New York–based Kalshi lets investors place unusual bets on future events, such as how many Americans will ultimately receive a Covid-19 vaccine. While he was at Goldman Sachs, Tarek Mansour’s clients wanted to hedge their investments during Brexit but had no direct way to do it. So in 2018, he started working on Kalshi with fellow MIT alum Luana Lopes Lara. The hardest part: regulatory approval. “In one day we both called 65 lawyers,” Mansour says. “All of whom said, ‘People have been trying to do this since the ’80s, and it’s not happening.’ ” But they persevered— and in November 2020, Kalshi became the first federally regulated event-based trading exchange in U.S. history. Billionaires Charles Schwab and Henry Kravis have invested alongside blue-chip VC shop Sequoia; Kalshi has raised $36 million and processed $10 million in trades since launch- ing in July 2021.
We published the first edition of the Forbes 30 Under 30 a decade ago, with one clear goal: to identify the new guard, the young innovators, trailblazers and disruptors remaking our world. That first list featured names like Kevin Systrom, whose company Instagram had only seven employees; Lena Dunham, who had yet to debut on HBO’s Girls; Daniel Ek, who had just launched Spotify in the U.S.; journalist Ronan Farrow, years before he exposed Harvey Weinstein in the New Yorker; and actor Donald Glover, then mostly known as a cast member in the cult comedy Community.
Much of 2022 was being freshly created by this group back in 2012. Ten years from today, it’s a good bet we’ll all be living in a new world being imagined today by the 600 entrepreneurs, innovators and entertainers that make up our 10th Anniversary class.
Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/30-under-30/2022/
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How Entrepreneurs Created America’s First Federally Regulated Event-Based Trading Exchange | Forbes