Following in the footsteps of Taylor Swift and Scale AI’s Lucy Guo, Luana Lopes Lara has just been crowned the world’s youngest female self-made billionaire thanks to her prediction market startup, Kalshi, reaching an $11 billion valuation.
But before Wall Street even knew her name, she was training to be a professional ballerina in Rio, where she endured brutal 13-hour days.
According to a recent Forbes profile, her ballet teachers at Bolshoi Theater School in Brazil held lit cigarettes under her thigh to test how long she could hold it up to her ear, without getting burned.
She’d sit through academic classes from 7 a.m. to noon before training in ballet classes from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m., while also fighting off competition from fellow dancers who’d reportedly hide glass shards in each other’s shoes to sabotage one another.
After finally graduating in 2013, she spent nine months in Austria as a professional ballerina, before giving it all up to start again and study at MIT—this time, chasing her even bigger dream: to be the next Steve Jobs.
This millennial founder built an $11 billion startup in just six years
Just like Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, and Larry Page, Lopes Lara would meet her future business partner, Tarek Mansour, at college. The two became close after he began sitting next to her in class to learn from her.
Lopes Lara would spend her summers working as an intern, including at Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates and Ken Griffin’s Citadel Securities. But it was a third internship with Mansour at Five Rings Capital in New York City in 2018 that cemented their friendship—and future as founders.
It was on their walk back home to their intern apartments one night that the idea of a prediction market business—which allows users to bet on the outcome of events such as elections, sports matches, and pop culture happenings—was born.
Following a successful pitch to venture capital firm Y Combinator’s startup accelerator a year later, Kalshi became in 2020 the first federally regulated prediction market platform after receiving Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) approval.
Now, six years after the company was founded, Kalshi raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation—pushing Lopes Lara and Mansour, who each own an estimated 12%, into the billionaire club before hitting 30 years old.
Behind many successful women is a sport, research reveals
It’s not just her internship experience, clear intelligence, or even serendipity that got Lopes Lara to the top of the tech world—research suggests her experience in the dance studio could have had a helping hand.
Despite the age-old cliché that jocks and cheerleaders peak in high school, with the nerds, meanwhile, getting the last laugh—perhaps by going on to become a Fortune 500 CEO—athletic students are ironically more likely to land an MBA, higher salaries, and corner office jobs.
And that’s especially true for women. Research from EY shows that nearly all women in the C-suite (a staggering 94%) are former athletes.
“The only correlation they can find of women in the C-suite, the CEO spot, is that they all played sport—or the majority played sport,” Melinda French Gates previously highlighted. “And the thesis is they didn’t mind failing.”
“You step out of bounds playing soccer, you go right back to it. You lose the tennis match sometimes. You learn to fail and that failing is okay.”
Execs previously told Fortune that playing sports growing up taught them confidence, teamwork, discipline, and more.
As an a16z partner, Alex Immerman told Forbes: “There are few better trainings for being told ‘no’ and pushing through anyway than being a professional ballerina—an injury or even a short rest could mean losing your spot.
“Luana learned persistence with grace early on … and she’s carried that same calm confidence into building Kalshi.”
