At Kalshi, most employees report directly to both founders of the largest prediction market in the US in what CEO Tarek Mansour described as a deliberately “unusual” management structure.
Speaking on a recent episode of Sequoia Capital’s “Long Strange Trip,” Mansour said he and fellow cofounder Luana Lopes Lara have roughly 150 direct reports with little traditional hierarchy in between.
“There’s some functions that like we sort of let them do like what they do,” Mansour said, “but pretty much most of the company reports to between the two of us.”
Mansour and Lara founded Kalshi in 2018 after they met as students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The CEO acknowledged that the management style is “pretty unusual,” but said the tradeoff is a company that can adapt quickly, even if it’s “kind of chaotic.”
“I think you could build an organization that’s somewhat okay with that, because what you get out of chaos is like continuous, constant adaptability,” Mansour said. “It’s very easy for a company to adapt, very easy.”
His goal, Mansour said, is to keep the company flexible enough to “constantly reorient and reassemble around the biggest challenges or biggest opportunities.”
“You want to be able to do that with no friction — that’s inherently chaotic,” he said, adding, “your structure needs to be as adaptable as possible.”
During the podcast, Mansour told host and Sequoia Capital partner Brian Halligan that he doesn’t follow any leadership playbook and described his approach as “making it up as I go.”
Mansour called he and his cofounder, Lara, “probably very sort of like entrepreneurially illiterate.”
“We haven’t read all the books, we haven’t watched all the podcasts,” he said.
Mansour said he concentrates on Kalshi’s big-picture strategy, while Lara focuses on the day-to-day operations of the company.
“I actually think we kind of disagree by design,” Mansour said. “Like we have this thing, this dynamic over time, it’s become a thing where like we essentially will always take the opposite side of the argument.”
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