Kalshi Co-Founder & COO and 2026 CNBC Changemaker Luana Lopes Lara
In this week’s episode of the CNBC Changemakers and Power Players podcast, CNBC Senior Media and Tech Reporter Julia Boorstin spoke with Luana Lopes Lara, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Kalshi and a 2026 CNBC Changemaker.
Luana Lopes Lara talks about how her path — from growing up in Brazil and training in ballet to studying at MIT and working on Wall Street — shaped her discipline and her comfort with high-stakes bets. She opens up about the years she spent pushing through regulatory roadblocks to legalize Kalshi in the U.S., and how she and her co-founder set out to build something fundamentally different: a platform where people trade on real-world outcomes, not stocks. She also explains why she believes prediction markets will be bigger than the stock market.
Disclosure: CNBC and Kalshi have a commercial relationship that includes a minority investment.
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LUANA LOPES LARA ON ORIGIN OF KALSHI
JULIA BOORSTIN: What is the origin of Kalshi? What was the original idea?
LUANA LOPES LARA: It really started when me and my co-founder, we were working on Wall Street and what we learned at the time is that most trading happens when you have some view about the future, and then you try to put it in the markets. But there isn’t a very good way to do it. So an example, for example, is when Brexit was happening in 2016, a lot of people were trying to get exposure to it, but there wasn’t a good way. You’re trying to build a portfolio of maybe shorting the pound, go long on some European stocks but there wasn’t a direct way to just get exposure about what was going to happen. And we saw that behavior happen a lot a lot of times so we saw it again when the Trump 2016 election that there wasn’t a way to really get exposure to it so people were trying to short the S&P and try to find a play in the markets. But what we wanted to do from that moment on was we want to create an exchange where people can trade directly on what’s going to happen in the future and just hold exposure, just hold a share of what’s going to happen in the future. And of course, the big question at the time, the big problem was how do we make this in a legal way because it was illegal in the US. So we went for a four-year regulatory journey to convince the regulators that these markets are good, that they should be regulated and legal in the US for us to be able to launch and go from there. And yeah, in the past two years since we started listing the election markets, we started growing so much and it’s been a blessing.
LUANA LOPES LARA ON CHALLENGES SHE FACED
JULIA BOORSTIN: Do you think you were aware of the challenges you were going to face in bringing this to the mainstream?
LUANA LOPES LARA: I think partially. One of the reasons I think Kalshi ended up working out was because of how naive we were and how stubborn we were. We were very naive to think that – from MIT, we solve hard math problems, we’re going to figure out this regulatory government problem. And I think that being very naive, we talked to lot of people at the time and they were like, that’s impossible. The odds are lower than 1%. You’re never going to make that happen. And I think it’s being naive and like, but maybe they just didn’t try that hard or maybe they didn’t understand this. I think being naive really helped us. The other side of it is being very stubborn. We really just don’t take no for an answer in a lot of ways. So when we got feedback from the regulator of like, these markets might be easy to manipulate or there’s an issue with this part of the plan, we would just, okay, when we disagreed with them, we would just go back and like do a lot of data analysis, legal research, all of those things to prove that we were right. And so it was a mix of those two things.
LUANA LOPES LARA ON HOW DANCING INFLUENCED HER LIFE
JULIA BOORSTIN: And I’m curious how your journey as a dancer influenced how you got to where you are now.
LUANA LOPES LARA: It influenced so much and I think it’s one of the reasons that Kalshi is where it is now. I think it’s, when I think about it, I think there’s two sides to it. I think one is the discipline, right? It’s about every day going there, doing your job, even if you got like terrible news from the regulator the day before that, you know, it’s going to be another six months or they need this. It’s about going, it doesn’t matter. You’re there at 9am or like 8am and you’re working the whole day and you have a plan and you have like, this is the next milestone, this is what we need to do. And kind of dealing with adversity and being able to keep your discipline which is very much like coming from ballet. Like in ballet if you’re, even if you’re injured, it doesn’t really matter you need to go and you need to train otherwise you’re gonna lose your spot. And the other side of it is really the delayed gratification right? Like ballet is about practicing for a year to have one hour on stage and it’s about dealing with that I really want to get to that one hour so I’ll do what I need to do and I want that one hour to be the absolute best. And it also helps a lot like almost psychologically dealing with the fact that there were so many delays with what we do and dealing with moments that you know the company’s going through a lot of issues like we have for example a big lawsuit against the government to the selection markets and that was a very hard moment for us on like waiting and not knowing what’s going to happen and being out of control, not having control over the situation and having that kind of like background of understanding delayed gratification and being okay with that was very good at leading kind of helping lead the company in a direction where everyone was motivated and coming to work and excited. So ballet definitely has helped a lot in being an integral part of Kalshi.
LUANA LOPES LARA ON THE NEXT BIG SWING FOR PREDICTION MARKETS
JULIA BOORSTIN: What is your next big swing? Where do you think prediction markets go next?
LUANA LOPES LARA: No, in a lot of, we really think that prediction markets will be bigger than the stock market. And I think the reason for that is that what prediction markets are is markets on anything that happens in the future, right? And anything that happens in the future means that anyone in the world will have some opinion about a large number of markets. If you’re very into politics, if you’re very into music, if you’re very into, you know, cars or makeup, if you’re very into anything really, you can find a lot of prediction markets that help you gain a better understanding of the future and help you also get exposure to the future. So when you sit at a dinner table, at least I’m not discussing, you know, what are Costco’s financials or, you know, Facebook earnings or something like that. I would be discussing what’s going to happen with inflation? What’s going to happen with politics? What’s going to happen with, you know, the Olympics? And and all of that and and what prediction markets are is markets on real-world events. For us, it’s about expanding the number of markets, expanding who is accessing it and also improving the user interface so we can attract a different audiences and yeah, and going and just growing growing more and more and on the institutional side, growing more on the kind of business side and all of that.
