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In the past few years, entrepreneurs have promised to de-extinct the woolly mammoth, create commercial space travel, build integrated AI and even humanoid robots. Each of these ideas seemed impossible at first glance or at least, wildly unlikely. And yet, companies like Colossal, SpaceX, OpenAI and FigureAI, are unicorn companies with sky-high valuations, one of which is about to go public for trillions of dollars.

They are suggesting a pattern here that is, frankly, hard to ignore. The days when an entrepreneur can set out to capture a niche market or optimize an existing product might be gone. Instead, today’s most successful entrepreneurs are being tasked with rewriting the rules of what’s possible. And, investors, it turns out, are hungry for that audacity and the blue ocean thinking behind some of the biggest companies on the market.

“I built five businesses before Colossal,” said CEO, co-founder and billionaire Ben Lamm. “So while this seemed impossible to many, I understood what was necessary to bring success. A lot of moonshot founders have a track record of success. Now they are leveling up by creating a company that has the capacity to create true transformation for the world. No one needs another new app company ever again. We need world-changing ideas to create a better tomorrow.”

The era of the “just another copy” startup, the one that does what someone else does but slightly cheaper or faster, may be dying or at least, may be decidedly boring. In today’s funding environment, the biggest checks are cascading toward those with the biggest visions.

There’s a psychological logic to this. Venture capital is, at its core, a power law business. A fund’s returns are driven not by its average investment but by the one or two bets that return the entire fund and then some. That math incentivizes VCs to chase transformational ideas, because a company solving a modest problem can only ever be worth so much. A company that successfully de-extincts an Ice Age megafauna, or puts humanity on the moon and then Mars, has no obvious ceiling. The bigger the addressable (literal) universe, the bigger the potential return.

But here’s what the headlines often miss: the moonshot bet only works when it’s paired with a ruthlessly executable near-term business. SpaceX hasn’t held out for Mars colonization to generate revenue; it won NASA contracts and disrupted the satellite launch market first. Colossal is doing more than making dire wolves; it’s building gene-editing tools with immediate applications to human healthcare. OpenAI monetized a chatbot while building toward artificial general intelligence. Indeed, a pragmatic revenue strategy is what keeps the lights on long enough to achieve the truly unfathomable.

So what does this mean for the entrepreneur sitting in a garage or a dorm room or a co-working space right now, staring at a whiteboard full of ideas? It means the bar has shifted. The question is no longer simply “is there a market for this?” but “does this change something fundamental about the world?” That is the question that the entrepreneurs behind these unicorns were willing to answer.

Logan Simmons

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Writer

The Bigger the Moonshot The More Likely the Unicorn