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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

What would the business model look like for doing this?

I spend $20M on lab time and experts to clone a dodo... Then I lease that dodo to zoos for $2000/day... and in the dodo's lifespan I will never make a profit...

Or I spend $30M to clone two dodo's - one male, and one female. I then breed 100 more dodo's from that initial pair. I then rent them to zoos around the world, at perhaps $200/day (lower price because there is no exclusivity anymore). Even this plan is dubiously profitable, considering my rental income will only slowly ramp up over 20 years as dodos are born...

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> What would the business model look like for doing this?

What would the business model look like for going fishing with your friends?

Some people want to wear diamonds and dine at posh restaurants, some want to do gardening and write books on it, some want to revive extinct birds; it's not a means, it's an end.

> What would the business model look like for going fishing with your friends?

Well for one thing it would definitely not involve $20M+ in up front costs..

Jeff Bezos commissioned a $500m yacht

I hope you are right, but this is a for-profit company that has just received a new round of funding. From an Austin American-Statesman article[1], "Colossal Biosciences, which this week announced a new $150 million funding round, is led by Austin-based entrepreneur Ben Lamm..." And from a Yahoo! Finance article[2], "Colossal’s use of various gene editing technologies will make waves across sectors – in agriculture...as well as in human health through improved gene therapy and vaccine development."

I think it is reasonable to assume that there is a "business model" here.

[1]: https://www.statesman.com/story/business/technology/2023/01/...

[2]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/colossal-biosciences-secures-...

I have no idea, but I would assume the Dodos are just a good PR stunt.* There are many many many extinct animals, why Dodo? because they seem to be almost universally known. So i they are successful, it will help them move on to the next stage of profitibility, but along the way they will gain knowledge, skill, etc. I don't know how they intend to make that knowledge/skill the basis for a business though.

* To be clear, I don't think the idea of a "PR stunt" is a bad thing, just that they are unlikely to consider the Dodo the profitability endpoint. Maybe they intend to build a park of extinct animals on an island somewhere and charge people huge fees to visit....

> I think it is reasonable to assume that there is a "business model" here.

Maybe the plan is to make money off the technology they create to do this and let the dodos do whatever dodos do?

> What would the business model look like for going fishing with your friends?

I'm not sure what your point is. Guided fishing trips is a pretty well established business model. It is a very different business model from de-extinction. (To be clear i don't agree with the grand parent either, i think its plausible albeit hard to get a succesful business model around ultra rare items).

Since nobody's actually answering your question: Colossal's business model is to use de-extinction to push the frontier of various genetic manipulation techniques, patent them when possible, and sell/license the IP they generate to people who are doing other things. For example, the idea is that in de-extincting the dodo, we'll generate useful techniques for manipulating birds that the ag industry might want to use with chickens.

It seems tenuous to me. But I believe that's their stated plan.

I've spoken with some people there and this is basically their plan. Technology and experience in making significant genetic changes in large organisms likely ends up being valuable for lots of things less flashy than de-extincting famous animals.

Since animal testing is negative PR these days, it seems like de-extincting animals artfully sidesteps any ethical or moral objections. I mean, dead animals/species don’t have any rights, so they can run all the frankenstein experiments they want without any PETA activists throwing cans of soup.

I think the gap in that logic is similar in size to the gap in their business model.

Now that I think about it, the business model seems eerily similar to 23 and Me , where they give you some basic ethnicity report and then do who knows what with your DNA afterwards.

"This is the latest," said Crake.

What they were looking at was a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing.

"What the hell is it?" said Jimmy.

"Those are chickens," said Crake. "Chicken parts. Just the breasts, on this one. They've got ones that specialize in drumsticks too, twelve to a growth unit.

"But there aren't any heads..."

"That's the head in the middle," said the woman. "There's a mouth opening at the top, they dump nutrients in there. No eyes or beak or anything, they don't need those."

Reminds me of the Sligs in Heretics of Dune.

"ugly creatures who excreted slimy, foul-smelling residue, and whose multiple mouths ground incessantly on garbage"

Compare the model to: Interval Research.

They swore that they were generating innovations for good, to license to worthy businesses. No patent trolling.

Then they became a patent troll.

If you founded a company that actually, really, visibly de-extincted the very famous,, deeply recognizable, colloquially-adopted dodo ("dead as a dodo, "dumb as a dodo", etc), and then had a literal dodo-looking dodo bird walking around in some game preserve for all the world to see, finding funding via dodo leasing would be the least of your monetary inflows.

VC money would rain down upon you like mana from heaven and the publicity would garner your company so many indirect financial rewards that you could later move on to all sorts of things. Not to mention the IP and patent rights you'd presumably create along the way with your cloning process and related procedures for future profitable use.

Also worth noting that dodo birds were reportedly very tasty and meat-rich, so farming millions of them as a resurrected species for food is hardly out of the question.

It's funny, when I saw the picture of the dodo on their website, I almost immediately thought, that bird looks tasty.

Also, there is a fun movie by Aardman Animations about Charles Darwin and a band of pirates whose captain keeps the last remaining dodo as a pet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates!_In_an_Adventure_w...!

You have to do the startup math:

Dodos scale like software and streaming platforms and need to be pitched like one.

Most of the cost is up front, and the cost for the next marginal dodo user is very small. Cost to make a dodo is $3 and I can sell them for $33.

We plan to disrupt the dog and cat market. There are currently 80M pet dogs and 60M pet cats in the US. If we capture 50% of this market, that would be 70M dodos.

This gives a projected ~210 Million annual recurring revenue in the US alone.

As growth company, we foresee a price to earnings of 40x at this point, which would put us at market cap of 8.5 billion.

If I sell you 49% of the company for your 30M startup cost, this would represent a 28000% return on investment for you.

A dinosaur themed amusement park, I assume.

You (probably) won't be able to breed 100 Dodos from one initial pair, because of the minimum viable population restriction (genetic stochasticity).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_population

There are lots of birds that can have 100 offspring in a lifetime. Wild ducks lay ~12 eggs per year, and live 10 years. Commercial ducks can do 20x that.

Obviously, all those will be siblings, so your chance of getting much of another generation is low.

The dodo is not one of them: as stated in TFA, they're thought to lay only one egg per year. (Although nobody really knows.)

If only there were some way to find out how quickly researchers think that the dodo reproduced, we wouldn't have to randomly talk about wild ducks.

Might be. But the question also is, is there enough genetic variety on the cloned Dodos to warrant 100 healthy Dodo babies?

Don't worry about exclusivity if you can create more than one. The world's population won't descend on the one city with exclusivity, but the broader number will descend on each city's zoo presenting a fresh new exhibit like this. Far more than $200/daily multiplied by the many zoos around the world.

Think about how China manages pandas with zoos around the world. The pandas in my hometown zoo got a lot of press and attention. I've never seen them, but their names are generally common knowledge. Struggle to remember the names of some of my friends' kids, but I can remember bloody Wang Wang and Fu Ni.

I'm not a biologist, but my guess is that it's much easier to make a dodo-like bird (leaving aside its dodosity) than to make a breeding pair of them.

> What would the business model look like for doing this?

sigh

We have exterminated a species. It's not going to be the last. We need this technology now to insure against further biosphere collapse. We are probably not going to be able to backup the entire biosphere, but we should start somewhere.

Governments should be doing this. What's the business model of the military?

> What's the business model of the military?

To protect the currency.

Without a military you can’t protect the tax base that you need to pay for the military.

> We need this technology now to insure against further biosphere collapse.

yawn, sigh (whatever other passive-aggressive bodily functions you can imagine).

99% percent of all species that ever existed have gone extinct. The biosphere is not some pathetic weak, non resilient, piece of glass that you think it is. We can easily lose a lot more species and the biosphere would be just fine.

> We have exterminated a species.

We are not some outside influence/cancer on the planet. We ARE nature, and nature is survival of the fittest, we are fit, dodos are not.

A massive loss of biodiversity is bad for humans, regardless of whether the biosphere recovers.

Spoken like someone who doesn't spend much time outside. Something can be worth saving for its own sake.

Traveling exhibit, charge $50/head, $20 for social media photo, concessions and you really only need 400,000 people to buy a ticket.

If you do a limited tour of the top 20 cities in the USA (population 35 million, you only need 1% of people to attend)

Not totally unreasonable, though I think you’d have better luck with something like a wooly mammoth.

I met Ben Lamm through a mutual friend when he came and sat down for dinner next to us and we ended up joining tables together. At the time the big news was his mammoth de-extinction project. He said that his business model was to essentially set up zoo exhibits and charge people to go see the mammoths. He also said that given how long the elephant gestation period is that it would take a while for the mammoth project to get going so they were looking at other de-extinctions they could do. I guess the dodo was one.

The zoo idea didn't seem to stack up to me and my friends so our consensus was his idea was to generate hype and exit, possibly licensing some of the tech developed along the way.

I'm more interested in the business case for farming giant tortoises, since they don't even need to be cloned. (although, it might help. Don't know if birds or reptiles are easier to clone)

I hear them suckers are delicious. Also, their population's kinda low.

The business is to develop and then sell genetic engineering technology. Reviving the dodo is just a marketing trick and R&D platform.

Genetic engineering technology has a large potential market in healthcare, agriculture, the chemical industry, and elsewhere.

Why does everything need to be a business model?

> Or I spend $30M to clone two dodo's - one male, and one female. I then breed 100 more dodo's from that initial pair.

You’re off to a good start to serving an historically unserved market.

I read somewhere that roasted dodos are delicious.

Christ. I realize you're probably being facetious. But de-extincting species to consign them to industrial food production (or some other industrial extraction process) seems like one of the more plausible business models. That's grim.

> de-extincting species to consign them to industrial food production (or some other industrial extraction process) seems like one of the more plausible business models. That's grim.

Thanks for calling this out in plain English.

To the extent my earlier comment is "funny", it's nervous-laughter funny which says something like "this is inhumane and probably immoral and its logical absurdity strongly suggests we should change our behavior to protect sentient species from such things coming to pass."

I don't see cows going extinct anytime soon...

this is the human way and of course we will do exactly that. After we produce dodo birds for the wealthy to consume we will redouble our efforts to do the same with dinosaurs.

Brontosaurus steak was a running gag on the Flintstones, but I'm sure it would be a huge hit among the kinds of people who pay $1000 for a gold-encrusted Salt Bae steak.

> Even this plan is dubiously profitable

Keep breeding dodos and then charge a million dollars a weekend to anyone who can afford it to go hunt them, and your initial $30m is likely recouped within the first year

There likely isn't enough genetic diversity to get more than a first generation of dodo's. You'd end up doing a lot of inbreeding and the rate of successful births would be very low.

I don't think the RIO is supposed be monetary.

The return is that Dodo's are no longer extinct. That could still turn into an operation that "makes money" if only to pay a wage for those involved, but with investors not looking for a monetary return. Obviously more care is needed to make sure it's legitimate since economics doesn't naturally validate such propositions.

Also, food supply? Bigger chick~I, mean, Dodo birds.

Bigger chickens would mean nothing to the food supply. We have lots of birds that are (1) commonly eaten and (2) much bigger than chickens. Chickens are very small.

Dennis Tito might pay $20M to eat one.

I guess you can sell them exclusively to a gulf state such as Qatar or the United Arab Emirates that currently has huge revenues from oil, but knows that will not last, and is working hard on getting sources of income for those times.

A lot of people would pay good money to dig up and reanimate their pets

1- Start with dodos

2- Once the technique becomes reliable, clone pets for rich people.

3- Profit!

...then, one day, possibly also human organs for transplants.

I believe that pets are already clonable and this service is available from companies. The problem is that traits such are coloration and perhaps, personality, tend to be polygenic and influenced by environmental factors. Thus the clones are may not at all look (or behave) like the original.

Must everything have a business model?

No, but it's pretty hard to get big investment money without one.

You just leverage supply and demand.

Serve dodo as an exclusive gourmet meal to thirty oil sheikhs at $1 million a piece.

Easy.

Nah you got it all wrong. Forget Zoo's, first breed WAY more than just 100. Then charge $30 a lb for Dodo wings/legs/breast to fine dining establishments.

Once you got a nice little operation going, you can then start selling Dodo eggs as well.

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