Among the many Lebanese youths that are striving in the diaspora, the Lebanese-American Tarek Mansour is breaking all the barriers in the tech world.
Mansour, age 25, holds a B.Sc and M.Sc in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
He is the co-founder and CEO of the New York-based platform Kalshi, a platform that allows investors to place bets on future events, such as how many Americans will receive the Covid-19 vaccine.
Mansour used to work at Goldman Sachs, a leading global investment banking and investment management firm.
While in that job, according to Forbes magazine, his clients wanted to hedge their investments during Brexit but he did not have a direct way to do so.
That led him in 2018 to start the platform Kalshi (meaning “everything” in Arabic) with MIT alumna, Luana Lopes Lara.
The most challenging part was getting regulatory approval, but as luck would have it, the start-up became the first to be regulated as a financial platform by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in November 2020.
Numerous billionaires jumped in to invest in Kalshi, which raised $36 million since its launching in July 2021.
In 2022, Tarek Mansour was featured on the 10th edition of the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
Among the 5 other Lebanese featured on the prestigious list, Mansour was the youngest of the selection, and one of the standouts.
Related: Meet The 6 Lebanese On Forbes’ 30 Under 30 List 2022.
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