How Kalshi runs hundreds of staff without traditional managers

Published: 2026-07-13T10:44:40.000Z

Most companies, once they cross a few hundred employees, quietly accept the arrival of middle managers and layers of approval. Kalshi has decided to resist all of that on purpose, running a flat structure where its two founders hold roughly 150 direct reports.

Most companies, once they cross a few hundred employees, quietly accept the arrival of middle managers, org charts and layers of approval. Kalshi has decided to resist all of that on purpose. The prediction-market platform, now valued at around 22 billion dollars, runs a deliberately flat structure in which co-founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara collectively hold roughly 150 direct reports, with very little hierarchy in between. Speaking on Sequoia Capital's podcast, Mansour cheerfully described the arrangement as unusual and even chaotic, and framed that chaos not as a flaw to be fixed but as the entire point. His reasoning is about speed. In a business that lurches with regulatory rulings, sporting calendars and sudden market opportunities, Mansour argues that the ability to reorganise instantly, with no friction, is worth more than the tidy accountability a management layer provides. A traditional hierarchy coordinates large teams but also slows them, since every decision filters up and down through intermediaries. By keeping most of the company reporting directly to the two founders, Kalshi trades that predictability for adaptability, betting that a structure loose enough to constantly rearrange itself will outmaneuver rivals bogged down in process. Some functions are left largely to run themselves, but the center of gravity remains the founders. Part of what makes the model work is a deliberate division of labor between the two. Mansour concentrates on big-picture strategy while Lara handles day-to-day operations, and the pair have institutionalized disagreement, routinely taking opposite sides of an argument by design to stress-test decisions. Mansour is disarmingly candid that none of this comes from a playbook, joking that he and Lara are entrepreneurially illiterate, that they have not read all the books or watched all the podcasts, and that he is essentially making it up as he goes. Whether the approach survives continued growth is the open question, since even admirers of flat structures concede that founder attention is finite, and a company scaling fast can only route so much through two people before something has to give. The model resonates well beyond New York, and the Gulf's startup scene has a particular stake in the debate. As Saudi Arabia and the UAE pour capital into homegrown ventures under Vision 2030 and their own tech strategies, founders across the region face the same crossroads Kalshi is navigating, namely when to trade the raw speed of a flat team for the coordination of formal management. Family-office and founder-led cultures common in the Gulf often favor exactly this kind of direct, centralized control. Kalshi's experiment offers regional entrepreneurs a live case study in how far a company can scale before the absence of managers stops being an advantage and starts becoming a ceiling.