Bet on the big idea—the only way to change the world

“By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”

Looking back, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman’s 1998 statement sounds like a failure of imagination. But at the time, his skepticism represented a familiar story: Bold, visionary ideas are met with resistance and fear from industries entrenched in conventional wisdom.

Yet, time and again, we’ve seen how disruptors use technology and sheer conviction to rewrite the rules and yield transformative outcomes. In the last decade alone, this played out across industries like transportation, aerospace, and defense—from electric vehicles challenging Detroit to reusable rockets shattering the assumption of expendable space travel.

Are we lacking that same boldness in the pharmaceutical industry? Instead of a resounding call to action, we too often hear the careful footsteps of an industry tiptoeing through a minefield. Transformative science gives way to calculated discussions about payers and pharmacy benefit managers, sacrificing a compelling vision for cautious incrementalism.

Capture the imagination

The antidote to this paralysis isn’t less ambition, but more—a renewed focus on the first-principles mindset that defines truly transformative companies and has the potential to reduce our industry’s abysmal 90% failure rate.

The reality is no other industry has more profound potential to radically improve lives. Today, the convergence of AI and automation with biology and chemistry is a multitrillion-dollar opportunity to fundamentally reinvent the way we make new medicines. The potential impact is extraordinary for everyone who eventually becomes a patient.

Why, then, do today’s leaders temper their remarks for the future? To me, this tone reflects a larger, more systemic issue—one where the pressure to deliver short-term, incremental progress can come at the cost of world-changing ideas.

This isn’t to say that incrementalism is without value. Many businesses with conventional, risk-averse strategies can be successful. The manufacturing industry, for example, relies on gradual improvements to drive small, consistent gains. Yet these incremental changes are built on the back of world-changing inventions like Ford’s moving assembly line, which reduced the Model T’s production time by nearly 90%. In my world of discovering new medicines, we see this parallel in hundreds of biotech companies that maintain a traditional, program-by-program strategy. This work is incredibly important for science and for patients—we need these companies.

But this is a crucial distinction. The incremental approach is fundamentally different from the kind of moonshot thinking that changes an entire field.

Of course, this call for boldness is not a call for recklessness. When human lives are at stake, there is a fine line between conviction and hubris. The cautionary tale of Theranos reminds us that boldness must be grounded in an unwavering commitment to science, ethics, and truth. But a fear of overpromising should not paralyze us into underdelivering.

How game-changers are made

Sometimes real change requires a deep belief in a seemingly impossible path—one that may be deemed too risky but, if successful, could create a step-function change for the better.

This is the first-principles mindset that defines truly transformative companies—the kind that don’t just innovate, but build or reinvent entire industries, like cloud computing and space travel.

The creation of Amazon Web Services (AWS) required billions of dollars of investment in a new business line with no guarantee of success. The market saw it as an irrational capital expenditure, but it was a long-term bet on the idea that cloud computing would become the essential infrastructure for modern business. That high-risk bet is now the dominant force in its industry: AWS generated more than $100 billion in revenue in 2024 and controls the highest market share among cloud providers.

Similarly, when SpaceX set out to make spaceflight more affordable and reliable, the goal wasn’t just to make a better rocket; it was to create reusable rockets. The company prioritized a first-principles mindset—asking what the most basic, fundamental truths are about rocket science—and rebuilt the entire process from the ground up. This path had a higher chance of failure, but it significantly reduced the cost of space travel and led to a satellite network capable of providing internet to every corner of the globe.

This high-risk, high-reward strategy is not for everyone. The pressure to abandon it is constant, especially in an environment where shareholders demand near-term milestones and predictable returns. But my conviction is born from the understanding that to solve the world’s most complex problems, we must be guided by a different playbook.

This was our mindset when we founded Recursion. Our purpose is to decode biology to radically improve lives, and our commitment is to building a new kind of platform that can discover many medicines at scale, rather than just finding a single drug.

The cost of playing it safe

The most profound failures in history are not those that bet big and lost, but those that failed to bet at all. Incremental advances will never cure Alzheimer’s disease or reverse climate change. To achieve those kinds of step-function changes, we need to embrace the ambitious, the seemingly impossible, and the inevitably uncomfortable.

We must not be afraid of a healthy dose of “hype.” We must defend it as the kind of conviction necessary for world-changing innovation. Very few companies are responsible for changing industries and the world—but they are almost always the kind of companies that bet everything on the big idea.

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Chris Gibson is the cofounder and CEO of Recursion.