Allan Maman watches numbers the way sports fans watch scores. When the World Cup kicked off in the U.S. this summer, Kalshi’s chief marketing officer was refreshing his dashboards hourly, and within 72 to 96 hours of the opening matches, he had seen enough: the company had badly underestimated the tournament. Organic signups were surging. Volume was spiking. The pre-tournament playbook — billboards across the country, ad deals with Jose Mourinho, Luka Modric, and nearly a dozen former national team players — was performing fine, but something bigger was happening.
“We pivoted away [from] our evergreen strategy to basically be all in on World Cup,” Maman told me in an interview last week.
