Bringing Back Mammoths And Building Noah’s Ark 2.0 | Colossal’s Ben Lamm

Ben Lamm (0:01)

We are trying to do things in science where one little slice of it would win a Nobel Prize.

Alex Konrad (0:06)

Some startups might be trying to connect people using a new social media network or solving tricky business problems using AI.

Colossal Biosciences is very different. It's trying to bring back the woolly mammoth and the direwolf and the dodo, as well as other extinct species. Co-founder and CEO Ben Lamm describes his focus as de-extinction and species preservation.

Ben Lamm (0:26)

There may be some more direwolf moments in the future where we surprise and delight people with species they don't know about.

Alex Konrad (0:32)

And in January 2025, Colossal reached an evaluation of $10 billion.

At the time of this recording, it's reportedly in talks to raise an evaluation of more than twice that at the 20 to 30 billion range. But one of Ben's early investors once told him the idea was crazy and basically begged him not to do it.

Ben Lamm (0:49)

He told me, whatever you do, do not do this. You're just burned out.

Just go and like take a vacation. I'll find the next thing. But this is crazy and you're going to completely ruin your career.

Alex Konrad (1:03)

Today on the podcast, we're going to talk about the early warning signs for extinction, how Ben tracks the online discourse around Colossal to a T, and how its work could lead to new treatments for genetic disease for humans too. Plus, why Colossal is not going to bring back the dinosaurs.

Ben Lamm (1:18)

And we're not building a park where things can go terribly wrong.

Alex Konrad (1:22)

I'm Alex Konrad, founder and editor of Upstarts Media. And this is The Upstarts Podcast, our weekly show where we talk to emerging startup founders who are punching above their weight to take on the status quo.

Ben, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Ben Lamm (1:35)

Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

Alex Konrad (1:36)

This episode is brought to you by JIRA by Atlassian, where teams and agents get the context, coordination, and control to move work forward. Try it free at jira.com. That's jira.com. So what the heck is Colossal?

Ben Lamm (1:50)

It depends on what you read on the Internet, but ultimately, we're the world's first de-extinction and species preservation company. We're working to bring back extinct species, to put them back into their natural habitat, while developing technologies that we can monetize through a myriad of different ways, and then subsidizing that so that we can give all that technology to conservation.

Alex Konrad (2:09)

So what makes this like or not like Jurassic Park?

Ben Lamm (2:12)

It's crazy. We've never heard that before.

So Jurassic Park, unless I missed a subplot line, is not focused on conservation. So I think that's a major difference. We're not working on dinosaurs. Sometimes people really love that answer, but I'd say 90% of people hate that answer. They're like, wait, what? We're so sad. Mammoths are cute, but why are you not working on dinosaurs? But there is no dino DNA. I don't like to say impossible, but I think it's highly unlikely we'll ever find dino DNA. The oldest DNA we work with is about 1.3 million years old, and it's pretty bad, pretty fragmented. From an ancient DNA perspective, we love stuff that dies in a cold, dry place. A meteor that lights the entire world on fire is not a cold, dry place. So it's highly unlikely 65 million year old DNA still exists.

But yeah, we get the Jurassic Park reference quite a bit. And we're not building a park where things can go terribly wrong.

Alex Konrad (3:06)

And we're going to talk a lot more about the science here, but I think that is sort of the first question that a lot of our audience would probably be thinking. But let's talk about the woolly mammoth, which you have said the whole time you were going to de-extinct. Why the mammoth? And what is the actual goal of the company once you can do something like that? Yeah.

Ben Lamm (3:25)

So what's crazy is most people think that the end goal is when you have the animals, right? But it's really the start of the race, right? So people are like, oh, we've announced a handful of species, woolly mammoth, Tasmanian tiger, Dodomo and others, most recently the bluebuck, direwolves. But then what people don't realize is like, that's the start when we get to there, right? And there's so much that goes into it working with governments, indigenous people groups, private landers. There's so much that goes into it outside of the science. But we started with the mammoth for a lot of reasons. Like I'm a big believer that from a startup perspective, you need a big goal, you need a North Star, you need to be what you're focused on, right? Like SpaceX has a really good job of saying, hey, we want to make life interplanetary and get consciousness beyond Earth, and we're focused on Mars. Now they're doing moon and they're doing much other stuff, right? But I think having these big goals that you can put everyone to rally behind is key. The mammoth is one of the harder projects that we're working on, right? All the projects we're working on have different levels of complexity, but the mammoth is pretty hard. We started with it because my co-founder, George Church, who's the father of synthetic biology. If you don't know him, he runs genetics at Harvard. He's arguably the smartest and probably one of the funniest people on the planet.