Alfred Lin

Was a true honor to sit down with @WalterIsaacson for The Builders podcast out this morning We are at an unusual inflection point in history and there are so many reasons to be excited for the future with superintelligence almost here

Who’s the best poker player in AI? We’re about to find out. The No Limit Charity Cup is Sunday, 11/15 in SF. $50K per seat. Founders and top players from @Etched, @Factory, @appliedcompute, @DoorDash, @fal, @Profound, @getserval, @sailresearchco, @conwayinc and more go head to head, with proceeds going to @khanacademy. Think you’ve got what it takes? We still have a few seats for partner companies to send a delegate to compete. Want to come watch? DM me. Bragging rights on the line. Thanks to our partners: @citsecurities @OpenAI.

Nominal just raised $240M at a $3B valuation. Engineers today are building some of the most ambitious machines humanity has ever seen. They should have AI that’s purpose-built for them. We started Nominal with a simple observation, that hardware teams needed better ways to work with test data and make decisions from it. Over the past four years, we’ve built software that understands the complex realities of hardware development. Now we’re building the Hardware Intelligence Platform that gives engineers increased visibility into complex physical systems, helps them make better decisions, and ultimately gets their products into the real world faster. It brings together the systems, data, intelligence, and applications hardware engineering requires to meet the AI moment. Our Series C was led by @Lightspeedvp and co-led by @Insightpartners, with participation from Lux Capital, Sequoia, General Catalyst, Founders Fund, Avenir, Lockheed Martin Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, M13, DE Shaw Ventures, Deployment Capital, Avra, Red Glass Ventures, Carpenter Capital, Audacious, PSP, Overmatch Ventures, XYZ, Haystack, and Brave Capital. Thank you to our customers, partners, team, and every hardware engineer building on Nominal. Read more here → nominal.io/blog/series-c

Single stock perps (SSPs) are here. And they're a truly great product. You don’t need to pay rollover fees like with futures, they’re simpler to trade than options, and you can go short just as easy as you can go long. This is one of the most consequential products we’ve launched and I couldn’t be more proud of the team that worked for over a year to bring them to life. Just this morning, since the stealth launch, our users traded over $300m. Grateful to be the ones bringing these to America in a regulated way 💚

Last night, the power to decide what America sees changed hands. I have spent a ton of time in DC over the last few months. The elites were certain the markets were off. I heard many variants of “no chance markets are right about X” and “I’ve been in politics for a decade. ‘These people’ don’t really know much.” Last night, ‘these people’ beat the elites. Prediction market favorites won 479 of the first 487 races. That’s 98%. The elites live in a bubble. They theorize, write, ideate, and mistake credentials for an understanding of lives they’ve never lived. They don’t see and feel what the everyday man, on the ground, sees and feels. Knowledge is not exclusive to the elites but scattered across millions of people. Someone knows their hometown better than any national pundit. Someone has followed a local race passionately for months. Someone has followed a local race dispassionately for months. Someone notices a shift in their community before it makes the headlines. Someone is shaped by an incident at work. Someone is shaped by what’s getting harder or easier for their families. Each holds a piece of the picture that no expert can see in full. And for the longest time, that knowledge had no way to reach the rest of the world. For generations, election night meant turning on the TV and waiting for a handful of people to tell you what happened. Prediction markets change that. You don't need a title, a large following, or an editor to publish you. All you need is a perspective and the conviction to back it. That changes who holds power over information. Anyone can see the market. Anyone can contribute to it. Anyone can question it. No title gives you the final word. No gatekeepers can filter your view. Sometimes the signal can be wrong. But anyone can challenge the consensus and improve it. And when people consolidate their knowledge together, something remarkable happens: millions of individual perspectives become a signal that we all can learn from. Over the last few months, the people showed up on Kalshi to tell the world what they were going to do. Last night, the megaphone was passed to them.

Kalshi just raised an additional $1B, valuing the company at $40B. This will help us expand into stocks, compute, indices, and institutional. Tomorrow marks 8 years since we got accepted into YC and the journey began. The odds of a kid from Lebanon getting here were pretty low. Growing up there was great, but very challenging. We went through war. We had bombs explode in front of my house. I watched brilliant people’s lives destroyed for reasons beyond their control. Lebanon is an unpredictable country. That unpredictability made it hard to plan for success. And yet despite it all, my mom sacrificed everything to give me and my brother the chance to go back to the US. I found my refuge in two things: anime and math. Especially math. I loved math because it calmed me. It was the opposite of unpredictable: clear, deterministic, orderly, and consistent. The proof is either right or wrong. I find that elegant and beautiful. I was lucky. I made it to my dream school, MIT (largely thanks to my mom), and my love for math quickly translated to a love for statistics, probability, and markets. I love markets for a lot of the same reasons. Their incentives are clear: you get rewarded for being right and for pursuing knowledge. They are effective weighting machines for people’s opinions. They provide an incentive to be truthful, because they separate good information from bad information. They let people challenge the consensus and be rewarded for being right. IMO, Hayek, Surowiecki, Hanson, Tetlock were the founding fathers of prediction markets. The more I read them, the more obsessed I got with the idea of applying market-based pricing to more things. Markets bring rigor and critical thinking to more questions. And in an increasingly polarized and information-positioned word, I believe we need that more than ever. Markets would also let people predict and manage more things outside of their control. And the world was becoming increasingly more unpredictable, and more like Lebanon, not less. That love for markets got Luana and me to build Kalshi. At first, it was mostly an idea we couldn’t stop talking about. We didn’t have much money. Luana’s sister bought the Kalshi domain name for us (for ~$1.7k). We moved to SF to get started, and embarked on a long, uncertain journey to build a regulated exchange. The paranoia and anxiety from my childhood never left me. Even when things are going well, I think about what could go wrong. When people trust you with their money, that instinct serves a purpose. I wanted us to build something that would hold up under pressure. The first principle we defined at the company: regulatory-first. We worked with regulators for years before we listed a single market. We took every step to do things the right way and always asked for approval before proceeding. It was very hard at times, especially when we were being overtaken by competitors, but we believe doing things the right way matters. Luana and I aren’t the only ones. Our team put years of their lives into something far from certain. That’s especially true of Lior, Brandon, Rainer, Luis, Xavier, and Josef, who stuck with us for years. They believed when there was little to point to. And they stuck with us no matter how long it took. Kalshi is the result of an arduous journey through a long desert where, at times, most people didn’t understand why we were making the walk. Many people still don’t understand what we’re doing and some disagree with us. Markets have historically taken time to be understood and accepted by some. But while not always obvious, their benefits are vast: capital markets help allocate capital and derivative markets help predict and manage uncertainty. I firmly believe in these benefits, and that’s why I am dedicating my life to building this market. Markets have caused issues many times in the past, and they certainly can present harms (manipulation, insiders, and addictive behaviors). These harms are more acute for certain types of markets (sports, short-term options, etc.) than others. It’s why I believe that guardrails need to exist and why we have taken the approach we have taken. We have consistently prioritized thinking critically about the risks and building the appropriate safeguards, sometimes beyond what the regulators require us to do. Many believe more needs to be done, and that’s a conversation I welcome. Over time, I believe more people will see what we see: markets can help us get smarter and manage the future with more rigor, more precision, and more certainty than we have today. To our tens of millions of users: you have made Kalshi bigger than anything Luana and I could have possibly imagined. Thank you for trusting us and thank you for coming along on the journey. I feel a strong responsibility to build a company worthy of that trust. I am so lucky to spend my life building something I love. I hope everyone finds something they care about that much. Something that keeps you curious. Something that pushes you to your limits. Something that may put you at odds with the status quo. Something worth the hard days. For me, it’s still markets. The more I learn, the more I want to understand.

Today we’re announcing the $600M Formation Bio Drug Development Accelerator Fund. @lintaho and I started @FormationBio because we believed the biggest bottleneck in bringing new medicines to patients wasn’t drug discovery, but drug development. As AI dramatically accelerates discovery, that bottleneck is only becoming more acute. Without the capital and capacity to advance promising drugs through clinical trials, much of that progress won’t translate into medicines for patients. Our new Fund brings together dedicated capital, drug development expertise, and AI-powered development capabilities to acquire promising drugs and advance them through the clinic.