They Made $0 for 4 Years. Then Built a $22B Startup | The Kalshi Story

Intro

00:00I disagree that without money you can get the same level of accuracy. A lot of the research of course is always in very controlled environments, right? You're getting a very small [music] set of people and you're testing specific things. But when you actually take this into the real world, you're talking [music] about millions of people.

00:11Incentives really matter. And that's why when people are putting money where their mouth is, when they're actually putting money behind their convictions, that's why you get the best forecast because people at the end of the day are incentivized to make money.

00:17If you ask someone who they think they're going to win an election, there's a [music] lot of research that says that people go, "Oh, of course this person like the the other person is stupid. This person not going to win." But when you ask them, okay, would you put money behind [music] it?

00:29Then they take a step back and they're like, "Well, I'm not really sure because maybe inflation is going to make a lot of people vote this other side or maybe co is going to make people [music] change. Talk is cheap. On prediction markets, you're able to put your money where your mouth is."

00:46We really wanted prediction markets to [music] exist. We love markets. We love this idea that markets can bring more truth and more objective conversation to a lot of our most important questions. We really want wanted [music] this to to exist to go mainstream for people to see its power and start utilizing it.

00:56And this was essentially the [music] guiding light that in the hardest times kept us going and kept us trying in the start a single day that we called I think 60 or 65 [music] lawyers and then when we finished the list we were like wow none of them said this was possible.

01:13We had talked to pretty much any lawyer [music] that would talk to us about this and you know everybody rejected us. this regulatory first approach you cannot show progress. Other companies in our batch were shipping products, acquiring new users and growing [music] every week whereas we had we were stagnating.

01:23So as a company the only choice we had if we believe that we were right on the law, if we believe that this [music] should exist in society is to sue our own regulator which is what we did. Forget product market fit. He [music] doesn't have regulatory market fit.

01:35There's probably nothing more bold, more ambitious than suing your [music] regulator. We won and then I don't remember what happened after that but I think everybody was screaming in the office and like there were chairs flying around and we celebrated that day.

01:47It was it was really great. It was insane. It we got over 2 million customers [music] in I think 2 weeks. Did over 2 billion in volume. We were still a very small team. We were 20 [music] 25 people. We scaled 100x overnight. So prediction market startup Kelchi announced on Thursday a $1 billion [music] series F round valuing the company at $22 billion.

02:15That's double the 11 billion valuation Kelchi nabbed just [music] 5 months ago after raising a $1 billion series E.

From Ballet to Building a $22B Startup

02:31When I was very young, around two I think I started doing ballet classes and that's was like my first big [music] passion was ballet and I I started doing it more and more and more and more up until I was doing it professionally. My days were very full.

02:42So, I would used to wake up at like maybe like 6:00 in the morning, eat a little bit, and then go to to normal like technical school, study, [music] math and science and all those things from 7:00 to 12:30. And then I would drive to the ballet school, which started around 1:00 and ended at [music] 9:00 p.m.

02:55Then I would go back home 9:30. And then I would actually start studying for whatever exams I had in school or SATs and all those things I had to do. [music] So, it was like 3 years that I was sleeping, I think, for 4 hours a night. My parents do today make the joke that they don't know how I grew to be a normal height because you know in Brazil we say you have to sleep a lot to be able to grow and they're like you're not sleeping for three years.

03:13How did that how did that work out? Since I was very little I was always very disciplined and worked very very hard. I feel like I get a lot of like pleasure on working hard and it makes me feel like [music] it's like I'm doing something with my life and that's always since I was very little I remember that on the discipline side and the other side is like kind of like this delayed gratification side that to me I liked doing things that were hard and and painful in a lot of ways because I thought there was going to be a big reward or something that I really was

03:43looking forward in the end and [music] and that's why ballet is very very good cuz you rehearse for like a year to have one hour on stage right so those things in a lot of ways I think my personality matched the kind of challenge challenge I was I was setting myself up for it was it's a lot easier for me if I have a very clear goal.

03:55It was like I wanted to figure out how to both excel in normal school and in ballet and I wanted to do that and I know it was around 3 years I had so it was kind of like a eye on the target type of thing but definitely not typical teenager.

04:08I remember like multiple weekends that I'm like wow I don't have exams next week I can just sleep like 8 hours and my friends be going to parties and all that stuff and it was just definitely not me. I only decided I wanted to [music] come study in the US.

04:20I ended up picking MIT because I thought it was the school that was going to take me most out of my comfort zone. But it was very hard transition first of all because I used to train a lot every day and it was a very important thing in my head.

04:33When [music] I went to school the first Saturday I was there to when I went to MIT I remember going to the Boston Ballet and try to take one class and I looked at myself [music] in the mirror and I was like oh my god I'm losing my form my arm looks bad and all those things and I thought it was better to just completely [music] stop it so I could remember myself being very good.

04:44So that was very hard to like go from eight hours a day doing something to [music] not even though I think it was the right decision.

Conviction: 65 Lawyers Said No

04:58So I'm I'm a big math nerd. I grew up loving math. That was my biggest passion. And I think one of the things that happens when you grow up in a in a country like Lebanon, there's a lot of similar countries that have similar issues is that everything is very dynamic.

05:09Anything could change at any given [music] day. You have to adapt. You become very adaptable basically because one day there's war, one day there's civil war, one day there's bombs, one day the country is doing okay. Lebanese people in general, they're very adaptable.

05:15They can change their entire life pretty quickly [music] to adapt to something new that gets thrown at them. And then two, they they always smile at life. Like they got so used to h bad things happening that like they don't take them too seriously.

05:27[music] So you could have a bomb happened during the day and then Lebanese part people would party at night. They would not cancel their social plans or anything like that, which is which [music] is I think very cool. But I think that that definitely has come with me in founder journey, which is you're going to get hit hard and there's [music] going to be new things as an entrepreneur.

05:44There's always new things that get thrown at you every week, every month. and you're going to have to adapt and then not complain too much about it. Don't [music] take it too too seriously. You're just going to have to change the way you're approaching things and then hope that over a long period of [music] time if you're doing the right thing it's going to work out.

05:55I was an intern at Goldman Sachs in 2016 and I was very young at the time. I was discovering financial markets and learning about how they work. Two things really surprised me that summer. The first thing was institutions and investors. What they really cared about was not what is the price of a stock or the price of treasury bonds or other complicated assets.

06:12they really cared about whether Brexit was going to happen or not, whether Trump was going to win the 2016 election or not. And so, at the time, there wasn't a very good way for them to get that exposure. And so, for example, when people wanted to hedge against Trump winning the 2016 election, there was this thing called the Trump trade that Wall Street bought a lot of.

06:24And it was basically shorting the S&P [music] on the week of the election. And that was a really bad trade because people were right about their predictions. So, Trump won, but then they lost money. This was really one of those moments where that made us think [music] maybe there is a better way.

06:37Maybe you could build a financial market that essentially answers these yes or no questions about whether important events are going to happen or not. Because if you could build that market, it would be a much more precise and direct way for people to get the exposure that they really wanted, which is whether an event was going to happen.

06:55And you know, I would say that was the initial idea for the company. The first time we actually fully talked about it was when we were both working at this prop shop called Five Rings and we were interning there together and there was this market making game that you basically made markets on it all day.

07:06You'd be [music] like, "What's the market on?" we started connecting a lot of different ideas and different things we've seen at this internship but also previous ones and I was like well when I was at Bridgewwater this was happening with with this other event and the five rings this was happening there and that's kind of where we started connecting the dots of all these different kind of like cow shei koshi behavior we were seeing [music] and thinking about it's insane that there

07:30isn't a legalized great big prediction market in the US that's liquid and [music] you can trade on everything and that's really the first time that we thought about it was a winter of um maybe [music] 2017 or 2018 that we're put everything together um into kind of really the the couch idea.

07:42In the start there was um a single day that we called I think 60 or 65 lawyers and we just had a spreadsheet and we're like well let's see let's see maybe the lawyers will will add some clarity here. We had a list of 60 lawyers and we were like tar Lana ta Lana who's going to call who and we called everyone and then when we finished the list we were like wow none of them said this was possible.

07:59Then Lana through multiple contacts got to Jeff. The first call we had with Jeff, he didn't say no, but he said all the reasons why this wouldn't work and how hard it is to get a regulated exchange and then a regulated clearing house and all the difficulties that will be ahead of us.

08:14And then he also explained that there is rules. There are 23 core principles that you have [music] to uh prove that you are satisfying to become a regulated exchange and they're very hard to do and it takes a long time. We took those rules and we didn't have much context but it was a Thursday night and then by Monday we had a full analysis.

08:33Luan and I did it, the two of us by ourselves on how we would create this entire system that would abide by those 23 rules. And I think when Jeff got that, he realized we were very serious about this. He was like, "These people, yes, they want to build product and commit committed to it, but they understand that there's a long regulatory journey they're going to have to take and they're probably going to be able to balance those two things together."

08:49And so he got excited about, you know, joining and helping us make [music] make this happen. And I think that was a very big early win for us.

Legitmacy: Four Years to Earn the Right to Launch

09:01we were started talking more about should we actually try to do this? Should we actually build this company? It was in the summer when we were both working at Citadel and one of our first things was well why don't we just try to go to this Y cominator hackathon you know it's like where these massive companies like Airbnb and whatever they all go there so let's try we presented and we had kind of like this very janky demo that kind of it was stable Coinbase at the time and you had to like it did move place A to place B but it was kind

09:24of only this and a very simple user interface and the first thing he said was that's illegal and then we're like well but maybe we can figure this out and and he's like well then why haven't other people done And we didn't really have a good answer for any of that.

09:37Yeah, I definitely remember the moment and when we were first really deciding whether to start a company and and and how to start it. This moment was very foundational because this was the time when as a company we decided to define [music] one of the most important principles of the company which is we're going to do everything regulatory first.

09:48We're not going to launch. We're not going to market. We're not going to build product. We're not going to do anything up until we figure out the most important thing for [music] the company to exist, which is how do we legalize and regulate this and [music] how do we create an ecosystem that is safe and transparent for customers.

10:05And that has informed everything we have done at [music] Koshi till today. And I think that YC kind of Michael Sabo actually says this to today that he's like this sounds insane, but these two kids from MIT sound really motivated and we should give them a try.

10:17When we were in YC, every other group in our batch had [music] week overweek like metric growth where they were like, "Well, we grew 20%. We're making this amount in revenue. We're we're new users and building this [music] product." And our entire journey was we talked to these lawyers and the next week like we talked to these other lawyers and the other week is like we filed this document [music] and all of that.

10:35So, it was a very different YC experience for sure. We were stagnating. there was no real progress because we were just [music] talking to regulators and writing legal documents and figuring out policies and procedures, all the stuff that entrepreneurs usually don't want to deal [music] with.

10:48It's kind of the unsexy parts of of building a company. And it was even more hard because our some of our competitors launched [music] and did it offshore without the license without really this regulatory structure that we were seeking. And I would say that was the hardest part of the path.

10:59It's not necessarily the period of time or the work itself. It's just the fact that you [music] cannot make real tangible progress. But we were very committed to it. We did not want to launch unless this was 100% regulated. It goes back to how we started the company.

11:10We we were not necessarily looking for ideas to start a company. [music] We we started the company because of this idea. We were a bit different. So there are sometimes teams that start [music] and they they pivot and they look for a bunch of different ideas to decide which one is the best one to to work on.

11:24[music] We were committed to this idea from the start. And so my answer here is that we really wanted prediction markets to exist. We love markets. We love this idea that markets can bring more truth and more objective conversation to a lot of our most important questions [music] and we really want wanted this to to exist to go mainstream for people to see its power and start utilizing it and this was essentially the guiding light that in the hardest times kept us going and kept us trying.

11:52Nowadays it's very hard to find very good and reliable [music] data sources for what's actually true and happening in the world. It's very hard to know if what I'm seeing on Twitter is it writer is it bots or who is writing this? What prediction markets do is that they kind of like take away the noise and you can really look at a like forecast that's come from millions of people putting money on the line and putting money where their mouth is to really see I believe this is going to happen.

12:09I'm have a lot of conviction and and [music] kind of aggregating all of that to see to see the future. So even if people are not trading in the markets actually the most important part of these markets is the single point of data the price that comes from these markets which can benefit anyone and I think that's the most important.

12:26If there's one thing people know about prediction markets, I really hope they they know that [music] if they want to know anything about the future, it is the best way to get a correct unbiased forecast.

Payoff: Four Years of Fighting. Four Weeks to Scale 100x.

12:43I [music] take hundreds of meetings a year. My first meeting with Tar really stands out. We were in Cafe Liria, which is this hipster coffee shop in New York City. It was really crowded. We could barely get a seat. We were surrounded by people.

12:55I'm thinking to myself, no one around us has any interest in this [music] conversation. I meet Taric for the first time. Forget product market fit. He doesn't have regulatory market fit. Part of the reason that meeting stood out so much was he's telling me the story of how he's suing his regulator.

13:12We love to back ambitious founders, bold founders. There's probably nothing more bold, more ambitious suing your regulator. They blocked it a lot of a lot of times. So we try to engage with them for over two years on like the usual process that we have for new markets and we talked to them about the use case of this market.

13:34We actually had a public comment period that over 200 people including [music] very very big academics like head of the council of economic advisors all of these folks wrote in saying these markets are very important. You should allow these markets to operate here and just regulate them so that they're safe.

13:51And then we realized that I think working with the regulators or trying to convince them wasn't going to work. But we didn't decide to list it like competitors. We stayed committed to the regulatory first principle. So as a company, the only choice we had if we believe that we were right on the law, if we believe that this should exist in society is to sue our own regulator, which is what we did.

14:02It was a very difficult decision. It's very hard for a company, especially a startup, a small company, to sue the part of the government that oversees you because they have all the power over you. But we decided to make this decision regardless [music] because we really believe that these market should exist.

14:20And it was a very hard decision because four years for [music] us to get regulated and we were kind of putting that in jeopardy in a way by suing them because we're basically saying like we're we're trying to really like okay we're we're fighting I very officially fighting uh in court um at that time and [music] but it was two things that really mattered to us.

14:37One these markets are the holy grail of prediction markets. They should be legal. They should be regulated. They should be in the US. They're very important. and the other sides. We knew we were right on the law. We ended up winning. Actually, every judge that looked into our case ruled in our favor on the district court and then the appeals court for two weeks and then when we won it was amazing.

14:55The next day the government is like we're going to appeal this. We extremely against I think this decision is wrong and then the stress all came back up. Okay, so now we have to go through the entire appeals court and process. Is it going to be done in time?

15:02Cuz at that time we were like 2 months before the election. maybe there was a chance we're going to run out the clock and we would lose the 2024 elections even if we won the lawsuit. So then it was one month of like we had this one big hearing on the appeals court in the state um pending appeal.

15:14And I remember it was like both Tark and I we we listen to to the court hearing at at the time and we were just pretty much only listening to this one recording of of the court and and trying to like get the company to keep moving and building things and all of that in case we want.

15:31But in our heads we were like this is the most important thing ever. we weren't being able to focus on anything else or sleep or eat or or anything like that. But after we we won, I think it it was like at 1:00 p.m. and we were extremely happy.

15:42It was like, "Okay, but then next day we have to launch this market and then we're going through like the we're going to go through actually the most intense period ever because [music] it's 4 weeks for us to go from a small niche website that not a lot of people know about, what are prediction markets to hopefully one of the most important things in the 2024 election and one of the most important data sources.

16:00We won. We won. We won. We won." And these moments are great because it's part of what a lot of entrepreneurship is about. You get frustration after frustration and no and disappointment after disappointment. But then all of these are counterbalanced by these very short moments where [music] you get big wins and those big wins make the whole experience totally worth it because you know you put so much effort and you see results.

16:20Yeah, those moments I think it's uh it's important to try to celebrate them but but it's also important for us at least we don't try to celebrate them for too long. We celebrate them for a bit and then we go back to work because then you have the next milestone.

16:25We're lucky enough that we got this win. we have to now make it count and we have to figure out [music] how to scale the product, bring in the customers, make the election market count and we only had a month to do that. So we celebrated for a few hours and then we got back to work.

16:36One of the very tricky things about Kawoshi is that a lot of our story is tied to very external factors that we don't have control over, right? So it's the government, it's a lawsuit, it's this, this and that. But it was one of the first times that actually it was fully in our hands how big it was going to be and if we were going to win or not.

16:54We felt like we had fought so hard, you know, for years [music] to get to that to get the chance to be able to do these markets. We felt like it was our shot. We we cannot mess up that shot. We have to deliver. So, we decided like, you know, for this whole month, our entire team and it's not just one and I think we [music] often times get disproportionate credit because a lot of the real work was basically the team.

17:11It was the engineers, products, markets, the [music] marketing. Everyone was just like for 4 weeks put their life on pause. it will be close to 247 in the office in the weekends just completely committed to making this [music] thing work. It was really hard because we scaled 100x overnight and that's not easy for systems to sustain [music] and a team to sustain but we you know we had a very small team that made that happen.

17:30It was insane. It we got over 2 million customers in I think 2 [music] weeks did over 2 billion in volume. It was crazy. We were having everything engineering wise was kind of breaking right. We've never gotten that many deposits like ever in the years of the company and everything was kind of breaking.

17:43But yeah, it was like the the the numbers the result that we got in the end, it was actually weaving would have grown a lot more. But the problem was that our deposit flows and signup flows were breaking because of the amount of people coming in that we had to kind of like almost like slow down.

18:01So the hardest thing that happened is at the time there are two key pieces to running a financial market. There's the exchange and then the clearing house. [music] The exchange is the marketplace that matches buyers and sellers. The clearing house is the place that handles all the money movement like how much money you have to put up to back this trade.

18:15Where does the money go? How do you keep it safe? We at the time had the cashi exchange and we were using a third party clearing house. [music] We had just gotten approval for our own clearing house. So to stop using the third party, but we were not ready to use our own clearing house at the time.

18:32The [music] issue is when we won the lawsuit and this was really unfortunate. The third party clearing house decided to block the election market. They did not want to let us list it. And so the hardest thing we had to do in [music] that weekend, and we knew we had only four weeks left, so we had to do it really fast, is basically move all of our business from the old clearing house to the new clearing house, and usually you do this over the span of a of a six-month window.

18:49You [music] plan it. There's a lot of different things that go into that movement. It's very complicated. It's a very big migration. And we had to do it [music] over a weekend because otherwise we wouldn't be able to do the election market.

19:00So it was a very disappointing situation, but we made the most out of it. And honestly, the engineers had done an incredible job navigating that. But that was definitely the hardest part uh of the month. That was very very difficult. If you look at the 2024 election, Khi was able to call the results before the media, you were able to see live probabilities throughout the night.

19:18And so long before it was declared that

Signal: Not a Casino. A Market for Truth

19:24Donald Trump was the 2024 winner on mainstream media, the question of whether prediction markets are betting or gambling [music] is very similar to the question of whether financial derivatives are gambling or betting. And that has always been a question uh historically that has happened in financial markets.

19:37And the reason this question exists is because [music] there is speculation in financial market. And speculation can look in some cases like a bet. It's like you're putting money to make more money on something you [music] don't control. But there are key differences.

19:48One is are you participating in something that is a natural risk? [music] It exists in the real world. It is tangible. You know, people care about it versus like rolling a dice that has no, you know, it's an artificial thing that you're creating for the purpose of uh betting.

20:07[music] The second core uh pillar of this, the market structure. In gambling, the market structure is you walk into a casino or a house, the house's [clears throat] revenue is [music] equal to the customer losses. There's inherent conflict of interest in the business model because the company benefits when their customers [music] lose.

20:19Prediction markets, just like traditional financial markets like the New York Stock Exchange or other places, yes, the underlying is different. Like what you're trading on is different, but how you're trading or how [music] you're participating is the same.

20:31It's an open marketplace. It's fair and people are trading against each other. So, the market is neutral. The market doesn't make more or less money if their customers lose. It's more of a fair and transparent place for people to [music] participate.

20:38And that's why it makes it, you know, a financial market and makes it kind of structured or or or placed in a [music] in a very different way than traditional, you know, betting or gambling places. I disagree that without money, you can get the same level of accuracy.

20:50A lot of the research, of course, I come my background is an academia. So, a lot of the research is always in very controlled environments, right? You're getting a very [music] small set of people and you're testing specific things, but when you actually take this into the real world, you're talking about millions of people.

21:07Incentives really matter. And that's why when people are putting money where their mouth is, when they're actually putting money behind their convictions, that's why you get the best forecast because people at the end of the day are incentivized to make money.

21:13And you see a lot of it is like the decrease [music] of polarization, right? If if you ask someone who they think they're going to win an election, there's a lot of research that says that [music] people go, oh, of course, this person like the the other person is stupid.

21:23This person not going to win. But when you ask them, okay, would you put money behind it? Then they take a step back and they're like, well, I'm not really sure because maybe inflation is going to make a lot of people vote this other side or maybe co is going to make people change.

21:36So, it kind of decreases polarization, but it's a whole point about money being the incentive to bring truth and information to markets, which you can't have if if you [music] don't have it. Prediction markets cut through the noise. They're the true signal of what's happening.

21:52If you think about social media, it's qualitative opinion. [music] If you think about prediction markets, it's quantitative conviction. Talk is cheap. On prediction markets, you're able to put your money where your mouth is. Regulation means a lot of different things, but I usually bucket them into two main pieces.

22:05One is market integrity, [music] which means fairness. Is the market fair? And then number two, customer protection, which means like clarity and transparency. And if we find that people did something wrong, it's the same as the stock market.

22:16We can do a [music] fine or we can refer to the government for uh criminal prosecution. If someone commits insider trading on cash, it's the same as insider trading in in the stock market or other places. And this is all structured, all these different rules are structured so that you get like you get a marketplace that is fair.

22:32And then the customer protection piece, it's [music] really all about making sure you're treating all your customers the same way that everything is transparent. So all of the trades, we [music] have a duty to make all of our trades and activity publicly available so that everybody can see it and we report to the government.

22:44We cannot [music] have discriminatory access. We have to give the same rights and same obligations to everybody else which is one other [music] thing that's very unique about financial markets or Koshi where like you cannot for example block the winners and then promote the [music] losers so that you know if somebody wins on your platform you you block them like some of the gambling sites do and if somebody loses money you basically figure out how to [music] get them hooked.

23:07You cannot do these types of things on a regulated exchange because it has to be neutral. The biggest misconception about prediction markets is they're just around sports. It's all about sports [music] and sports is a meaningful portion of prediction markets, 10x, but non-sports today has 300 to 400 million of weekly volume that translates [music] to 15 to 20 billion annualized.

23:26And while everyone talks about sports and it's growing so fast and so much of the volume, if you were to just look at non-sports, it's growing really fast, too. It's [music] growing 5x year-over-year. These markets cover economics. Where are interest rates going?

23:43Politics, who's going to be the next president, who's going to be the Fed chair, culture, who's going to win the Oscar, even the weather, how many interest is it going to snow in New York next week. But these other categories are growing really quickly and in the next few years are going to represent meaningful portions of the volume.

Edge: Where Knowledge Becomes a Market

24:05So, uh, my name is Joel. I am a full-time prediction market trader and content creator only for the last six months. So, still very [music] new to this. I trade a variety of markets, but I'm most wellknown for mentioned markets, which are markets on what someone will say in a speech and [music] within that even more so focused on kind of Trump speeches.

24:16Being an accountant and following, you know, [music] companies very closely, loving to read like a 10K or 10 Q. And I realized that like I can't really compete uh the equities market, right, in terms of like picking [music] stocks or something like that because who is my counterparty?

24:32Who am I up against? It's going to be a hedge fund or just a much more sophisticated investor. [music] So seeing prediction markets was a huge draw to me because I'm like okay here's something that I believe is very inefficient for the [music] time being and that's why it was a natural draw is I felt like I could get an edge I guess made in the past year just over uh 200k trading but since going full-time back [music] in end of September uh I've made about 170,000 in the last 5 months or so

25:00uh trading when I'm trading [music] I'm doing heavy kind of research like for for Trump um I'm looking at you know as many historical speeches that he's given to kind of try to gain an edge of what is this [music] guy going to say? I'm very very in tune to talking points of the administration as new news is breaking out.

25:11How is this going to impact what he's going to talk about in his next speech? I will watch every single one of Trump or Manny or Powell every single one of his speeches. [music] So the intuition I've been able to build up over kind of what he's going to talk about in a given day and then staying [music] very very in tune with what's happening around the world and how that's going to impact talking points.

25:27uh have uh [music] a database that I use of historical speeches for for anyone that I'm I'm trading in. So, I'm not going to like rewatch all of his past speeches, but [music] anytime he's going to go live for a speech, I'm always watching it.

25:46It started as a very kind of quantitative thing where you're looking [music] at historical speeches, things like that. and it's evolved into a lot more intuition [music] based where I just know I can trust my intuition when it comes to someone like Trump because I've watched hundreds of his speeches.

25:58I'm Brandon Fiend. I'm a 25-year-old in Bucks County, Pennsylvania and I am a public school teacher. I teach sixth graders at an elementary school and direct the school plays. So, I have $150,000 um that I have made from Kouchi. I just hit that milestone today.

26:19I went downstairs to my parents and I said, "Mom, dad, I just made like $8,000." And I'd been very quiet about koshi like beforehand cuz I wasn't having success with it ever since I was in 8th grade. I've studied the music charts. I have overanalyzed them.

26:38I've tracked them in the little notes app on my phone. Travis Scott was selling CDs for his single 4x4. If you copied the HTML page source and you looked in the code of it, you could actually see the inventory for how much was stocked. I bought very low stakes, paid out [music] $8,000.

26:56That was crazy that just looking at the source code of a website that's public to everyone. You can just hit source code. It's right there. I made $8,000 off one click. My name is Shannon. I work at Koshi in operations and I am originally from Alabama.

27:14I started trading on Kouchi back in 2021. I went to school for meteorology and so some friends that I went to school [music] with had said, "Did you know that you can trade on high temperatures?" And I thought that was super [music] interesting.

27:26My first deposit was $50. From there, I mean, it was just kind [music] of like, "Let's see what happens with this." Uh, I wrote out Hurricane Ivan back in 2004, Hurricane Katrina [music] in 2005, Hurricane Michael in 2018. I have a lot of experience with tropical storms, tropical cyclones, hurricanes, things of that [music] nature.

27:45I think it's really important from a climatological perspective [music] to utilize those weather markets in a way that is almost like insurance. But whenever I did live on the Gulf Coast, my homeowner's insurance deductible for a hurricane was over $10,000.

28:04So essentially it if a hurricane were headed to my house, the way I would hedge that is with buying yes that a hurricane would hit. So let's say that that's a 10. I take $1,000 and put that on yes that a hurricane is going to hit. So if I bought $10,000 I get $10,000.

28:21So a $9,000 return. I would then use that to pay the homeowner's insurance deductible [music] to recover things, you know, from the loss from the hurricane at my house.

Scale: From Niche Market to Global Infrastructure

28:40Well, I think the company has grown a lot since we last spoke. I mean, I think the the way that consumer marketplaces work is there's [music] network effect aspect to them. They compound over time. It's a bit like an exponential. and the exponential things grow but you don't really notice that growth up until it starts getting to big numbers and all and then an exponential basically becomes big very [music] big very quickly and I think that's what happened with Koshi in the last 2 years I think the company has gone mainstream

29:04we've grown a lot in size percentage of Americans now are active on the product whether they're trading actively or they're getting informed about the forecasts they use it a bit like a news feed and I think we now have a global recognizable brand one of the places that we really want to invest in is essentially defining ing what the brand stands for and explaining to [music] people who we are, who we're not, what we want to do and what we want to achieve.

29:22And I think there's a lot of work to be put on the brand. Basically explaining [music] to people what that brand means. We want to go international. We want to diversify our customer base. And you know, we feel like we're in a very very early inning of people using prediction markets actively.

29:33Even though the numbers have grown a lot, I think they could really grow significantly more. You know, we get into basically every corner of the internet. If you have an interest or a passion or you care about something, there will be a market that you can relate to or engage with or you can get informed about because that's whole the whole vision.

29:50The whole thing was people feel like Wall Street is rigged against them. Most people don't relate to the stock market or understand options or or complicated [music] financial instruments, but they read the news. They follow trends. They are on X.

29:56They care about politics. They care about culture. They care about sports. And this is a market where they can find a place for topics that they're passionate about with other people that have the same similar passion. and then you know debate on the opinions about these things.

30:09[music] So we we have a long way to go. We really want to go more into the institutional use case. When we started the company it was the idea of causing how we how we first encountered this this type of [music] couch behavior was in institutions right it wasn't a Goldman Sachs a Bridgewater five rings a citadel and for us it's kind of full circle we actually that is where we want to really land it's like these extremely liquid markets that everyone from retail to [music] a massive institutional bank is trading on.

30:38And I think that in five years, if we're very successful, I think that prediction markets are the size of the stock market. The participation of like the types of users participating [music] in it are similar to that. And it's just a very more a way more mature market.

30:50But yeah, I [music] just hope Couch grows even even more.