← How I Invest with David Weisburd
How I Invest with David Weisburd
EP272: How a $10B Company Turned De-Extinction into a Platform
00:29:46
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- [00:00]
A
Showing 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, with our woolly mice.
- [00:12]
B
So why do you want to bring back the woolly mammoth?
- [00:15]
A
There's not a better, like, cultural animal icon than the mammoth, right? It's almost like it's. It almost feels like a dinosaur. People think that it like went extinct 65 million years ago, but it's just, just out of like 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 like, bring back this icon and have this massive, like, feat of science and inspire the next generation while also building technologies to help elephants is something that's pretty exciting, right? I don't know if there's a cooler.
- [00:51]
B
Science project on the planet before this podcast. I congratulate you on the last round, which was value the company at 10.3 billion. And you said, we're just getting started. What did you mean by that?
- [01:03]
A
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 dire wolves, 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. And 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 that colossal. While people are excited in taking victory labs on the technology achievements and some of the financial achievements, we haven't even really started compared to where we think we're going.
- [01:53]
B
Tell me about the business model today and what you plan for the future.
- [01:58]
A
If you create a lot of value and you, 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 spinning bidding 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. And so all of those different technologies have different applications to human healthcare, 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 they've in. 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 they can be packaged into a specific use case, a specific target company is pretty interesting. And I think over time, you know, we'll build more and more companies. Long 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.
- [03:28]
B
Outside of ecotourism carbon credits, is there potential pharmaceutical applications or other ways to improve humans through kind of these, these de extinction technologies?
- [03:41]
A
Our computational analysis and some of the tools we built were so interesting that we spun them out into a company called Form Bio, which is focusing on how we can almost do drug resurrection. Almost like de extinction for drugs, right? So drugs that, 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, and hopefully resurrect them. We've had a lot of success very quickly in that model with Form Bio, 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. We have a pretty large team working on artificial wombs and even just the Lego blocks, if you will, that we're building towards artificial wombs are massively valuable.
- [04:31]
B
What made you think maybe I should start a de extinction company? And what gives you the right to do that?
- [04:36]
A
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 I think the other one was Covid. Right. It's like we sat around and we were in doing introspection. I built a handful of software companies and, and so just doing something that didn't create like rule step, function change, just creating new software company didn't seem that interesting. And 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, it just seemed like the right fit and it seemed crazy enough to go do it. And then I thought if it failed I could just go back to software. So it like really wasn't the worst case.
- [05:23]
B
Do you think the fact that you had had a couple successes under your belt made you more likely to go after moonshot?
- [05:30]
A
Having a couple 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. I 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, you know, that time and effort to really be prepared for everything that I have to do on a daily basis.
- [06:10]
B
At Colossal, you're going at hyperspeed. How are you going so quickly and with so much complexity? And what are some of your secret sauces for, for building fast growing startup?
- [06:21]
A
We got to get the right team, right. I think that motivation also starts at the top. Right. And so, you know, if I'm phoning it in, I think everyone else will phone it in. If I'm here, if I'm on the road, if I'm, if I'm the first one in, the last one out, I think that tries to lead by example. You know, I never ask anyone to do something I wouldn't do. And so if I'm, 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. Right. 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, 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, and, and that they live it right. If you come in Colossal Labs, you'll see everything's branded Colossal. Everyone's wearing different, you know, I'm wearing a direwolf T shirt today, but everyone's wearing a different Colossal hoodie or T shirt. And, and everyone is like really mission focused. In my experience, as long as you continue to say mission focus and that is your, your ultimate driving force, the rest of the staff and team kind of like help build you up. And, 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, you know, I, I, I found, you know, drive success at, at, at pretty quick speeds.
- [08:08]
B
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 versus bullets that are like one trick ponies that may be very reliable but you give them tasks.
- [08:22]
A
Yeah.
- [08:23]
B
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.
- [08:32]
A
We almost treat every single species like a pro 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 the computational biology and embryology and animal husbandry. But the core products teams that are driving the individual species are almost mini CEOs. Right. And 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 are 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 I, you know, 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.
- [09:29]
B
And what weaknesses did you fix from Chaotic Moon and Hypergiant? That's allowed you to become much more successful with Colossia.
- [09:37]
A
So 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 you know, they're traditional software people. I think we spend an unnecessary amount of time in the education process. Whereas with Colossal, I think I, 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. Right. And so I, I, you know, most of my core investors in the early days had met with George Church on different topics. You know, they weren't like what? I didn't 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.
- [10:40]
B
With Colossal is that kind of like anti selling, like you stood for something and you were looking for people that aligned with you.
- [10:47]
A
I had a couple 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. They'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 guys. 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. We 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've said numerous times this deal is just not for everybody. There's a very famous household name investor that, that's not in this deal. One of, one of the top people in the world. It's not Elon, but other people, someone else. And 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 like I don't need to get you comfortable with this. This is either something that you're into or you're not.
- [12:31]
B
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?
- [12:42]
A
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. It's not like, okay, we can get to alpha sensori if we solve faster than light travel, right? Like there was no, there was none of those moments. There wasn't this major science case. So, 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, that these were engineering problems and 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 and doing analysis of genomes and building reference genomes and comparative genomics. We 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, we had to create stem cells which we knew we could create using Namayaka factors and others, right? And so we, we, we knew that the individual technologies in science worked from a principal 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 actual delivery products to market in the way that we think of software products only, these being biological products that, that, that the world would get excited about.
- [14:12]
B
You broke the Internet with the woolly mammoth. You, you did the Direwolf, which is obviously a Game of Thrones character. You could argue the Tasmanian tiger is kind of like the Tasmanian Devil from, from Looney Tunes. Tell me about how you use the media and memes to spread and lead to this circuitous, this positive loop for, for the company.
- [14:32]
A
Well, 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, in the south island of New Zealand, or a celebrity, right? Or the most, one of the richest people in the world who they all have their favorite extinct species, they all have their favorite living species. And we, 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, made. I don't know exactly how old you are, but when we, when we did like volcanoes in, in class and like that Bill Nye genre that doesn't exist anymore in, in, 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, and how do we add in like old school, like 1980s MTV. So 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, our sitting around reading Nature and Science and Cell, we think they're on Instagram and Tik Tok. 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. And so part of that is like, work with culture. I, 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. They heard about our project. They were excited about the thylacine in Tasmania. Tiger. 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 wanted to attach themselves to it. And then that just drove more and More of the pop culture excitement because I think that these taste makers get people more and more excited about all these different projects that we're working on. Right.
- [16:45]
C
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- [18:09]
A
It ended up turning into this, like, positive flywheel of us achieving big scientific milestones, educating people in areas in, in, in, in the me, in, in the channels they were in, like TikTok and Instagram and, 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, 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% of the scientific community that also hates that we're doing it.
- [18:53]
B
I don't think it's a coincidence that you see people that are doing these generational braking technologies like Elon with SpaceX, like Shoal 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, who's in real estate. And they actually knew of the meme of the woolly mammoth coming back. They didn't know about Colossal necessarily, but they, it had become so popular that they knew the concept even if they didn't have a name to it.
- [19:37]
A
I was in Budapest last week and I met someone in, 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 direwolf guy. And I was like, yeah, sure, that's what you want to say. And so to your point, like, you know, 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. 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 on 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, you know, I think that we have captivated the world in terms of the science, the art of the possible, the conservation benefits. I think we've done a really good job in that communication.
- [21:00]
B
Half a trillion in impressions. You know, if I do a math left with 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, the narrative for the general audience and having the business case align?
- [21:18]
A
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 healthcare. Now 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. Of those half a trillion meeting 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, 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 what's interesting is like 99.999% of our, our media is like your general purpose media. It's New York Times, it's Time magazine, it's Rolling Stone, it's others, but it's not, it's not these, it's not like we're targeting the kids stuff. So 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. They're now elevating it to their parents. Which I find is interesting because we, 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.
- [22:54]
B
What's the next decade for Colossal look like?
- [22:57]
A
In the next decade we will see a couple things. We will see all of our flagship species done. I think we'll have mammoths, thylacines, moas, dodos. I think we'll have all of them done. We'll have them all back into the environment on some level. Probably not the mammoths because the number of years takes to get to reach maturity in elephants. They'll stop. Probably be in some type of managed care facility with human intervention to a point. But I do think that some of the other species will have been successfully rewilded, which is exciting. You will also see massive jumps in the artificial womb technology De 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 and 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, 100 northern white rhinos still feels a little science fiction to me.
- [24:00]
B
How do you encapsulate your vision for the future and a world where Colossal.
- [24:05]
A
Has executed its vision to take a meme from Jurassic Park? 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.
- [24:20]
B
Why is it important for the world to have these extinct species back into the ecosystem.
- [24:26]
A
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. So there has been lots of modeling not by done, some now being done by us, but way before us done in terms of how it applies to the benefit of the ecosystem. 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 then need a de extinction toolkit and not have it right. And so to, to, to draw on some of your SpaceX comments. I think it's, you know, it's, it's better to have off world contingencies for 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 without humanity. But also I think building you know, redundancy models for consciousness like the, like what SpaceX and Elon doing is probably a pretty good idea. I think the same so for biodiversity here on Earth is probably a pretty good idea.
- [25:59]
B
Tell me about how you align with later stages of the capital market and also maybe your capital markets plans.
- [26:05]
A
We get asked all the time if we're going to go public when we're public. 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. People want, 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 okay, we got enough streaming platforms, we got enough social media platforms. Do we really need another one? Do we need another slack? Do we need another one of these things? Right? And so, so I, I, I think that we have mass retail appeal. So I do think that most investors even in the later stages can look at our half trillion media impressions and take is there a retail story for ipo? And I think that the general perspective has been yes across the board from analysts to the big banks to, to the, to the various big PE firms. With that said, I think that because we've been pretty thoughtful about capital raising and we're pretty, we're weirdly capital efficient for the word, for the work that we're doing. I think that, that people, you know, aren't just betting on me and the management team, but I think they're saying, okay, look, there's 30 ways to monetize this. If you look at, you know, content models like Mr. Beast and in the incredible business that they've built, you know what's interesting is we have that fan favor. I think we could develop those types of model where I think we could build a very profitable business on just the content of what we are creating, if we want to do that right.
- [27:40]
B
Previous guests and former partner at Excel and Menlo, Tyler Sosin put it. There's never been a business that failed because it ran out of market share. A profitable business that grows, retains optionality, retains upside. You've been an entrepreneur now for more than two decades, founding companies. You've had a lot of dark times. What strategies do you use in those dark times in order to keep going? And what's your philosophy on how to survived the hard times?
- [28:11]
A
There's something from a genomics genetics perspective that's just fundamentally broken in me and others where it's like, I, I'm okay with just no. And I'm also okay with the blank piece of paper. And both those things to some people are very unsettling. No. And rejection to some people is like what they live their life on. I told some of our investors, this just isn't for everybody. Right? Like we're not for everybody. We've had some feedback where there's a small percentage, there's about 4% of the feedback that we got on the dire wolf that was negative. And of that, about half of it, people wanted to argue about dire wolves. And I was like, well, then don't call me dire wolf. I'm fine with that. And I think that that acceptance also makes people more mad because I, I, it just, I don't, I, I've never viewed my model of, of one to persuade. It's, it's, I feel very convicted about my, my mission and then it's just my job to educate. And in those dark times, if you take this attitude of education, Tony Robbins once told that, that to me, that you'll never feel nervous on stage. If you, if you have an attitude that you have to go out on stage and you have to persuade, you feel like you have to sell something, well, then you're really, you know, there is pressure in that, right? If your job is to be convicted about what you're doing, be the most knowledgeable, and then your job is just to educate people, well, then you don't. I don't feel that, that same pressure. And so in my most darkest times, I've always been mission convicted. A lot of successes in entrepreneurship is not magic, it's just work. And most people forget about the times where you run out of money. People forget about the times where you can't find product market fit people. People read the positive headlines. But I think that that true technology, serial entrepreneurship takes massively dysfunctional individuals and with high degrees of pain tolerance and maybe borderline sadists. For me, I've just always been super mission convicted. And it's like, you know, if I build something and it doesn't work, you know, like the worst thing can. You know, your investors aren't like, they're not animals, they're not gonna come eat you. So it's like the worst case scenario is like, you say you're sorry and go try again. The luxury of freedom is more valuable to me than the pain and suffering in the darkest day. So I've always really just tried to rely on other entrepreneurs because I think they really know what you're going through. In those dark days when you have the worst day ever, which happens on a monthly basis, no matter how great your startup is, you always have the worst day ever, once a month. At least in my experience.
- [30:53]
C
That's it for today's episode of how to Invest. If this conversation gave you new insights or ideas, do me a quick favor. Share with one person in your network who'd find it valuable or leave a short review wherever you listen. This helps more investors discover the show and keeps us bringing you these conversations week after week. Thank you for your continued support.