The CEO Hacking Evolution’s Clock

Everyone has a skill that, when looking back on their life, turns out to have shaped their entire career. For some people, it's storytelling. For others, it's an extraordinary ability to operationalize. For Ben Lamm, CEO of Colossal Biosciences and the entrepreneur behind a string of unicorn companies, it's something stranger: the ability to compress time.

In a 2017 interview with Dallas Innovates, Lamm described what he considered his defining business skill: "Someone once asked me what my special skill was in business, and I answered that it's a subset of time travel and really compressing time."

Nearly a decade later, it seems he has taken that philosophy even further.

Lamm's obsession with time compression led him from Hypergiant, the defense and space technology company he founded, to Colossal Biosciences, a company attempting one of the most ambitious scientific challenges imaginable: de-extinction.

"De-extinction is time compression in two ways," Lamm says. "On one hand, we now have the technical tools to understand the past."

Artificial intelligence, computational modelling, and gene editing have converged to create exactly that opportunity. AI can search biological possibilities at a scale humans never could. Gene editing allows hypotheses to be tested rather than merely debated. And, modern computing turns decades of laboratory work into months of simulation that dramatically reduces experimentation time.

But for Lamm, reconstructing the past is only half the story.

"The more completely we understand biology through de-extinction," he says, "the more we can compress future time. If we can do that it means developing cures for diseases or solving biological maladaptations that today take decades to understand could be dramatically reduced."

His argument is that de-extinction is less about resurrecting mammoths than it is about building a complete model of biology itself. Once biology becomes sufficiently computable, discovery begins to accelerate.

That creates an interesting paradox. Biology has always been indifferent to startup timelines. Venture capital rewards rapid iteration but evolution unfolds over millions of years. Lamm believes that distinction is beginning to disappear.

"Biology is becoming an engineering discipline," he says. "We're moving from observing biology to programming it because we've compressed the most difficult variable: time."

It's an ambitious claim and one that naturally invites skepticism.

Every technological revolution has, in some way, compressed time. Railroads compressed geography, shrinking journeys that once took weeks into days. The internet compressed communication, collapsing distance into milliseconds. Today, artificial intelligence compresses cognition, reducing hours of thinking into seconds of computation.

Biology, however, has always resisted acceleration.

"People misunderstand what we're building," Lamm says. "They think we're in the mammoth business. But we're really in the time-compression business. We're making biology something engineering can finally work with. By reducing the timelines of discovery, we reduce the timelines required to test, understand, and ultimately work with nature."

It's an important distinction.

The extinct animals may become the public face of Colossal, but internally they function more like moonshots i.e. problems so difficult that solving them forces entirely new technological capabilities into existence. Every breakthrough in reproductive biology, genome assembly, computational modelling, or gene editing becomes infrastructure that can be applied far beyond de-extinction.

That way of thinking explains why Lamm has consistently gravitated toward seemingly impossible markets. Throughout his career, he hasn't simply built companies around emerging technologies. Instead, he's looked for moments when multiple technologies converge, creating an opportunity to compress time itself.

When that happens, an entirely new design space emerges: one where problems that once belonged to science fiction become engineering challenges.

That is where Lamm thrives.

It also reflects a broader shift in how entrepreneurs create value. For decades, founders built companies that moved information more efficiently. The next generation may build companies that move biology with the same precision. If software allowed humanity to rewrite code, synthetic biology may allow us to rewrite life itself.

As Lamm puts it, "People consistently overestimate what happens in a year and underestimate what happens in ten. The tools compound. Once they reach escape velocity, progress stops looking linear."

Perhaps that's the deeper meaning of time compression.

It isn't simply about making the clock run faster. It's about reaching the point where every breakthrough accelerates the next and where technology compounds on itself, creating a flywheel that permanently changes the pace of innovation. Time, in Lamm's worldview, seems that it isn't a constraint to be accepted. It's another variable that can be engineered.