Tarek Mansour is the co-founder and CEO of Kalshi.

Tarek was born in California and grew up in Lebanon. He made his way back to the States to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Before starting Kalshi, Tarek worked as a quantitative trader at Goldman Sachs as a structured credit and equities analyst and at Citadel as a global macro trader. During his time at these firms, he realized a common thread: a lot of trading stemmed from an opinion on a future event.

For example, a lot of activity at Goldman was focused on providing institutions with exposure to, or a hedge against, Brexit. That would be done by selling them complicated financial bundles (swaps, options, etc.) at a high price… but these bundles were proxies: basically, a bunch of risk curves fitted together to approximate the binary/event exposure the customers were looking for. What you couldn’t do was just trade directly on the event itself, even though that would have been simpler and cheaper and was what people wanted. The option just didn’t exist.

It was from that observation that the idea was born: a marketplace for event contracts. In 2018, Tarek and Luana partnered up to start Kalshi.