He helped build DraftKings into a giant. Now he can’t stop tweeting about Kalshi. This week, Matt Kalish tells the Business of Betting podcast why.
If you’ve been anywhere near gambling Twitter the last few weeks, you’ve seen it: The DraftKings co-founder, freshly retired from the company, lighting up the timeline with one critique after another of Kalshi. The Business of Betting podcast got Kalish on to find out what set him off — and why he continues to beat the drum.
The short version? Well, it’s not because the letters of his last name can be rearranged to spell Kalshi. The critiques originated with a golf bet. Kalish, on vacation in Mexico, decided to try Kalshi during the PGA Championship. What happened to his money next surprised him, and “not in a good way,” as he puts it. From there, he says, every stone he turned over revealed something stranger. “I almost feel like I’m a detective,” he says.
Kalish isn’t anti-exchange. He thinks the product should exist. His beef is narrower, sharper, and aimed squarely at how he says one company markets to regular people — the same regular people, he argues, who don’t stand a chance against the Wall Street machines on the other side of their bets.
His message to Kalshi: “Don’t market to me [that] this is some nice sportsbook app I can just download and bet anything in 50 states and just put me into the meat grinder like that. That’s crazy.”
The podcast digs into the “shark tank,” why the DFS playbook should have been a warning rather than a template, and one game: If Kalish were handed the Kalshi CEO job tomorrow, what’s the first thing he’d kill? His answer is immediate.
Plus: his pivot to Hardscope, and where he thinks this whole story ends.
The full episode is live right here:
