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Daniel Dae Kim, the actor, is walking Jimmy Fallon through the finer points of somaek, a popular Korean drink that mixes beer with the spirit soju. “Like a boilermaker,” Kim says on The Tonight Show, where he’s promoting his CNN series K-Everything. As with most drinking cultures around the world, there are rules. The youngest person should pour, though Kim, 58, takes up the job on Fallon’s behalf.

He perches a pair of Korean flat metal chopsticks in parallel lines over a half-full beer glass; the shot glass of clear soju rests on top. What happens next is fast: They slam the table in unison, and the vibrations send the shot into the beer. They grab their glasses, clink, shout the Korean cheers, “Geonbae!,” and down ’em in one. It’s a soju bomb, featuring a tall bottle of Terra beer and a sky blue bottle of Jinro soju.

For the Korean alcohol heavyweight HiteJinro, which owns both brands, the scene was a moment of pure, earned-media bliss. Kim had summed up in a few minutes what makes Jinro—a brand that’s ubiquitous in Korea and increasingly recognizable here—the world’s top-selling spirit brand by volume: the communal ritual of sharing a bottle.

Alcohol consumption in the U.S. has been on a steady decline amid changing consumer habits and rising inflation. The proportion of U.S. adults who report drinking alcohol dropped from 62% in 2023 to 54% last year. But soju—typically made by fermenting rice into wine and then distilling it into a clear, neutral-flavored spirit—is a bright spot for the industry.

Soju represents just 1% of U.S. spirit sales volume, according to Koryn Ternes, consulting director at the alcohol industry research firm IWSR Americas, but “it’s gaining a lot of traction.” Sales volume grew 30% in the last year, and IWSR predicts a compound annual growth rate of 14% from 2025 to 2030, compared to a 1% decline in total U.S. spirits sales volume over that same period.

Jinro, Korea’s oldest brand of soju, has long been the go-to bottle among Korean people. Now, it’s aiming for global dominance. In 2024, the brand declared its intention to reach 500 billion South Korean won, or about $323 million, in international sales by 2030. HiteJinro made progress on this goal in 2025, expanding export revenue by 6.7% year over year to 192 billion won ($136 million), while taking in roughly $1.5 billion domestically, on a nonconsolidated basis. But with the spirit’s rising popularity abroad, it’s facing increasing competition on the shelves of global liquor stores.

Jinro will also have to thread the cultural needle between its Korean roots and Western ambitions. The company is riding the ever-growing K-wave, which has brought K-beauty, K-pop, and K-dramas (where its products are ubiquitous) into the mainstream. But that wave tends to both change and be changed by its expansion. The members of the K-pop group BTS, for example, have to consider the balance of English lyrics versus Korean ones in their songs, and streamers like Netflix will create full English dubs of K-dramas for viewers disinclined to overcome what the Korean director Bong-Joon Ho has called the “one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles.”

For Jinro, success might mean non-Korean customers taking the rituals and traditions associated with the drink and making them their own. “We really want to keep that Korean-culture-based, authentic soju image,” says Kaya Kim, marketing manager at Jinro America, “but at the same time, make it more fun and bring in some modern ways.”

Soju’s rise in America coincides with a larger shift in drinking habits. Its relatively low alcohol by volume, generally between 12% and 25% depending on the brand (compared to standard 80-proof vodka’s 40%), appeals to drinkers increasingly looking for lower-proof spirits.

Ternes notes that its ABV makes it more accessible in the U.S., where liquor laws vary between states. Soju-based cocktails can also be a workaround for restaurants without a liquor license; the low ABV makes soju more akin to wine. The spirit is also traditionally sold in small, 375-milliliter (12-ounce) bottles, situating it well in a market led by canned cocktails and malt beverages.

And then there’s the culture that surrounds the drink. “It’s typically associated with socializing, with fun events, with games,” Ternes says. “That’s a big part of why a lot of U.S., especially younger, consumers are engaging with the category. But I think that there’s still such a lack of awareness of what it is, how to get it, how to drink it, what the differences are.”

Traditionally, drinking soju in Korea has its own set of guidelines. In addition to pouring for your elders, you should hold the bottle with both hands. Often, opening the bottle itself is a ritual—the pourer shakes it to create a soju tornado, then taps it on their elbow or with the palm of their hand before unscrewing the lid and flicking the neck to send soju flying. That particular practice is based on the post-Korean War necessity to remove bits of cheap cork from the bottom of bottles.

Irene Yoo, chef and co-owner of the Orion Bar, a Korean-American establishment in Brooklyn, outlines many of these traditions in her 2025 book Soju Party, which won a James Beard Media Award. Yoo’s book also offers recipes for cocktails and various snacks, noodles, and stews that pair well with soju. “In Korean culture, you would never be drinking without also having food,” she says.

Jinro’s seemingly expected presence in Korean restaurants is one of the key ways that it’s reaching customers. At Yoo’s Bar—where a neon Jinro sign on the wall lights up one corner—the brand is sold by both the shot and the bottle, alongside higher-end brands.

Jinro is taking a similarly organic approach to social media, which the brand largely uses as a listening tool to identify people and communities already talking about it. Despite working with only about a dozen influencers, mostly culture and food content creators based in the U.S., Jinro’s social impressions have grown from 1.7 million to more than 9.3 million since 2024. Engagements have more than tripled.

“More people are discovering our brand naturally, by Instagram or social media, by creators, at restaurants when they’re having Korean food,” says Kim, the Jinro America marketing manager. “This signals that we’re moving beyond awareness and into the real adoption period.” As that happens, she says, “Jinro is becoming part of people’s own social occasions and traditions, and not just something that they only associate with Korean culture.”

When Jinro works directly with influencers, Kim says the brand is intentional about fitting into a creator’s existing affinity for the spirit. Kenny Song, a YouTuber and foodie with millions of followers who tune into his cinematically shot and edited “dramatic cooking videos,” started working with Jinro last year, but he’s been a longtime fan. “All throughout college, I was always drinking it,” Song says. In the video for their first collaboration, last year, Song cooks an expansive meal—including spicy ramen, braised pork belly, and dumplings—only to “realize” he’s made too much for one person. Friends assemble at the table, Song pours Jinro in flavors like strawberry and peach, glasses clink.

The brand is starting to take bigger swings with influencers, too. It recently named Kim Taehyung, a BTS member known by his stage name, V, as its first global ambassador, promoting Jinro’s flagship Green Grape flavor. Jinro will also sell limited-edition K-pop bottles of Green Grape that feature its iconic toad mascot in BTS-style leather jackets.

When I visited Seoul earlier this year, I was surprised to find that most Koreans don’t drink the flavored soju that has hydrated many a night of Korean BBQ and karaoke with my friends in New York City. Koreans prefer combinations like plain soju and soda water. Yoo says flavored soju is something young people in Korea might drink when they’re discovering alcohol, but otherwise it’s not often purchased. “It’s like peach schnapps or Malibu,” Yoo says, adding that Americans still “have very immature palates” when it comes to soju.

That makes flavored soju an easy sell in the United States. Across the board, says Ternes at IWSR Americas, American “consumers are much more loyal to specific flavors than to a brand.”

HiteJinro’s earnings show growing global demand for flavored soju. While overseas sales of plain soju grew by 6.5% between 2023 and 2025, exports of “other refined liquors”—a South Korean product classification that includes flavored soju—increased 22% in the same period.

Jinro has historically offered five flavors in addition to its classic bottles: Green Grape, Grapefruit, Strawberry, Plum, and Peach. But its biggest Korean competitors offer more: Soonhari has nine (including Yogurt), and Good Day (from the Korean distillery Muhak) has at least a dozen. Kim acknowledges that Jinro has been losing shelf space in the U.S. as a result.

It’s starting to catch up, though. Last year, it released Jinro Lemon, and this spring it rolled out a limited-edition Jinro Melon. So far, Melon has outstripped Lemon in sales, which surprised Kim, who thought lemon-flavored soju might evoke something like the zest of biting into a lime after a shot of tequila. Jinro Melon soju, however, fits more closely with flavor profiles in Korean snack products.

The melon flavor “is similar to the Korean ice cream bar Melona,” says Song, who promoted the flavor’s new bottle label on Instagram. “It’s a unique taste that I haven’t tasted anywhere else [in the U.S.].” As interest in soju grows, the most successful brands might end up being the ones that offer flavors that feel both exciting and in line with their Korean roots.

Soju’s heavy hitters will also have to contend with non-Korean brands. In spring 2026, the German discount grocery chain Aldi launched a peach-flavored soju, with a green bottle and label that mimics the look of Korean imports. Arlin Zajmi, director of national buying for adult beverages at Aldi USA, says the company decided to move into soju after seeing the fanfare around everything from KPop Demon Hunters to real-life K-pop groups. “Soju has been flying off the shelves,” Zajmi says over email. The grocer has new flavors planned for 2027.

In the face of this competition, Jinro has been positioning itself where American and Korean cultures meet. It does some paid promotion in K-dramas, though Kim says the lion’s share of Jinro’s screen time is organic. It sponsors music festivals, including L.A.’s Head in the Clouds, which focuses on Asian artists. Jinro also has a presence at Dodger Stadium, capitalizing on the team’s longtime connection to Korean-American Angelenos. All of this, Kim says, stems from HiteJinro’s focus on showing consumers where it can be part of their lifestyle.

“The brand isn’t trying to become something different for every market. Instead, it’s finding different ways for people to discover the same Jinro,” Kim says. “Some people are introduced to Jinro through Korean food, others through K-pop, K-dramas, nightlife, karaoke, or even a creator they follow online. The entry points may be different, but the heart of the brand stays the same.”

The brand’s heart may not be changing, but its packaging is. Over the past few years, Jinro has slowly tweaked the label of its flavored soju to make the Korean hangul letters smaller and the English bigger. One iteration of the label removed the Korean entirely, but Kim says HiteJinro wanted to keep some hangul. “It is a Korean brand, and we didn’t want to lose that authenticity.”

Staying silent can hide your value, but bragging can alienate people. An executive coach offers a better approach.

Prediction markets incentivize truth. Everything else incentivizes clickbait. That’s the core argument Luana Lopes Lara makes for Kalshi, the prediction market platform she co-founded that has gone from $5 billion to $22 billion in valuation in under a year and is now being sued by New York’s attorney general for $36 billion. Lara, the company’s chief operating officer, makes the case that Kalshi is fundamentally different from DraftKings—even though 75% of its volume comes from sports—and shares what Kalshi’s data actually says about the midterms.

This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by former Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.

Kalshi launched in 2021. Last year at this time, Kalshi was valued at $5 billion. I think by early this year, it was up to $22 billion. That scale at that speed—what makes that possible? Is there luck in it?

It’s a great question because actually, though we launched in 2018, right, in a lot of ways it looks like an overnight success. Like it was all up two years ago, and we just started growing a lot around the election. But it was the result of eight years of work. When we started the company, it was very important for us to be legal and regulated from the start, so it took us four years before we could launch the product, launch anything really, or have any users. We worked with the federal government to figure out how to bring prediction markets to the U.S. in a safe and regulated way.

A lot of things helped us grow this much now, but I think it’s the compounded effort that the team has put in for so many years on the tech, on the users, and on talking to them. Then we won the lawsuit against the CFTC [Commodity Futures Trading Commission] to be able to bring a lot more markets to Kalshi. When that happened, the product was ready to really grow and go from there. So I think it’s a mix of both. We were very prepared when our time came.

With that kind of hockey-stick growth, do you have to pinch yourself? Is this totally real? Is there anything about that pace that scares you?

I actually would say it’s a very good thing that it happened so fast because, in a lot of ways, we keep the mentality of being very early stage. I think when companies are compounding at a very normal rate, it’s easier to start thinking, “Oh, I’m a bigger company. I need to hire more people,” and you can start making a lot of mistakes. It can take a long time for you to realize you’re making them. For us, because we grew so fast, our mentality and the way we look at the company haven’t changed as fast.

Because of that, we’re able to operate with far fewer people. We’ve just had to keep going and building the product as fast as we could: early-stage team, early-stage mentality, and very intense work. Keeping speed is the most important thing for startups. You’re definitely right that sometimes we look at the numbers and, two years ago, before the election, we were making way less than 10 million dollars a year.

Now, in a day, we transact way more than we used to in a year just two years ago. It is crazy, the numbers we’re talking about, and we’re very grateful for where we are. But we really try to keep the mentality that we’re still underdogs, and we still have a lot to prove and a lot to grow.

The success you’ve had has put a bull’s-eye on your back. States are coming after you for being an unlicensed gambling operation. A federal appeals court just ruled that Ohio and Tennessee can regulate Kalshi through their gambling laws. Is that kind of an existential threat? New York alone is suing you for $36 billion . . . the state where you’re headquartered.

We are very confident in our legal analysis. Of course, as you said, the appeals court went against us, but we also won the 3rd Circuit. Each of these lawsuits has a different legal thesis. The more important part, if you take a step back, is that the mechanics of how Kalshi operates and how a sportsbook operates are completely different, right? And that’s why they are regulated in different ways. We are federally regulated. We are an exchange, which means you trade against someone else. We don’t set the price. We don’t set the odds. We don’t trade against the users. The users are trading against each other, and we take a transaction fee.

What matters most here is liquidity and making sure we have national liquidity to build on. Imagine if you had the New York Stock Exchange, but you could only buy stocks on the New York Stock Exchange if you were in New York. The prices would be significantly worse. It would not be a liquid market. It would just be worse for every participant, and the market wouldn’t work well.

A sportsbook, on the other hand, operates completely differently. Because we also don’t trade against our users, we don’t make money when users lose. A sportsbook is completely different. Their revenue is equal to customer losses. The more the customers lose, the more money they make. For us, it’s not the same. The incentive is not to make people lose because we don’t make money when people lose.

Because of that as well, we don’t cap our winners. If you go to a sportsbook or casino and start making money, they’ll make sure you cannot participate anymore. We want winners. We want people to come and bring price, and we want price competition. In a sportsbook, there’s no price competition. The sportsbook has a monopoly on the price, and they’re going to put their margins on top because they’re having a bad month, so they make the prices a little worse or whatever. Because of that, they are fundamentally different mechanics and fundamentally different products, and they need to be regulated in different ways, which is how the federal regulation for exchanges developed.

We’re growing a lot because an exchange is a fairer, more accessible, and more transparent way to trade. You can see all the prices. You can see the competition and the order book in real time, and that’s why users like it so much. I think it’s fair that consumers, at the end of the day, pick what’s better for them.

Election polling has become kind of unreliable. What does Kalshi’s current data say about the U.S. midterms? Is that 70% accuracy? Or at what point does it start to move toward 90%?

A poll is top-down, right? It’s some editorial board or someone doing a poll, trying to aggregate the information and just tell people, “This is the number” or “This is the forecast” or “This is what’s going to happen.” But prediction markets are bottom-up, right? We want as many people as possible to do as much research as possible and bring that information to the market. So it is kind of an aggregation of what millions of people are thinking and doing, and I think it’s one of the first times that you really see information that’s actually led by people versus the elites just coming and saying, “This is what’s going to happen.”

With our big markets, like who’s going to take control of the Senate or control of the House, I think it’s as accurate as you’re ever going to get. The other thing we always have to talk about is that probabilities are not certainties, right? When something happens 1% of the time, it doesn’t mean it will never happen. It means that one out of 100 times, it will happen.

An election that’s at a 60% chance of someone winning means there’s still a real chance the other person wins. If I told you if you walk outside right now, there’s a 40% chance you’ll get hit by a bus, you’re not going to walk outside because 40% is pretty high. It’s the same thing. Forty percent does not mean that the person, the underdog, is never going to win. I think that’s kind of a challenge we have on the educational front, which is explaining to people that, different from polling, this is not the same thing.

Polling might say someone is 10 points ahead. In the market, that would probably mean over a 90% chance of someone winning, because they’re very different things. They measure different things, and we need to look at them as probabilities.

Prediction markets incentivize truth. Everything else incentivizes clickbait. That’s the core argument Luana Lopes Lara makes for Kalshi, the prediction market platform she co-founded that has gone from $5 billion to $22 billion in valuation in under a year and is now being sued by New York’s attorney general for $36 billion. Lara, the company’s chief operating officer, makes the case that Kalshi is fundamentally different from DraftKings—even though 75% of its volume comes from sports—and shares what Kalshi’s data actually says about the midterms.

This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by former Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.

Kalshi launched in 2021. Last year at this time, Kalshi was valued at $5 billion. I think by early this year, it was up to $22 billion. That scale at that speed—what makes that possible? Is there luck in it?

It’s a great question because actually, though we launched in 2018, right, in a lot of ways it looks like an overnight success. Like it was all up two years ago, and we just started growing a lot around the election. But it was the result of eight years of work. When we started the company, it was very important for us to be legal and regulated from the start, so it took us four years before we could launch the product, launch anything really, or have any users. We worked with the federal government to figure out how to bring prediction markets to the U.S. in a safe and regulated way.

A lot of things helped us grow this much now, but I think it’s the compounded effort that the team has put in for so many years on the tech, on the users, and on talking to them. Then we won the lawsuit against the CFTC [Commodity Futures Trading Commission] to be able to bring a lot more markets to Kalshi. When that happened, the product was ready to really grow and go from there. So I think it’s a mix of both. We were very prepared when our time came.

With that kind of hockey-stick growth, do you have to pinch yourself? Is this totally real? Is there anything about that pace that scares you?

I actually would say it’s a very good thing that it happened so fast because, in a lot of ways, we keep the mentality of being very early stage. I think when companies are compounding at a very normal rate, it’s easier to start thinking, “Oh, I’m a bigger company. I need to hire more people,” and you can start making a lot of mistakes. It can take a long time for you to realize you’re making them. For us, because we grew so fast, our mentality and the way we look at the company haven’t changed as fast.

Because of that, we’re able to operate with far fewer people. We’ve just had to keep going and building the product as fast as we could: early-stage team, early-stage mentality, and very intense work. Keeping speed is the most important thing for startups. You’re definitely right that sometimes we look at the numbers and, two years ago, before the election, we were making way less than 10 million dollars a year.

Now, in a day, we transact way more than we used to in a year just two years ago. It is crazy, the numbers we’re talking about, and we’re very grateful for where we are. But we really try to keep the mentality that we’re still underdogs, and we still have a lot to prove and a lot to grow.

The success you’ve had has put a bull’s-eye on your back. States are coming after you for being an unlicensed gambling operation. A federal appeals court just ruled that Ohio and Tennessee can regulate Kalshi through their gambling laws. Is that kind of an existential threat? New York alone is suing you for $36 billion . . . the state where you’re headquartered.

We are very confident in our legal analysis. Of course, as you said, the appeals court went against us, but we also won the 3rd Circuit. Each of these lawsuits has a different legal thesis. The more important part, if you take a step back, is that the mechanics of how Kalshi operates and how a sportsbook operates are completely different, right? And that’s why they are regulated in different ways. We are federally regulated. We are an exchange, which means you trade against someone else. We don’t set the price. We don’t set the odds. We don’t trade against the users. The users are trading against each other, and we take a transaction fee.

What matters most here is liquidity and making sure we have national liquidity to build on. Imagine if you had the New York Stock Exchange, but you could only buy stocks on the New York Stock Exchange if you were in New York. The prices would be significantly worse. It would not be a liquid market. It would just be worse for every participant, and the market wouldn’t work well.

A sportsbook, on the other hand, operates completely differently. Because we also don’t trade against our users, we don’t make money when users lose. A sportsbook is completely different. Their revenue is equal to customer losses. The more the customers lose, the more money they make. For us, it’s not the same. The incentive is not to make people lose because we don’t make money when people lose.

Because of that as well, we don’t cap our winners. If you go to a sportsbook or casino and start making money, they’ll make sure you cannot participate anymore. We want winners. We want people to come and bring price, and we want price competition. In a sportsbook, there’s no price competition. The sportsbook has a monopoly on the price, and they’re going to put their margins on top because they’re having a bad month, so they make the prices a little worse or whatever. Because of that, they are fundamentally different mechanics and fundamentally different products, and they need to be regulated in different ways, which is how the federal regulation for exchanges developed.

We’re growing a lot because an exchange is a fairer, more accessible, and more transparent way to trade. You can see all the prices. You can see the competition and the order book in real time, and that’s why users like it so much. I think it’s fair that consumers, at the end of the day, pick what’s better for them.

Election polling has become kind of unreliable. What does Kalshi’s current data say about the U.S. midterms? Is that 70% accuracy? Or at what point does it start to move toward 90%?

A poll is top-down, right? It’s some editorial board or someone doing a poll, trying to aggregate the information and just tell people, “This is the number” or “This is the forecast” or “This is what’s going to happen.” But prediction markets are bottom-up, right? We want as many people as possible to do as much research as possible and bring that information to the market. So it is kind of an aggregation of what millions of people are thinking and doing, and I think it’s one of the first times that you really see information that’s actually led by people versus the elites just coming and saying, “This is what’s going to happen.”

With our big markets, like who’s going to take control of the Senate or control of the House, I think it’s as accurate as you’re ever going to get. The other thing we always have to talk about is that probabilities are not certainties, right? When something happens 1% of the time, it doesn’t mean it will never happen. It means that one out of 100 times, it will happen.

An election that’s at a 60% chance of someone winning means there’s still a real chance the other person wins. If I told you if you walk outside right now, there’s a 40% chance you’ll get hit by a bus, you’re not going to walk outside because 40% is pretty high. It’s the same thing. Forty percent does not mean that the person, the underdog, is never going to win. I think that’s kind of a challenge we have on the educational front, which is explaining to people that, different from polling, this is not the same thing.

Polling might say someone is 10 points ahead. In the market, that would probably mean over a 90% chance of someone winning, because they’re very different things. They measure different things, and we need to look at them as probabilities.