An innovation arm's performance isn't its "batting average." If a team pursues truly ambitious, "exotic" opportunities, a high failure rate is an expected and even positive signal. An overly high success rate suggests the team is only taking safe, incremental bets, defeating its purpose.

Despite experts advising he would "waste his money," Immortal Dragons' founder received a controversial gene therapy in Honduras. He viewed it not as a cure, but as a low-risk chance to experience the process firsthand and support the "first wave" of companies attempting mass-market gene therapies.

The default assumption for any 'moonshot' idea is that it is likely wrong. The team's immediate goal is to find the fatal flaw as fast as possible. This counterintuitive approach avoids emotional attachment and speeds up the overall innovation cycle by prioritizing learning over being right.

Instead of hoarding early capital, Actuate's CEO synthesized a kilogram of their molecule and sent it to labs worldwide. The goal was to fail fast by seeing if promising results could be replicated, a crucial de-risking step before committing larger funds.

CZI set an audacious goal to cure all disease. When scientists deemed it impossible, CZI's follow-up question, "Why not?" revealed the true bottleneck wasn't funding individual projects, but a systemic lack of shared tools, which then became their core focus.

Frame moonshot projects like Google's Waymo not as singular bets, but as platforms for innovation. Even if the primary goal fails, the project should be structured to spin off valuable 'side effects'—advances in component technologies like AI, mapping, or hardware that benefit the core business.

Companies pursuing revolutionary technologies like autonomous driving (Waymo) or VR (Reality Labs) must endure over a decade of massive capital burn before profitability. This affirms venture capital's core role in funding these long-term, high-risk, high-reward endeavors.

Rather than abandoning an investment category after a failure, some VCs intentionally fund the same idea again in a new company. This strategy is not about repeating mistakes, but a high-conviction bet that the core idea was simply ahead of its time and that a change in timing or underlying technology will enable its success.

DFJ Growth Partner Barry Shuler details their strategy of avoiding herd investments by focusing on 'life tech'—the intersection of life sciences and technology. This contrarian approach allows them to back brilliant but lesser-known visionaries in emerging fields like population genomics, where they see immense potential.