Prediction market Kalshi has exploded in recent years, reaching a $22 billion valuation. For the company’s 30-year-old CEO, Tarek Mansour, getting there hasn’t meant following the wisdom of business school professors or management gurus—it’s been ignoring advice altogether.
“The worst advice that most people get is that you should go and seek out a bunch of advice. There’s really no recipe to any of this stuff,” Mansour told The New York Times in a recent interview. “People are over-reliant on advice, and people love giving advice because it makes them feel smart and powerful. It’s usually mostly trash.”
Mansour’s skepticism of conventional founder wisdom is backed by his own track record: He and cofounder Luana Lopes Lara have built Kalshi into a platform with four million active users and became self-made billionaires, with estimated net worths of about $2.6 billion each.
And when it comes to his own business approach, Mansour said he’s largely learned by doing—opting to even ignore management books or podcasts.
“I have a lot of, I’m gonna make it up as I go,” he said on a Sequoia Capitol podcast last month.
