the biggest derivatives exchange in the US, if they want to come into the space, they don't need to re-get regulated. But I think what really sets us apart there is like how much we know.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Surveillance means looking at the activity in the exchange and trying to see if there's anything suspicious or some bad activity happening. So in the world of securities, for example, you could think about surveillance catching insider trading and things like that. In the world of the CFTC, you can think about things like, I don't know, wash trading or collusion and things like that. And what we need to do is to ensure our markets are safe and integral and then surveillance is a big part of this because we need to look at all the data and make sure that no bad things are happening. And if there's some indication they're happening, talk to them, kick out compliance procedures and things like that. But really, the goal of surveillance is to make sure everyone's trading on safe markets.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And things like that. So when we got regulated, we got ready to launch everything ready because the CFTC checks every single thing that you're doing.”
2022-06-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP458: Why Billionaire Charles Schwab Invested in Kalshi w/ Luana Lopes Lara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT