Ben Lamm Co-founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences, the de-extinction company; earlier founder of Chaotic Moon, Conversable and Hypergiant Founder · Capital · $1–10B cost 5 headwinds 0

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Founder · Capital · Biotechnology · Technology · Software · Artificial Intelligence · $1–10B

Ben Lamm

Co-founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences, the de-extinction company; earlier founder of Chaotic Moon, Conversable and Hypergiant · b. 1981 · Austin, Texas

not establishedTexas

Colossal Biosciences

Cost of failure 5 / 10

soft landingnothing to catch a fall

Headwinds 0 / 10

clear runagainst the current

Two calls made by hand, not formulas. how we score →

Summary

A Texas serial founder who started his first company as a Baylor senior and sold four of the next ones.

In 2021 he co-founded Colossal with Harvard geneticist George Church and raised outside capital at a reported $10 billion or more valuation. Forbes puts him at $5.7 billion, almost all of it paper value in a private company.

Coded record

industryBiotechnology · Technology · Software · Artificial Intelligence

talenthigh

connectionssome

outcome size$1–10B · band 5

path typeFounder · Capital

childhood householdtwo-parent

immigrant generationnone

educationnot established

credential fundingnone

startup capitalnone

took outside investmentyes

kept ownershipyes

public scrutinyjournalistic

ⓘ Hover any row for its definition.

Subject cooperation: public-only · last reviewed 2026-10-12

Where they worked

Colossal Biosciences Co-founder and CEO · 2021–now founder still there

How it happened

iAustin and Baylor

Wikipedia gives his birth as December 4, 1981 in Austin, Texas, and says he attended Baylor University. It says he founded his first company, Simply Interactive, while a senior there; Wikipedia cites D Magazine for the Baylor detail and says the company was later acquired by Agile in 2010. The sources consulted say nothing about his parents, their work or their money, and none confirms whether he finished the degree. Those are left blank rather than guessed.

iiChaotic Moon and the early exits

In March 2010 he co-founded Chaotic Moon Studios in Austin with William "Whurley" Hurley and Mike Erwin. Wikipedia says WME and Silver Lake Partners took a significant position in 2013, so outside money was in this company before the sale. Accenture bought it in July 2015 for undisclosed terms. A game studio, Team Chaos, went to Zynga in 2016 and Conversable, a conversational-software company he started with Andrew Busey, went to LivePerson in 2018. No sale price is public for any of them, so how much he personally took out is not known.

iiiHypergiant

Hypergiant Industries was his AI and machine-learning firm. TechCrunch reported in August 2023 that Trive Capital had acquired it, terms not disclosed, and that Lamm was staying on its board. Forbes describes the buyer differently, as Josh Kushner's Thrive Capital. The two names are one letter apart and the sources disagree, so the buyer here follows TechCrunch and Wikipedia.

ivColossal

Turning point

In 2021 he co-founded Colossal Biosciences with George Church. Church supplied the science and the lab; the company's first money was $15 million of seed funding from other people, including Thomas Tull and Tim Draper, per Wikipedia. Lamm brought a record of selling companies, the ability to raise and the pitch itself, which was to bring back the woolly mammoth. Nothing in the sources shows him putting meaningful cash of his own into it. Later reported rounds were $60 million in 2022, $150 million in 2023 and $200 million in January 2025 at a stated $10.2 billion valuation, all from outside investors. The sources consulted don't show Colossal earning meaningful product revenue, so its valuation rests on investors' view of the science and the company's announcements.

vWhat Colossal has announced, and what others said

In April 2025 Colossal announced three pups, Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi, which it called dire wolves. By Colossal's account they were gray wolves with 20 edits across 14 genes, based on DNA from a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old ear bone. The IUCN Species Survival Commission Canid Specialist Group said, as reported, that they are not dire wolves under any definition. Colossal chief scientist Beth Shapiro was reported in May 2025 as saying they are gray wolves with 20 edits. Whether they should be called dire wolves is argued over; this site doesn't take a side. Colossal's mammoth, thylacine and dodo timelines are company goals, not achieved results, and none of those animals has been produced.

viWhere it stands

Forbes lists his net worth at $5.7 billion as of October 12, 2026, rank 736 and self-made. That figure depends on private-company valuations set by funding rounds, such as the $10.2 billion at the January 2025 round and a figure of $11.5 billion Forbes mentions for 2025. His ownership percentage isn't public in the sources consulted. In April 2026, per Forbes, he spun an AI company, Astromech, out of Colossal, valued at $3.8 billion that August. That is also a private mark.

Can you replicate their success?

Partly

Part of this route is copyable: starting a software company as a student, selling it, and starting again needs little. The Colossal step is much harder. It rested on a Harvard geneticist as co-founder, investors willing to fund years of work with no product, and a story the press would carry. The wealth is also unrealized and rests on private valuations, so what the route has actually paid out is not yet known.

Required conditions

1 Several earlier exits, or a track record investors accept in their place

2 A scientist with a lab and standing willing to co-found

3 Investors prepared to fund multi-year research ahead of any revenue

4 A public story that keeps attention and funding coming

5 Time and patience for the claims to be tested by independent scientists

The coded evidence

Thirteen groups, every claim sourced

Feeds cost of failure

Parent Occupations

Low

not established

Wikipedia and the profiles consulted say nothing about his parents.

↗ en.wikipedia.org

Structural context

founder lens · venture capital

The cost-of-failure score comes from this person's own money and circumstances. But who they were in America carried its own weight, the same way their household or income did, and it shaped how hard the path was just as much. That part isn't in the cost-of-failure number. It's here instead.

tailwindman

Men founded the companies that took nearly all the venture funding and almost every top outcome, a tailwind that never shows up in one person's own circumstances.

↗ techcrunch.com

Among the people recorded here — men: 225. Representation here is who reached these outcomes, not equal odds of reaching them.