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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.”
