The steady stream of announcements has captivated a collection of celebrity investors, including Paris Hilton and motivational speaker Tony Robbins, who don’t necessarily confer an aura of scientific seriousness. But Colossal has also enlisted less-famous investors with considerable pedigree, although it is unclear how involved they are.
Tom Chi of At One Ventures, a founding member at Google X, Alphabet Inc.’s innovation lab, is the only independent member of Colossal’s three-member board of directors. He has made ambitious investments in other difficult endeavors such as Helios Labs, which seeks to extract metals and oxygen from the surface of the moon and Mars.
Chi dismisses the focus on Hollywood investors. “Are they mucking with the way we do the science? No,” he said in an interview. In fact, Chi said, the science behind Colossal was so tough that many of its backers didn’t fully understand it. “It would probably take eight hours to explain to a celebrity.”
Traditional investors remain skeptical about the field. “I think the de-extinction angle might hold promise for scientific discovery, but probably very hard for venture in terms of market, cost and speed to scale,” said Helen Liang, managing partner of Founders X Ventures. “The bigger question is what business values could be unlocked and the justification on the cost of capital in doing that.”
The dodo was a flightless bird that was roughly twice the size of a turkey and lived on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, about 550 miles east of Madagascar. The last known one was killed in the late 1600s, after people arrived on the island and hunted the bird for food, overtook their habitat and introduced pigs and monkeys that ate their eggs.
Unicorn bubble goes 'Pop' 🙄
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