Luana Lopes Lara
Episodes
Notes
Masters of Scale · Kalshi vs. Everyone: Co-Founder Luana Lopes Lara on the lawsuits…
-
Why Do Most Kalshi Visitors Look Without Trading?
A report said seventy percent of visitors to Kalshi look at the data and do not put money behind a prediction. Luana Lopes Lara thinks the share is higher, maybe seventy eight percent. People do not open a sports book just to read odds, because the price is the book's margin. They come to Kalshi for market-driven information that updates in real time, and some treat Kalshi as a substitute for Twitter or the New York Times.
Prediction markets incentivize truth. If you are right, you make money. Twitter incentivizes clickbait, and the most extreme post collects the likes. On Kalshi, an absurd claim loses money.
-
Why Did Kalshi Refund the Iran Leader Bets?
Kalshi listed a contract on whether Iran's supreme leader would die or be removed from power, then had to backpedal and reimburse more than two million dollars to users. Kalshi is federally regulated and does not allow markets on war, terrorism, or assassination. The Maduro contract was listed for the same reason: a person can leave power in more than one way, and the departure had a clear economic impact, including the price of oil.
Kalshi let the market operate, and voids every trade if the outcome is an assassination or terrorism so nobody can profit from it. Luana Lopes Lara said Kalshi did not do a good enough job in the product explaining how voiding would work, and users got confused
-
Why Did DraftKings Report No Overlap With Prediction Markets?
DraftKings and FanDuel look at Kalshi as competition even when the engine underneath works differently. The house always wins is not how an exchange works. On a DraftKings earnings call, the CEO said the company is seeing no cannibalization between sports betting and prediction markets, because users understand them as different products and engage with them in different ways. Both can coexist while users pick what they want.
A bar in New York used Kalshi as a hedge during a Knicks championship run so it could offer free drinks if the Knicks won. The hedge is a use a sports book does not sell in the same way.
-
Why Is New York Suing Kalshi for 36 Billion Dollars?
A federal appeals court had just said Ohio and Tennessee can regulate Kalshi through their gambling laws. On Masters of Scale, Luana Lopes Lara was asked whether the state cases are an existential threat.
New York alone is suing Kalshi for thirty six billion dollars, and New York is the state where Kalshi is headquartered. The figure is Masters of Scale's number for the New York case, stated on the episode before the exchange-versus-sports-book answer.
-
How Did Kalshi Jump From Five to 22 Billion?
Kalshi looks sudden, and Luana Lopes Lara ties the growth to eight years of work. Being legal mattered from the start, so four years passed before the product could launch and before there was a user to learn from. The time went into working with the federal government to bring prediction markets to the US in a regulated way. Growth followed the lawsuit against the CFTC, once more markets were allowed and the product was ready.
The valuation sat on top of that wait. Kalshi launched in 2021. A year before the conversation the company was valued at five billion dollars. Early in the year of the interview the figure was 22 billion.
-
Why Does Kalshi Run an Exchange Instead of a Sports Book?
Kalshi grows a lot because an exchange provides a fairer more accessible and more transparent way to trade than a sports book. Users on Kalshi trade against each other while Kalshi collects a transaction fee. Sports books make money equal to customer losses so their incentives differ completely from Kalshi.
Kalshi needs national liquidity for the market to work well. Trading only in one state like the New York Stock Exchange limited to New York would create significantly worse prices and low liquidity. Kalshi does not trade against users or make money when people lose so the company wants winners to increase price competition. Sports books cap winners and hold a monopoly on pricing so they