YouSaid · the spoken record

Tarek Mansour

lines on the record: 66
first: 2025-10-01
most recent: 2025-10-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“This is different, right? Like, this is much more dynamic. It comes and goes. Like oftentimes the trend could be sort of like there for two to three weeks, sometimes a week, sometimes it's a day, and you have to be much faster. And my mental model for what this looks like is sort of like there's an idea that can be from a user, from the news, from a trend, from some tweet. Then there's a listing of the market. And then there's kind of like from a listing to kind of making it reasonably liquid and active. So we've gone through like all kind of types of regulatory winters. But the first time we listed a market, it took us 18 months. That was just for listing. And because there's a lot, like Operations Attack, these are tickers, right? Like you list them like a stock or a WTI crude oil.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or like GPU futures. I mean, like, the point here is like. You have something where the lifetime is infinite. Your list of future and the derivative and it's sort of there forever and then you build the liquidity over time. You can take your time. It takes like usually these things take time. They take years to kind of build up, to market them and build liquidity.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, well, the onion futures rule is truly absurd. Yeah, yeah. It's like that's one of those. But I guess now it's maybe kind of funny. Maybe we should just keep it. But”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great question because that's a hard problem, right? Because in traditional markets, right, the life cycle is like, you know, we have an idea, like a grain futures or onion futures or GPU.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the universe of financial markets. You cannot do it outside. You have to expand it. And if you expand it, then I think we have a real winner. And I think the results show, like, you know, yes, Balli has a lot of volume, but there's not real revenue yet. There's a lot of wash. How do you account for all this stuff? And even if you account for all of that, today we're something like 3x bigger within a year or so.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talking about polymarket. So it's not like we couldn't go on chain, right? It's like this is not a very hard thing to build, right? And actually, it's funny, like the first two weeks of CASH, we tried to do something on chain and realized like, well, again, it was a good way to sort of be maybe like somewhat smart about regulation, but not really because Augur was on chain also. And that was also sort of shut down and it was a bunch of issues. For us, we stood very firmly that for this to go mainstream why you should avoid a VPN, but also, how do you have this be legitimize the financial markets, attract the type of institutions that would trade? You have a bunch of institutional partners and now the brokers and actually truly take this. It was just no way to do it outside of the like.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't necessarily think that on chain, off chain is sort of necessary kind of an unregulated, regulated. On chain doesn't mean illegal, right? Sure. But I think that like”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it would have just been slower and harder, but no, not died. I mean, we didn't die under the harshest environment of all, I think. Well, the first three years and a half was like, well, this was just not allowed, right? And we kept sort of making progress all the way up until legalizing and launching. But then, yeah, the reality is the prior government, I think, was as hostile as it gets. It was just not, I mean, they just didn't want it to exist.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that was going to hold two year long process that ended with us suing the government, our own regulator. And then I think that lawsuit, I view it as sort of probably what the turning point is for these markets. When we won that institution, this is when everything changed, I think.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The whole thing with the prior administration around the election market, which we were completely uncompromising on, we had to do that.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But for us, when we got really obsessed by doing this and we realized actually the only way for this to go big is we got to legalize it. There was no other way. And no matter how big the company would get, no matter how much culture there was going to be around the company, it didn't really matter because the government could shut it down and they will after a certain level of scale. And so this was sort of like we spent three years and a half when we started after starting Calci, all we did was basically. Regulatory work. It was like, how do we legalize? Fight. Exactly. The fight was actually more like five years and a half. Like with three years and a half to get to legalize prediction markets and there was sort of”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, John Delaney was a sort of founder of intrade, and he was just kind of visionary. I mean, like Don in many ways, I mean, he really believed in the, you know, he was on CNBC back in 2000, sort of like talking about the forecast for the election and stuff. But he sort of ran offshore from Dublin, and it was kind of like a VPN type setup. And then the company got shut down in 2012. The government. And two weeks later, John Laney died. And he died climbing Mount Everest. And there's a kind of a whole controversy of what happened. I mean, was there some sort of causation there?”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The elephant in the room was regulatory. There's a very simple kind of like first order factor here. Well, it was illegal. That's a pretty good reason for something not to generally kind of go mainstream and exist. And the legality has been sort of the thing that has weighed on. All prior prediction markets. I don't know if you've ever encountered in trade”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But my view on this, and that's why we started the company, is the fundamentals are there. This should be a very large market. And we could talk a little bit about the history. But when we first started the company, this idea of sort of like a financial market that prices questions about the future, we were very drawn to it because, you know, one, if you could build such a financial market, it could be the largest of them all because the largest number of people will care. And number two, it could be the most important because yes, pricing, the share of Tesla is important, but pricing whether Brexit is going to happen or Trump's going to win an election or what's sort of the next natural disaster going to be. I think that's at least as important, if not more. At least from my perspective, when I looked at the history and you were chatting a little bit about the history, like,”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think there's path dependence to these things, right? Like, it's not sort of like, I'm a strong believer that sort of like, you know, in history, you had to have a few agents that sort of like push and push the boundary of certain things. And somebody's got to do it type thing.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I try to avoid watching or reading anything about us without kind of getting the third party reaction before. So we didn't know because we saw the thing, like the announcement a few days ago they're doing episode prediction markets, and we started kind of imagining all the types of things that they were going to do. It was crazy. I mean, the highlight, I think, is like they copied the app Exactly. They even had the referral bonus. They even had some of the bugs we have in the habit. It was unbelievable. But, you know, it was pretty cool. I mean, there's a few bars that I disagree with, but for the rest, I mean, we enjoyed it. I watched it this morning.”
2025-10-01 · Odd Lots · Tarek Mansour on Kalshi's Plan to Create Markets in Everything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source