Insight certainty 3/5 debate potential 2/5

Mansour: The best senior hires retain a childish curiosity for new tech

Tarek Mansour · Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour: How to Build Moats Against Incumbents; How to Hire Engineers | 20VC #931 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Oct 1, 2022 · at 16:59

Tarek Mansour is the co-founder and CEO of Kalshi. He shares his framework for hiring experienced executives who remain curious and adaptable.

0:00 / 0:39exact quote · 39.7s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“We tend to, Try to focus on people with a lot of experience and wisdom that still, I mean, I don't mean that, I really mean this in a good way, that still have a little bit of like, I call it like the childish fascination aspect. And there's a lot of those people. There's a lot of people that like, you know, feel like they've got it figured out, and now I have my wisdom and experience, and then other people, and you know, they could be, you know, at the end of it, they could have retired already. But they constantly have this sort of childish fascination with new things like, oh, what is this? Or what is this like new crypto thing? Or what is this like? And I think those types of people are like, tend to be extremely good people to have in an organization.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Tarek Mansour

Opinion
Mansour: The overinflated B2B SaaS ecosystem resembles a VC Ponzi scheme
“It's just the ecosystem is very hyper overinflated through a mechanism that is not too dissimilar to Ponzi schemes.”
Tarek Mansour Oct 1, 2022 ▶ 31:10 Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour: How to Build Moats Against Incumbents; How to Hire Engineers | 20VC #931 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mansour: Kalshi is the fastest-growing non-AI US company at scale
“Kalshi this year is at this scale, at least, you know, the, I think the fastest growing company in America outside of AI. I think Anthropik is growing faster, and I'm not sure about Merkur and Cursor, but we're, you know, growing at that sort of, at that pace,…”
Tarek Mansour Dec 8, 2025 ▶ 1:20 Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour on Raising $1BN, CNN and CNBC Deals & the Polymarket Feud · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Open
Mansour: Kalshi is currently profitable
“We are at a point right now where, so we're growing incredibly fast. We are also profitable right now.”
Tarek Mansour Dec 8, 2025 ▶ 2:28 Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour on Raising $1BN, CNN and CNBC Deals & the Polymarket Feud · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Mansour: Kalshi lost team members twice before suing the US government
“The next day we came back, and we were like, we're gonna try again for the twenty-twenty-four election. And then we tried another year till the end of twenty-twenty-three. Then the government blocked it again. And then, so that's the second time. And then God …”
Tarek Mansour Dec 8, 2025 ▶ 18:18 Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour on Raising $1BN, CNN and CNBC Deals & the Polymarket Feud · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Opinion
Mansour: Traditional financial markets are rigged in favor of Wall Street
“The current financial markets, they don't relate to a lot of people like, you know, trading stocks or options or futures, like people don't really understand them. And the game is sort of rigged. It's rigged on behalf of like for Wall Street against Main Stree…”
Tarek Mansour Dec 8, 2025 ▶ 21:05 Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour on Raising $1BN, CNN and CNBC Deals & the Polymarket Feud · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mansour: Only 1 to 2 percent of prediction market users actively trade
“Out of every hundred prediction market users, maybe there's like one or two traders that are actually trading on the market, but the rest of the users are getting informed about the world.”
Tarek Mansour Dec 8, 2025 ▶ 23:10 Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour on Raising $1BN, CNN and CNBC Deals & the Polymarket Feud · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 1,200 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.