@theventure: This guy brought an animal back from extinction, and built a $10 billion empire! In 2019, Ben Lamm is a Texas software guy who's already sold three companies. He calls Harvard geneticist George Church to talk about AI, and at the end asks one thing: if you had unlimited money, what would you work on? Church says he'd bring back the woolly mammoth and put it back in the Arctic. Then he hangs up. Ben stays up all night reading about mammoths. Two weeks later he's in the Boston lab, where Church has chased the mammoth for ten years on a single $100,000 donation. So Ben quits his own company to fund it properly. ✓ Launches Colossal in 2021 with $15 million from the Winklevoss twins and Tony Robbins ✓ Tests mammoth fur genes on mice and gets 38 woolly mice 30 days later ✓ Pulls DNA from a 73,000-year-old skull, edits a grey wolf, and produces three dire wolves, the first in 12,500 years ✓ Sets the first woolly mammoth babies for 2028 Sold three companies → one question to a geneticist → mammoths all night → a lab running on $10K a year → quits to fund it → woolly mice, then dire wolves → a $10.3 billion company. Sometimes the biggest bet of your life starts with asking someone what they'd do with no limits. #Business #Colossal #Biotech #Success #Entrepreneur @colossal

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Wednesday 19 August 2026 14:54:22 GMT