Prediction market platform Kalshi has surged to a $22 billion valuation in recent years, but its 30-year-old CEO Tarek Mansour says the key to that success was ignoring conventional business wisdom rather than following it.

"The worst advice that most people get is that you should go and seek out a bunch of advice. There's really no recipe to any of this stuff," Mansour told The New York Times in a recent interview. "People are over-reliant on advice, and people love giving advice because it makes them feel smart and powerful. It's usually mostly trash."

Mansour and cofounder Luana Lopes Lara have built Kalshi into a platform with four million active users, becoming self-made billionaires along the way with estimated net worths of approximately $2.6 billion each.

When it comes to running the company, Mansour says he has learned primarily by doing—deliberately avoiding management books and podcasts.

"I have a lot of, I'm gonna make it up as I go," he said during an appearance on a Sequoia Capital podcast last month.

"Both of us, we're probably very sort of entrepreneurially illiterate," Mansour said of himself and Lopes Lara. "We haven't read all the books, we haven't watched all the podcasts."

From MIT Classmates to Billionaire Finance Disruptors

Mansour and Lopes Lara met as classmates at MIT. With companies including Goldman Sachs, Palantir, Citadel, and Bridgewater Associates on their collective résumés, both appeared destined for lucrative careers in established tech and finance institutions.

Instead, less than a year after graduating, they founded Kalshi in 2018. The initial concept was a financial exchange where users could buy and sell contracts tied to real-world event outcomes.

The early years proved difficult. Kalshi encountered significant regulatory hurdles while seeking approval for its novel business model, and Mansour acknowledged there were numerous moments when he considered quitting.

"Every day you wake up and you're like, 'What am I doing?'" he recalled.

In 2020, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission approved Kalshi as a financial exchange, making it the first platform of its kind authorized to offer event contracts directly to U.S. retail investors. The platform later won approval in 2024 to offer contracts tied to U.S. election outcomes—a category that drew mainstream attention to prediction markets broadly during a high-profile election cycle, as rival platforms such as Polymarket also reported surging trading volumes. Since then, the company's growth has been exponential: Kalshi was valued at $2 billion in June 2025 before soaring to $22 billion by May 2026. Earlier this summer, the Financial Times reported that Kalshi was exploring a new funding round that could value the company at $40 billion.

If pressed to offer guidance to other aspiring founders, Mansour's message is straightforward: take risks.

"Try as much as you can to take as much risk as you can," he said—before adding a caveat consistent with his general skepticism of advice: "don't take my advice as gospel."

Kalshi Faces a Potential $36 Billion Penalty from New York

Mansour's appetite for risk has also drawn scrutiny. Kalshi currently faces allegations of insider trading and criticism that its contracts effectively constitute gambling.

Last week, New York filed a lawsuit against Kalshi accusing the company of operating an unlicensed gambling platform. The state is requesting civil penalties of $100,000 for each unauthorized sports-betting offer, which the filing estimates could total approximately $36 billion.

The case highlights a broader unresolved tension in U.S. regulation: the CFTC oversees derivatives and futures markets at the federal level, while individual states retain authority over gambling within their borders. How event contracts are classified—financial instruments or wagers—remains contested, and the outcome of state-level challenges like New York's could shape the regulatory landscape for the entire prediction market sector.

Speaking on CNBC the day after the lawsuit was filed, Mansour defended Kalshi, stating the company operates under federal regulations.

"I think the more interesting thing that's at play here is that you have an industry, the prediction market industry, that is disruptive, that is growing fast, consumers are adopting it, and it's threatening a legacy incumbent industry that is unhappy about that," he said.

Kalshi declined Fortune's request for further comment.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.