Key Takeaways
- Luana Lopes Lara is a former ballerina, an MIT graduate and the world’s youngest self-made feminine billionaire.
- She made her fortune by co-founding Kalshi, a prediction market exchange that permits customers to guess on everything ranging from climate to sports activities.
- She said many sensible founders fall into a common entice when it comes to beginning their own business.
As a teenager, Luana Lopes Lara studied ballet at the Bolshoi Theater School in Brazil. Competition was cutthroat; college students sometimes tried to sabotage each other by hiding glass fragments in each other’s footwear. She attended technical college in the morning, then went to ballet coaching from the afternoon to the evening.
“Since I was very little, I wanted to do big things,” Lopes Lara said in a latest episode of the podcast Confession with Ali Partovi.
That self-discipline laid the basis for Lopes Lara’s later success. Now, at 30 years outdated, the entrepreneur is the world’s youngest self-made feminine billionaire, unseating pop star Taylor Swift and tech billionaire Lucy Guo in December 2025 to claim the title. Lopes Lara has a web value of $2.6 billion, according to Forbes.
She made her fortune by co-founding Kalshi, a prediction market exchange where customers can buy and promote yes-or-no contracts based mostly on real-world future occasions, such as elections, financial information, climate and sports activities. Lopes Lara is working towards a future where people can basically guess on anything.
Kalshi is “the first federally regulated exchange in the United States dedicated exclusively to trading on the outcomes of future events,” according to its website.
The common entice
Lopes Lara said on the podcast that many sensible founders fall into a common entice when it comes to beginning their own business: They become “obsessed with probabilities.”
“You can psych yourself out of doing anything,” she said. “I think that going for it, taking the risk, believing that things will work out, is very important.”
Lopes Lara said that if a startup’s workers are only pondering about the math of whether the company is going to work or not, it becomes a “super negative culture that overreacts to every new information you have.”
“It’s important to have a lot of optimistic people who want to build things in the company,” Lopes Lara said.
How she began Kalshi
Lopes Lara created Kalshi in 2018 with her co-founder, Tarek Mansour. They both graduated from the college in 2018. Lopes Lara majored in laptop science and arithmetic, while Mansour majored in electrical engineering, laptop science and arithmetic. They met because they had courses in common, and Lopes Lara always sat at the entrance of the class. Mansour wished to study from her instance, so he began sitting next to her.
Lopes Lara came up with the thought for Kalshi when she was interning at Five Rings, a New York trading firm. She seen that people on social media were pushing the narrative that actuality TV star and entrepreneur Kylie Jenner was pregnant.
“I was like, ‘I want to make a bet with you on this,’” Lopes Lara said in an interview with Bloomberg earlier this 12 months. The only downside was that she had nowhere to place the guess.
In that second, Lopes Lara recognized an alternative that was greater than gossip. She discovered that there were hundreds of thousands of people with firm views about the future, but no outlet for those beliefs.
Now Kalshi, which addresses that need, is value a reported $22 billion and growing.
Key Takeaways
- Luana Lopes Lara is a former ballerina, an MIT graduate and the world’s youngest self-made feminine billionaire.
- She made her fortune by co-founding Kalshi, a prediction market exchange that permits customers to guess on everything ranging from climate to sports activities.
- She said many sensible founders fall into a common entice when it comes to beginning their own business.
As a teenager, Luana Lopes Lara studied ballet at the Bolshoi Theater School in Brazil. Competition was cutthroat; college students sometimes tried to sabotage each other by hiding glass fragments in each other’s footwear. She attended technical college in the morning, then went to ballet coaching from the afternoon to the evening.
“Since I was very little, I wanted to do big things,” Lopes Lara said in a latest episode of the podcast Confession with Ali Partovi.
That self-discipline laid the basis for Lopes Lara’s later success. Now, at 30 years outdated, the entrepreneur is the world’s youngest self-made feminine billionaire, unseating pop star Taylor Swift and tech billionaire Lucy Guo in December 2025 to claim the title. Lopes Lara has a web value of $2.6 billion, according to Forbes.