EP272: How a $10B Company Turned De-Extinction into a Platform

0:00We've shown that the end-to-end system for de-extinction and species preservation works with what we've been able to achieve with our direwolves, as well as the work that we were able to do, our trait engineering with our woolly mice. So why do you want to bring back the woolly mammoth? There's not a better cultural animal icon than the mammoth, right? It almost feels like a dinosaur. People think that it went extinct 65 million years ago, but it's just out of human memory. Most people don't know this, but we were actually building the pyramids while mammoths still existed on this earth. And so the idea that we could bring back this icon and have this massive feat of science and inspire the next generation while also building technologies to help elephants is something that's pretty exciting.

0:49I don't know if there's a cooler science project on the planet. Before this podcast, I congratulate you on the last round, which is value the company at 10.3 billion. And you said we're just getting started. What did you mean by that? We've shown that the end-to-end system for de-extinction and species preservation works with what we've been able to achieve with our direwolves, as well as the work that we were able to do, our trait engineering with our woolly mice. And so if you look at how we scale genome engineering over the next, you know, two to 10 years, I think we're going to completely change what's possible in terms of synthetic biology.

1:25And so I think a lot of species that have gone extinct, you know, aren't just going to be on the verge of bringing back. I think we're going to see them back on this planet. And so I think over time, we'll have a whole kind of portfolio of animals that we've been able to bring back and hopefully successfully reintroduce in the ecosystem. So I think that Colossal, while people are excited and taking victory laps on the technology achievements and some of the financial achievements, we haven't even really started compared to where we think we're going. Tell me about the business model today and what you plan for the future.

1:57If you create a lot of value and you build a lot of technologies and you solve hard problems, you always find ways to monetize. So the original business model was, hey, if we go do this, there's probably something valuable along the way. We're now figuring that out, right? The midterm goal, which we're in right now, is spitting out technology companies, right? And so as we develop these different technologies and as we develop this pipeline for de-extinction, we're having to innovate across everything from like genome engineering to computational biology to cellular engineering to even cloning.

2:30And so all of those different technologies have different applications to human health care, to animal, to plants, all over the board. So we've successfully spun out three companies, two of which we've announced, right? The third one we haven't announced, which we're pretty excited about. And our first two companies are valued over$100 million, right? So I think we're starting to show that the value in not just the technology that we're developing, but as it can be packaged into a specific use case, a specific target company, is pretty interesting. And I think over time, we'll build more and more companies.

3:01Long term, what we're finding is that governments are now coming back, coming to us for everything from biobanking to genetic rescue and help saving species, as well as like what are the long term applications to rewilding the extinct species back, everything from carbon credits to ecotourism. So we're really looking at both the technologies and the animals as ways to monetize both short, mid and long term. Outside of ecotourism, carbon credits, is there potential pharmaceutical applications or other ways to improve humans through kind of these these de-extinction technologies? Our computational analysis and some of the tools we built were so interesting that we spun them out into a company called FormBio, which is focusing on how we can almost do drug resurrection, almost like de-extinction for drugs.

3:52So drugs that failed in the different stages of manufacturing or the clinical trials, we can actually help identify, use AI, use some of our modeling to understand why those drugs failed and hopefully resurrect them. We had a lot of success very quickly in that model with FormBio, which is pretty interesting. Other ideas that we're starting to employ is like, even though we don't have artificial wounds, our long-term goal is to actually grow everything fully ex-utero. So we have a pretty large team working on artificial looms. And even just the Lego blocks, if you will, that we're building towards artificial looms are massively valuable.

4:30What made you think, maybe I should start a de-extinction company? And what gives you the right to do that? I like hiring much smarter women than me. I like building systems. I like learning from people. So I thought that I would probably be the right person to kind of go figure this out. I didn't have backgrounds in some of the other technologies I'd built before. But then, you know, I think the other one is COVID, right? It's like we sat around and we're in like doing introspection. I'd built a handful of software companies. And so just doing something that didn't create like role, step, function, change, just creating new software company didn't seem that interesting.

5:02And the idea that we could build a company that created a lot of value, create impact for conservation, and then also inspire the next generation if we were successful about science, it just seemed like the right fit. And it seemed crazy enough to go do. And then I thought if it failed, I could just go back to software. So it really wasn't the worst case. Do you think the fact that you had had a couple of successes under your belt made you more likely to go after Moonshot? Having a couple of successes under my belt gave me probably some of the confidence, but I think it also really helped me understand the playbook and the context switching.

5:39I don't think that I could have built Colossal before I had done so many different startups because Colossal, most people think of as just being in the lab. We also spend so much time with governments. We spend so much time in the field. We spend so much time with conservation, indigenous people groups, legislators. There's so much complexity to this business, and there's a lot of context switching. So I really think that I needed that time and effort to really be prepared for everything that I have to do on a daily basis at Colossum. You're going at hyperspeed. How are you going so quickly and with so much complexity?

6:16And what are some of your secret sauces for building a fast-growing startup? We got to get the right team, right? I think that motivation also starts at the top, right? And so if I'm phony, then I think everyone else will phone it in. If I'm here, if I'm on the road, if I'm the first one in and the last one out, I think that tries to lead by example. I never ask anyone to do something I wouldn't do. And so if we need to go work on a project with Indigenous People Group in the South Island of New Zealand, I need to be able to get on a plane and do the same. There's many flights where I've gone halfway around the world for a 24-hour session.

6:53Right. And and and those are the things that I think that you have to be committed to do if you're going to ask others to do it. We have an awesome opportunity to create something that's never been created, to make history and inspire the next generation. And I think that that opportunity is infectious. And we've tried to build a combination of all of the right people from all these different walks of life that that want that and that they live it right. If you come in Colossal Labs, you'll see everything's branded Colossal. Everyone's wearing different. I'm wearing a Direwolf T-shirt today, but everyone's wearing a different Colossal hoodie or T-shirt.

7:31And everyone is really mission-focused. In my experience, as long as you continue to say mission-focused and that is your ultimate driving force, the rest of the staff and team help build you up. And you can't just be the only torchbearer. you have to be able to light that in everyone else. Even when I'm coming in pretty early here, there's already people in the lab already doing experiments. When I come in on the weekends, people are here working because this is so part of their identity and what they want in life. Instilling that in what I've found, drive success at pretty quick speeds. Keith or boy popularized this framework that you want to hire barrels that basically create their own projects and execute essentially mini CEOs within the company.

8:17versus bullets that are like one trick ponies that may be very reliable, but you give them tasks. Yeah. How do you think about that? And how much of Colossal's success could be attributed to bringing these barrels that are kind of these mini CEOs? We almost treat every single species like a product. And so we have species leads that are almost like the mini CEOs, to your point of that they have full autonomy. We do have cross-functional teams in computational biology and embryology and animal husbandry. But the core products teams that are driving the individual species are almost many CEOs, right?

8:53And so, you know, and then I have cross domain functionality in the C-suite in terms of like our chief science officer, our chief biology officer, and our chief animal officer and our VP of data. To your point is they're almost many CEOs, many of them, they run their own budgets, they do their own reporting, They make their own decisions. We have a weekly senior leadership meeting just to go through this, under which we make everyone submit and prepare a memo because just going to a meeting and talking isn't that interesting. And so we always have everyone that drafts a memo, fills it out before the meeting so that everyone has to have read it before.

9:29What weaknesses did you fix from Chaotic Moon and Hypergiant that's allowed you to become much more successful as Colossae? One problem we had at Hypergiant was we had very big ambitions. We were software focused, and then we moved into hardware, but we didn't bring in the right investors on the hardware front. It's software investors understand the software side. We're then moving into some satellite hardware and whatnot. They didn't understand that business. I think we did a good job of explaining it, but they're traditional software people. I think we spend an unnecessary amount of time in the education process, Whereas with Colossal, I spent a lot of time identifying investors that had the same vision, the same long term, the same risk profile, and that also understood the technology stack.

10:21And so most of my core investors in the early days had met with George Church on different topics. They weren't like what I didn't have to educate people on George or CRISPR or anything. Right. And so, so I think I did a really good job of investor alignment and managing and setting expectations with Colossal. Is that kind of like anti-selling? Like you stood for something and you were looking for people that aligned with you. I had a couple of investors and they're great folks that had been in my previous companies that when I told them about this, they were like, I don't get it. They're like, we don't get it.

10:56They're like, we'll give you money to go start another software thing, but like, we, we don't get like, we don't get this. We don't know if you should do this. And I was like, look, okay, well, this just isn't for you. I didn't really spend time selling them on it. Right. I was like, okay, this is what I'm going to do. I'm a trust, but verify guy. So I spent a lot of time leading up to this to ensure that I felt like the technology stack was good enough to get there before we took people's money and my money and other people's money. But but and so in that process, though, we still didn't have like monetization models.

11:29We didn't actually know the timelines. We had ideas of the timelines. We had big goals. But but we ultimately had to go work with investors that had that risk profile, that had that ambition, that knew that there'd be positive and negative feedback along the way. And so I wouldn't necessarily say it's anti selling. I think that I just quickly weeded out the people that this just wasn't a fit for. And I, I, I've said numerous times, this deal is just not for everybody. There's a very famous household name investor that, uh, that's not in this deal. One of the top people in the world, uh, it's not Elon, uh, but other people, someone else.

12:09And, uh, that, that from day one was like, I'm just concerned on like, you know, if things go wrong, how this could hurt my personal brand. And I just said, look, this just isn't for you. like it's okay like we're still friends but they i i don't need to get you comfortable with this this is either something that you're into or you're not at the series a at the seed you had to make a bet a what were your first principles in creating colossal at the time and also what did you know and what did you not know we knew that the technologies existed we knew that there were no science gate it's not like we had to solve like faster than light travel.

12:50It's not like, okay, we can get to Alpha Sensari if we solve faster than light travel, right? There was none of those moments. There wasn't this major science case. So I think that the biggest thing that we did was we broke down the science into engineering challenges. And we took a mindset that these were engineering problems. These were not science problems. These were not discovery problems. We knew that if that somatic cell nuclear transfer and cloning works. And we knew that would make it more efficient. We knew that computational analysis and understanding, uh, uh, uh, doing analysis of genomes and building reference genomes and comparative genomics.

13:29We know that works. We knew that editing genome engineering works. Now we had to get the right media conditions, right? For these different cells, we had to create stem cells, which we knew we could create using Nama Yaka factors and others. And so we knew that the individual technologies and science worked from a principle perspective, but we had to break it down into engineering steps. We took an engineering perspective and not a scientific discovery perspective. We didn't want to create a scientific think tank lab. We wanted to create something that could actually deliver products to market in the way that we think of software products, only these being biological products that the world would get excited about.

14:11You broke the internet with the woolly mammoth. You did the dire wolf, which is obviously a Game of Thrones character. You could argue the Tasmanian tiger is kind of like the Tasmanian devil from Looney Tunes. Tell me about how you use the media and memes to spread and lead to this circuitous, this positive loop for the company. What's interesting is that we found that every single person that we talked to, whether it's a parent in Iowa, a child, an indigenous person in the South Island of New Zealand or a celebrity, right, or the most one of the richest people in the world, they all have their favorite extinct species.

14:50They all have their favorite living species. And we wanted to build a brand that was like very pop culture focused that it's like, how do you make science fun again? Like, remember the days when we like, you know, may I know exactly how old you are, but when we when we did like volcanoes in class and like that Bill Nye genre that doesn't exist anymore in America in terms of like science, science. There's lots of science skepticism. There's not this science excitement. So we wanted to create like, how do we take the stigma out of of of science and in this academic elite, which it has become? And how do we add in like old school, like 1980s MTV?

15:30So we always joke that Colossal, if we nailed Colossal, it was like the merger of Harvard meets old school MTV. I know that sounds dumb, but that's actually like what we've always said from day one in terms of the brand, how we communicate. You know, we believe science is for everyone. We don't think that kids in this attention economy are sitting around reading nature and science and sell. we think they're on Instagram and TikTok. So it's like, how do we get people as excited about science as they are about influencers or the next episode of the Kardashians? And so that's how we had this attitude.

16:04And so part of that is like work with culture. I wish I could tell you, we said, oh, we're going to call the Hemsworth brothers because they're from Australia. We didn't do that. It actually worked exactly opposite. Like the Hemsworth brothers reached out to us where they heard about our project. They were excited about the thylacine in Tasman entirely. They're like, we're excited about conservation. How do we get involved? And we had this kind of like pop culture domino effect where people heard about our different animals and projects and wanting to attach themselves to it. And then that just drove more and more of the pop culture excitement because I think that these tastemakers get people more and more excited about all these different projects that we're working on, right?

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17:29It ended up turning into this positive flywheel of us achieving big scientific milestones, educating people in areas and in the channels they were in, like TikTok and Instagram and X and others, And then also talking about it with pop culture and celebrity, because that just also makes it more fun and exciting. And I bet we found this kind of like perfect, like smoothie blend of how to talk about it. And, you know, I'd say the vast majority of people were stoked about it, but, you know, including a lot of people in scientific community. But there's about 30 percent of the scientific community that also hates that we're doing.

18:13I don't think it's a coincidence that you see people that are doing these generational breaking technologies like Elon with SpaceX, Lake Shul from Supersonic. They're balancing this extreme level of complexity in their business with this extreme, I guess, like simplification of their vision. We want to colonize Mars. We want to make travel easier or more efficient. I think there's something powerful to be able to kind of dial up the complexity and also to make it very simple. preparing for this interview, I talked to a lot of people, including my wife, who's in real estate. And they actually knew of the meme of the woolly mammoth coming back.

18:51They didn't know about Colossal necessarily, but it had become so popular that they knew the concept, even if they didn't have a name to it. I was in Budapest last week and I met someone and I was getting introduced some people in the government who didn't know about the project or who didn't know about Colossal. And then they were like, oh wait, you're the dire wolf guy. And I was like, yeah, sure. That's what you want to say. Like, and so, and so to your point, like, you know, they, they are aware of the movement, even if they aren't necessarily, they know the name Colossal. Now we hope as a company, we changed that over time.

19:26Um, but I think people just knowing about it, given that, I mean, we're, we're literally four years old as of like two days ago. So given the fact that we are, you know, you know, pretty young and our journey. And there is so much worldwide awareness, even if it isn't all directly tied specifically to the Colossal brand, but on the mission is pretty cool. We have been very, very fortunate. We have, I think we have over half a trillion media impressions, which is insane. Like, you know, it's ludicrously insane, but I think that we have captivated the world in terms of the science, the art of the possible, the conservation benefits.

20:12I think we've done a really good job in that communication. Half a trillion in impressions. You know, if I do the math, I left a 60 impression per human being on the planet, which is crazy. And then you have a very specific business and investment case. How much do you think about having kind of the narrative for the general audience and having the business case align? I don't need my, you know, kid or some parents to understand how we're going to monetize, you know, multiplex editing for human health care. And what's interesting is I can't tell you the number of times numerous people, including some of our investors, have said, oh, my gosh, I've heard about this from my kids.

21:00Of those half a trillion media impressions, most of those aren't like Discovery Kids or Nat Geo Kids or Scholastic. We've been in all of those, but those are like kind of like one off, right? Like we're not like, you know, we're not like a household name like Sesame Street to kids. So what's interesting is the number of adults, whether it's for the business, end up becoming in as an investor on the business thesis or the just a general purpose interest that have heard about it. And they say to me, I, oh, I heard about this for my kids. And what's, so it's interesting is like 99.99 % of our, our media is like your general purpose media.

21:38It's New York times, it's time magazine, it's Rolling Stone, it's others. Um, but it's not, it's not these kids. It's not like we're targeting the kids stuff. So it's, what's interesting is that, that so many adults and parents, even though that, that, that general, that half a trillion media impressions are mostly to people like us, so many kids are finding out about it and learning about it in schools that they're now elevating it to their parents, which I find is interesting because we don't directly market, you know, to kids. We hope we inspire kids, but we don't have like colossal kids or anything like that yet.

22:15What's the next decade for colossal look like? In the next decade, we will see a couple of things. We will see all of our flagship species done. I think we'll have mammoths, thylacines moas dodos um i think we'll have all of them done we'll have them all back into uh the the environment on on some level probably not the mammoths because the number of years takes to get to reach maturity in elephants they'll stop probably being some type of managed care facility with with human intervention to a point but i do think that some of the other species will have been successfully rewilded which is exciting we will also see massive jumps in uh the artificial womb technology.

22:55De-extinction to me doesn't seem like science fiction, you know, just based on what we've achieved and where I know we are on these various projects. It just seems like a function of time on scale. I do think that some of the artificial womb stuff to get to the point that we can replicate and have a warehouse or lab that's growing, you know, a hundred northern white rhinos still feels a little science fiction to me. How do you encapsulate your vision for the future and a world where colossal has executed its vision to take a meme from jurassic park uh i think we our tagline is like the business of discovery but i think it should be something more like life finds a way yet we help it get there why is it important for for the world to have these extinct species back into the ecosystem all the ecological modeling and environmental modeling is like when you remove keystone species from environments, you have this tropic downgrade, you have this negative effect on the ecosystem.

23:55So there has been lots of modeling, not done, some now being done by us, but way before us done in terms of like how it applies to the benefit of the ecosystem with restoring these species. They all have different unique values they add to the ecosystem. It's not just about restoring them to the ecosystem. I think it's also about having a redundancy model for ecosystem collapse in the event that this six mass extinction continues. And right now, given that it's forecasted that we could lose up to half of biodiversity in the next 25 years, you know, I would rather have a de-extinction toolkit and not that's that's that's systematized and well optimized and not need it.

24:38then need a de-extinction toolkit and not have it, right? And so to draw on some of your SpaceX comments, I think it's better to have off-world contingencies for a planetary destruction event, right? Than not, right? People can say, oh, well, going to Mars is weird, but we know we learned a lot when we went to the stars and we built a lot of technologies to help humanity. But also, I think building redundancy models for consciousness, like what SpaceX and Elon doing is probably a pretty good idea. I think the same for biodiversity here on Earth is probably a pretty good idea. Tell me about how you align with later stages of a capital market and also maybe your capital markets plans.

25:25We get asked all the time if we're going to go public, when we're going to go public. Like, you know, if you look at the mass retail appeal of companies like SpaceX and Tesla and others, I think that we have something similar for that. You know, people want to bet on Colossal because they're excited about it. And, you know, I don't think everyone wants just the next streaming platform. Right. I think everyone's like, OK, we got enough streaming platforms. We have enough social media platforms. Do we really need another one? Do we need another Slack? Do we need another one of these things? Right.