“Whatever you do, do not do this.”
That’s what one of Ben Lamm’s longtime backers told him when he explained the vision behind his new startup, Colossal Biosciences: to bring back a famous, and famously extinct, animal species: the woolly mammoth.
“You’re just burned out. Go and take a vacation,” the investor pleaded. “I’ll fund the next thing, but this is crazy, and you’re gonna completely ruin your career.”
Lamm, of course, didn’t listen. But he did spend six months, and one million dollars of his own money earned building and selling a handful of other startups in gaming, software, and AI, to stress test his plan with the scientific community. All roads kept going back to one legendary geneticist often compared to a real-life version of the genius (or mad) scientist working with dinosaur DNA in Jurassic Park, Harvard’s George Church.
And Church didn’t think it was crazy. The race to bring back the woolly mammoth was on.
That was in 2021. Today, Colossal’s building a ‘de-extinction’ empire. The Texas-based Lamm employs more than 260 scientists, with 95 more as advisors, and 60 people in a lab in Melbourne alone, where he’s working with the Australian government to bring back the Tasmanian tiger.
He’s also helping Mauritius revive the dodo, and restoring the red wolf population in America’s southeast. Elsewhere in the U.S., at a 2,000 acre, secret preserve to keep them away from Game Of Thrones fans, Colossal is raising three dire wolves: Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi – and Lamm hints there may be more.
“To build a generational company, we’re trying to crawl, walk, run in this process,” Lamm says.
Colossal is already valued at more than $10 billion, and is reportedly in talks to raise now at $23 billion or more. Lamm doesn’t deny such interest on the show, noting that about 30% of Colossal’s investors have found the company through their children’s interest.
But what are investors paying for, exactly? Zooming out even more: say you really could bring back animals like the woolly mammoth – Colossal’s “north star” that will take Lamm longer than he hoped, but where he’s making progress shared in detail on the show. To what purpose? Or more simply: why?
On this Season 3 debut of The Upstarts Podcast, I put all those questions to Lamm. He makes the case for why Colossal can build a big business in a few different ways; why he believes Colossal is doing all of this ethically and responsibly, with the community’s support; why building in biology is so different from software; and why he won’t consider anything short of reviving every targeted species a success.
Plus: We answer the question I know you’re wondering. No, Lamm promises he won’t – and can’t – bring back the dinosaurs.
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We’ve got some amazing founder guests and stories on the podcast this season, but when it comes to head-scratching questions and eye-popping sci-fi brought to real life, it’s hard to top Colossal. We’ll try.
A huge thanks to this season’s premier sponsor, Atlassian, as well as supporting sponsor Chargebee for supporting unfiltered founder interviews like this.
Below, you’ll find The Upshot — my top takeaway from the interview. We’re also trying something new this season: asking every guest three startup-building questions we’ll share exclusively in this companion newsletter. Read on.
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The Upshot: The Business Of De-Extinction
I had the same questions as you around what bringing back species like the mammoth really achieves. Is it marketing? Simply, because we can? The Rule of Cool?
Lamm has gotten versions of this question a lot, so he had a few answers prepared. Your acceptance of them might vary.
On a societal level, Lamm makes a few claims: reintroducing mammoths could help return the planet’s permafrost and combat climate change, he argues; other species could restore national pride and have a tourism benefit (Tasmanian tiger, dodo).
The same technology can also be used to help with conservation around existing species, Lamm claims. He points to the billions that governments pay to combat certain invasive species, like the screwworm fly, or to try to preserve other populations, like the red wolf, which Colossal has successfully cloned.
And from a more business and technological standpoint, Lamm makes the point that to revive a species requires building a “systems model” that includes lots of different technological breakthroughs.
“We are trying to do things in science where one little slice of it would win a Nobel Prize,” he claims.
Much of that work is in gene editing, where Colossal has gone from 20 gene edits to engineer a dire wolf to tests involving a thousand. Those genetic engineering advances can be applied in other areas, he says.
Similarly, Colossal can take on conservation projects like an active one to work with birds in the Middle East where working with artificial eggs and a dedicated avian facility is “a layup” compared to bringing back the moa or dodo, Lamm says.
Essentially, Colossal is the system, and current-day conservation or biological problems can be the point solutions. Colossal has already spun out multiple companies, more than previously reported, says Lamm – several are unannounced. But one, AI startup Astromech, was already valued at $2 billion in less than a year.
Perhaps it’s the nature of Upstarts and our show, but the more practical use cases resonate with me more. If a small herd of mammoths provides the funding, inspiration and hype to allow Colossal to spend many millions with hundreds of scientists on current-age conservation needs, then that feels like a positive impact. But it’s hard to picture mammoths roaming at a scale to create significant environmental benefits on their own.
The trick there: showing their work enough that the accountant could easily verify it, and feel confident that the process had run correctly, so they didn’t have to retrace the agent’s steps.
Startup question 1: What’s the best advice you’ve heard?
Ben’s answer: Don’t take advice. (LOL.)
“Look, trust your gut, because everyone has an opinion. Many times, people will get inundated with business books, or there was a season where everyone wanted to emulate Steve Jobs, or they wanted to emulate Elon or whatever. But no one can be emulated. Everyone’s unique.
You’ve got to be authentic to yourself and just don’t take that advice, the day-to-day advice. I’m sure there’s major strategic advice you should take occasionally, but, really: trust your gut, and have high convictions of what you’re doing.”
On the hiring side, Lamm adds that you can’t hire for, or teach, passion, but you can teach skill.
“If you hire really smart, passionate people, the resumes don’t really matter. What they did doesn’t matter.AI is going to just obliterate that, anyway. So it’s really about finding passionate, high conviction people that also trust their gut.”
Startup question 2: What’s the worst advice you’ve heard?
Ben’s answer: Don’t start your company.
“That was actually advice I was given by a really good friend, a mentor, and an investor of mine who ended up ironically investing in Colossal. A very wealthy, very successful person, who said: ‘Don’t do this. Go do more software shit. Don’t do this because people are gonna think you’re nuts.’”
Lamm does caveat that if your lawyer tells you not to do it, you should maybe listen. But otherwise, people didn’t know that Anduril would be successful, or SpaceX.
And he does say that he’s willing to have his mind changed by his own team members. “If you get new data, or the market responds differently, or your team tell you to, then you should pivot. Take that into account.”
Startup question 3: If you had one do-over to ‘reload from last save,’ what would it be?
Ben’s answer: Don’t trust The New Yorker.
When Colossal was announcing its dire wolf project, Lamm tried to work with Wired, Time, and do podcasts like Joe Rogan. But The New Yorker didn’t follow the embargo time, and Lamm is still salty the launch went haywire with the others.
“Relationships are built on trust, right? If you want a transactional short-term relationship, do not expect those people to ever call you again in the future.”
Lamm says he didn’t value such relationships enough earlier in his career, and he lost some that he valued.
“There’s, people that I wish I had deeper relationships with that I did not invest in in the long term, and I made short-term decisions,” he says. “I think everybody should think about that because the world is a pretty small place – it’s just, everyone says this – but it is so small. And it is just getting smaller.”