A 30-Year-Old Billionaire Says Avoid This Common Startup Trap

As a teenager, Luana Lopes Lara studied ballet at the Bolshoi Theater School in Brazil. Competition was cutthroat; students sometimes tried to sabotage each other by hiding glass fragments in each other’s shoes. She attended technical school in the morning, then went to ballet training from the afternoon to the night. 

“Since I was very little, I wanted to do big things,” Lopes Lara said in a recent episode of the podcast Confession with Ali Partovi. 

That discipline laid the foundation for Lopes Lara’s later success. Now, at 30 years old, the entrepreneur is the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, unseating pop star Taylor Swift and tech billionaire Lucy Guo in December 2025 to claim the title. Lopes Lara has a net worth of $2.6 billion, according to Forbes. 

She made her fortune by co-founding Kalshi, a prediction market exchange where users can buy and sell yes-or-no contracts based on real-world future events, such as elections, economic data, weather and sports. Lopes Lara is working towards a future where people can essentially bet 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 site. 

The common trap

Lopes Lara said on the podcast that many smart founders fall into a common trap when it comes to starting 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 employees are only thinking 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 started Kalshi

Lopes Lara created Kalshi in 2018 with her co-founder, Tarek Mansour. They both graduated from the school in 2018. Lopes Lara majored in computer science and mathematics, while Mansour majored in electrical engineering, computer science and mathematics. They met because they had classes in common, and Lopes Lara always sat at the front of the class. Mansour wanted to learn from her example, so he started sitting next to her.

Lopes Lara came up with the idea for Kalshi when she was interning at Five Rings, a New York trading firm. She noticed that people on social media were pushing the narrative that reality 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 year. The only problem was that she had nowhere to place the bet. 

In that moment, Lopes Lara identified an opportunity that was bigger than gossip. She found that there were millions of people with firm views about the future, but no outlet for those beliefs.  

Now Kalshi, which addresses that need, is worth a reported $22 billion and growing. 

As a teenager, Luana Lopes Lara studied ballet at the Bolshoi Theater School in Brazil. Competition was cutthroat; students sometimes tried to sabotage each other by hiding glass fragments in each other’s shoes. She attended technical school in the morning, then went to ballet training from the afternoon to the night. 

“Since I was very little, I wanted to do big things,” Lopes Lara said in a recent episode of the podcast Confession with Ali Partovi. 

That discipline laid the foundation for Lopes Lara’s later success. Now, at 30 years old, the entrepreneur is the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, unseating pop star Taylor Swift and tech billionaire Lucy Guo in December 2025 to claim the title. Lopes Lara has a net worth of $2.6 billion, according to Forbes.