In the News: 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 MIT.
[Editor’s Note: Luana is in the news this week. Her company, Kalshi, runs a prediction market like the ones that are frequently cited to show how the markets are betting on who will be the next president. Kalshi just won a major court case allowing them to list election-related betting contracts for the first time in over 100 years in the U.S.]
Markets in Everything
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.
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