Luana Lopes Lara co-founded Kalshi, arguably the most controversial startup in America right now. The company is fighting legal battles across 19 states, has faced cease-and-desist orders in at least 11, and has even been hit with criminal wagering charges. And yet, in eleven months, Kalshi went from a $2B valuation to $22B. In August, Kalshi traded roughly 5x Polymarket’s volume, commanding more than 80% of the combined market. With a marketing team of just 15 people, it outdid(!!) Nike at the World Cup and turned @RealChalamet into the face of the tournament’s #1-performing ad. Building a company like Kalshi requires an extreme tolerance for pain and a degree of conviction that can look like delusion. Or, as @mansourtarek_ puts it: you need to have the dawg in you. @luanalopeslara has it. No sane founder spends two years fighting for a company’s right to exist, only to turn around and sue the regulator that finally granted it. Without Luana pushing Kalshi through that fight, it might have remained a licensed experiment without the capital, liquidity, or market power to pursue its real ambition: becoming the exchange where anything about the future can be traded. I spent months researching Luana alongside @Anastasia_ELW, an early-stage investor building @jointhebridge: speaking with people who worked with and backed her, poring over every recorded interview and written account I could find, and tracing the CFTC’s paper trail. Ana and I wanted to understand how Luana keeps pulling off things that look impossible from the outside. Where did her appetite for impossible bets come from? Why does she keep choosing the steeper mountain? And why have the people around her learned not to bet against her? This is the person behind one of America’s most audacious companies. SideDoors presents Luana Lopes Lara: the founder behind Kalshi’s most impossible bets. sidedoors.co/p/luana-lopes-l…