Interview with Luana Lopes Lara
Luana Lopes Lara is the co-founder of Kalshi, a prediction market based in New York City. She is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Markets in Everything
Contents
Max Raskin: I’m a huge fan of prediction markets, and I think part of it is because I’m such a fan of the news. Are you a news junkie at all?
Luana Lopes Lara: Definitely more recently, but news wasn’t really how we started. Kalshi was born out of a need for a direct way to get exposure to events and the forecasting power of these types of markets. But nowadays I would say we even have a bunch of monitors for Bloomberg and CNBC in the office, and I definitely read a lot of the news.
MR: What's the first thing you read in the morning?
LLL: First thing I do, I actually listen to NPR News Now and Up First. I do that when I'm getting ready to come to work. And then on the way to work, I read the Bloomberg summaries and the Wall Street Journal. The markets team at Kalshi gets lots of inspiration from the news and what’s happening in the world, so I have to be on top of it - like when Breyer announced he was retiring, we had to quickly spin up a Supreme Court nomination market.
MR: Do you have any morning rituals?
LLL: That is a good question. What I do every day is I always step out of bed with my right foot first. It's a Brazilian thing. I'm from Brazil, and you need to wake up with your right foot, so that it's a good day.
MR: Really?
LLL: Every day, yeah. But outside of that, not really. I mean, I just shower, change, and play with my dog a little bit before coming to work.
MR: Which prediction market are you most interested in? Is it the economic ones? Is it the political ones?
LLL: I'm very interested in the economic ones - we have markets right now on interest rates, inflation, GDP, mortgage rates and they are interesting because they are at the core of conversations in financial circles these days. My interests are history and then math, and that really matches up well with finance.
MR: Did you read Philip Tetlock?
LLL: Yes. I think Superforecasting was really one of the first books that Tarek [Mansour] and I read about prediction markets. We were really captured by the idea that casual forecasters are often more correct than subject matter experts. That’s the entire idea Kalshi is founded on. I think it was that and then the Predictably Irrational from Dan Ariely, and also Robin Hanson.
MR: Are you into the “rationality” community – like LessWrong and places like that?
LLL: I’m not really in the community. I'm obviously extremely familiar – but half of our company is religiously reading them for years and going to all the meetups. There's definitely a huge crossover from that community, prediction markets, and effective altruists.
MR: What's the market that you watch the most?
LLL: I would probably say, it's between the inflation and the Fed markets. I'm on Twitter a lot, and all Twitter people are always claiming things about the Fed and inflation and the economy and I always have the Fed markets next to me just to check.
MR: Who's your favorite person to read on Twitter?
LLL: Paul Graham on the startup side. We also read him a lot when we started Kalshi – we went through YCombinator. I think he's a great thinker for the startup world. Obviously, the classic ones like Elon Musk.
Documentaries
MR: What hobbies do you have?
LLL: I love watching documentaries. I watch at least one complete new documentary a weekend – just history ones. My favorite one is The Vietnam War by Ken Burns.
MR: I interviewed Geoffrey Ward who wrote it!
LLL: Wait, really?
MR: Yeah.
LLL: Oh, that's awesome. It’s such a fantastic documentary. Since I'm from Brazil, I think it was a whole new way of looking at American history and understanding the country.
It was also just a mark for me because it was when I really started liking documentaries a lot. It would be what I talked about with my boyfriend and my friends for a while. I also love the Fog of War.
MR: Do you watch on a little screen? Do you watch on your TV?
LLL: Oh, on the big TV. That was a big investment in the house. We use Apple TV and we go to BBC Select.
MR: Do you have any cool apps you like using that most people haven't heard of?
LLL: Not really, actually.
MR: Tarek uses this thing called Superhuman. Do you?
LLL: No, I don't. It was a decision he made when we started the company, that he thought he wanted to get better at his email, and now he got addicted to it.
MR: What do you use?
LLL: I just use Gmail. I'm one of those people that have a hundred thousand unopened emails. I'm the messiest person with my emails.
MR: What does your screen time look like?
LLL: Three hours, average.
MR: That's not bad at all.
LLL: Really? I feel like it's very bad.
LLL: Honestly most of the days, I wake up, shower, come to work, and then at work, I'm using my phone to track Twitter, but now I'm using even Twitter on my desktop.
The Nutcracker…Sweet
MR: What do you do for exercise?
LLL: I try to exercise like twice a week. I go to the gym – do a HIIT workout for 30 minutes. I haven't really gone in the past month or so, but I'm trying to get more into Pilates because my sister is addicted to Pilates. I actually have my first Pilates class this Saturday to see if I like that.
But it's interesting because when I was in high school, I used to be a professional ballet dancer. So I used to do like eight hours of exercise a day. Since I started college, I stopped doing ballet.
MR: What's your favorite ballet?
LLL: Swan Lake, probably.
MR: What's your favorite music to listen to ballet-wise?
LLL: Any Tchaikovsky – The Nutcracker, Swan Lake…things like that.
MR: Do you have a favorite Nutcracker tune?
LLL: Probably the pas de deux in the Second Act.
MR: I love Duke Ellington’s Nutcracker Suite.
LLL: It’s actually the first ballet that I did more seriously. I was one of the kids in The Nutcracker.
MR: Were you ever Clara?
LLL: No. We did it in school, but I wasn’t in Clara because I was still in school when I stopped. That was in the Bolshoi Ballet school.
MR: That's in Moscow?
LLL: They only have one school outside of Russia and it's actually in a tiny city in the south of Brazil.
MR: What kind of shoes did you wear?
LLL: Gaynor.
MR: What kind of tutu do you wear?
LLL: The two I wore the most were the romantic and the pancake tutus.
MR: What kind of music do you listen to now?
LLL: I really like indie rock and actual rock. So I still listen to like Guns N' Roses.
MR: What was the last song you were listening to?
As American as Brazilian Pie
LLL: The last song I was listening to was “American Pie” by Don McLean. If you're in the office past like 10:00 PM, we start playing music out loud for people to work. And this is like number one selection for everyone.
MR: How good is your vision?
LLL: Very bad.
MR: Do you wear glasses?
LLL: I do when I'm at home. I usually don't wear glasses during the day.
MR: Where do you get your glasses from?
LLL: In Brazil. I don't even know the name of the store.
MR: What's your most-ordered-from restaurant in New York?
LLL: I actually order from only four places. One is Dos Toros – I just get rice, beans, and steak, which is the Brazilian plate. The other one's called TAP NYC, which is a Brazilian store, and I just get cheese bread. I actually just got 10 cheese breads for the office. Then there is this crepe place, Vive la Crêpe that get ham and cheese and Nutella crepes from. The last one is this Italian place called il Buco – I get the prosciutto sandwich.
MR: When you’re home all you eat is Dos Toros?
LLL: I actually don't have dinner. I do the intermittent fasting from Sunday to Thursday. I usually just eat breakfast and lunch. For breakfast I have these protein bars in the office, KIND breakfast protein bar, the dark chocolate ones are awesome, or whatever we get for breakfast in the office like Chobani.
And then, for lunch, I alternate between those four places.
But my two favorite restaurants in New York are actually omakase places. They're actually very cheap, but they have the best sushi in New York, in my opinion. One's called Shiki and one's called Mojo, and they look the same – they're fantastic. Whenever I go to dinner on the weekends, I go to one of those two. And every weekend, I'm in one of those two, for sure.
MR: Do you drink?
LLL: I do. I mean, on the weekends casually, not like college.
MR: What’s your favorite alcohol?
LLL: I guess my favorite drink is a Moscow mule or wine. Just any wine probably.
MR: Do you read biographies a lot?
LLL: Not really.
MR: Yeah. Are you interested in biographical documentaries?
LLL: I am. I haven't found any that I was completely into. I guess there's one from Ken Burns about Thomas Jefferson that I thought was pretty good.
Nova Bossa Nova
MR: Are you one of these people who likes to wear uniform to work?
LLL: Yes, absolutely. I have two pairs of jeans I like that I alternate to go to wash.
MR: Where are they from?
LLL: Just Levi’s.
And then I wear the company t-shirt every day and one out of three sweaters. This one I'm wearing is the one I wear the most. It's actually my dad's.
MR: Where is it from?
LLL: From a random store in Brazil. But it's very much those like '90s looks.
LLL: But it was from him when he was young, and I just loved it.
MR: Where was your favorite place to eat in Boston?
LLL: It’s this Brazilian place called Oliveira's Steak House.
MR: You're very into Brazilian stuff.
LLL: I'm born and raised in Brazil – I'm as Brazilian as it gets.
MR: Do you like bossa nova?
LLL: Yes I do. I do.
MR: Who's your favorite?
LLL: In bossa, I think the classic ones, like Tom Jobim and things like that. But I also really like more modern Brazilian music. For me, there is no better party than if you go to a party and they're playing funk, which is the Brazilian funk, not the American funk. I don't know if you know who Anitta is, for example.
MR: I don’t, but I love Sinatra and Jobim and Getz/Gilberto from my dad.
What were your top songs last year?
LLL: That's actually very interesting. My top song was a song called “Fever” from Dua Lipa and Angèle. Next is “Good For You” from Olivia Rodrigo. And the third one is “You’ll Be in My Heart” from Tarzan by Phil Collins.
That is funny…I thought I listened to a lot of different stuff. I can scroll down like 10 songs and then I get to the first Brazilian one.
MR: What's the first Brazilian song?
LLL: It's called “Ai, Amor” from Anavitoria.
MR: Is Jobim on there?
LLL: No. There's Anavitoria and Tiago Iorc. They’re modern bossa nova.
No Atheists in Classrooms
MR: What kind of family did you grow up in – I know it’s wrong in the Latin American context but for some reason I just associate three names with wealth.
LLL: That's how everyone in Brazil has it. But no, I'm from a middle-class kind of family.
MR: Are you religious?
LLL: Yeah. I grew up going to church every Sunday – Catholic school…everything.
MR: Do you believe in God?
LLL: I do. My college years were a circular experience with this, but I do.
MR: Do you believe in an afterlife?
LLL: That is the trickiest question. I prefer to believe in it, yes.
MR: You prefer, but do you believe in it?
LLL: Probably not, if I'm being fully honest, but I would prefer to believe that I won't just die. But fundamentally, I don't think I believe.
MR: Do you pray?
LLL: I pray when I'm very stressed. Whenever I have very bad semesters or problems in my life – that’s when I get the most religious. I think that’s most people, which doesn't make much sense. But I think it's that support network that you get from wishing and hoping for things. I don't go to church every Sunday anymore. I used to growing up and every time I had an exam in school, I used to pray for 30 minutes before because I was terrified of it.
MR: What would you pray?
LLL: I would do the normal Catholic prayers in Portuguese.
Because I used to be extremely stressed with exams, going to an exam was like the end of the world for me in school. I used to bring a lot of saint images. In Brazil, we have this little paper, and I would put it in the desk in school when I was going to do every exam. I would be almost like a crazy religious person growing up. But again, it was less about being religious or believing in God and more about this support that I created for myself when I was extremely stressed.
Waiting to Eat
MR: What kind of shoes do you wear?
LLL: I wear these black Adidas things every day, because on my left foot, I lost two of my ligaments on the side. So I have to wear this very specific thing on my shoe to make sure it's more stable and I don't fall all the time. I have to wear sneakers all the time.
MR: Do you get nervous before you go into meetings with people?
LLL: It depends on the people. I think when I'm meeting with people that are very high up on the Hill or something like that, I get stressed. But then I also have everything memorized to the dot.
MR: Did you ever think you would have to learn so much law?
LLL: Not at all. I'm not a big writer or reader or anything. I'm always on the math-science side. But actually, one interesting thing is that law is very similar to computer science in the way that you think about things. It's really just trying to find logical ways and exceptions.
But what I really like on top of it is the storytelling and the strategy, which is less about law, and it's more about working with governments, like being able to tell your story to explain why the law does or doesn’t apply. I realize that I enjoy the politics and strategy more than I thought.
When I was in college, up until I started the company, I thought I was going to be an engineer from the very beginning. Then I transitioned to think I was going to be a trader. And that's what I was going to do.
MR: Do you want to be an American?
LLL: I would love to.
MR: What’s your least favorite thing about America in terms of day-to-day living?
LLL: Waiting for everyone to get their food to start eating is something I don't get. In Brazil, you get your food, you start eating. Here you have to wait for everyone and then your food gets cold. I'm not a fan.
MR: Do you floss?
LLL: I do. Funnily enough, I have a night ritual of seven things I have to do before I go to bed.
MR: What are the seven things?
LLL: Brush my hair, brush my teeth, floss, go to the bathroom, drink water, organize my bag for the next day, and organize my clothes for the next day. That's what I have to do. I do that and that's it. And then I go to bed.