Journey of Building Billion Dollar Company
His First StartUp Failed but he did not quit and kept going.
Today I’ll introduce you to the founder and CEO of the leading text 2 image AI company MidJourney — DAVID HOLZ
In this article, We will dive deeply into what inspired him to build it. So you could get inspired and build something like it too.
Let’s first look into his childhood then his studies then the Amazing Part where he started to build his own Company.
let’s begin..
David Holz grew up in South Florida. His dad was a dentist who had a dental office on a sailboat. Sailboat! I hope now you know from where he got the idea for the MidJourney logo. Now back to his dad, His dad would Sail around to the Caribbean to get his patients.
David Holz was very interested in computers from an early age. He started coding in Scheme and later got high interest in it when he knew that he could hack games like “Star Wars Jedi Knight Dark Force 2, and do some amazing cool stuff with it that would impress his friends :)
As for Holz’s studies, He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and graduated with a dual degree in math and physics. Huh.. again another genius with maths and physics as his subjects. Hear my folks if you wanna be a billionaire get maths and physics. This is the first step, Okay!
Now his further studies he chooses maths though the real story is different because he wanted to pursue both maths and physics however he was forced to pick only one and maths was his choice as he thought of it as a middle ground.
While doing his PhD. He also worked at Langely and the Max Planck Institute but very soon he became overwhelmed by the amount of projects he took so he left those work and decided to do the thing that he wanted to do for a long time which was building his start-up, Leap Motion.
Leap motion was an amazing idea from Holz but it was way ahead of its time. Do you remember when Apple introduced the concept of touch screen, yes this was the time when Holz was working on motion tracking. Where you can control screen elements using hand motion and gestures. When Apple found out about it. They wanted this tech so badly that they approached them two times but the deal didn’t happen, and it was a big mistake because In real-world use and experiment. It was found that it’s not working very well.
The second offer was from Microsoft, They gave them a chance on their OS-Windows but it was not working very well and Things started to fall and LeapMotion became a failure. Soon after those failures company was sold to Ultra hepatic in 2019.
Currently, this tech is a gem, and All I can say is that this is the future. it is going to replace the touch screen, for example, look at Apple’s recent expensive toy Vision Pro. You see how every element of the screen is controlled using eye and hand gestures. Doesn’t this tech seem to you that it will replace the touch screen? Holz was right about it but, at the wrong time, and Leap Motion failed.
After leap motion failure, Holz was wondering what the would future look like.
Back in 2021, when everyone was worried about the coronavirus. The Silicon Valley geniuses were busy on working tech that could transform the World. One of those tech was Text2Image. Text2image made its first entrance with Dall E 1, though this didn’t catch the eye of normal people like us, but people who were living in Silicon Valley knew that this is going to revolutionize the industry and David Holz also witnessed it, he was at Silicon valley seeing looking at these amazing changes in the tech world.
Soon after the release of Dall e 1 Holz started working on making his own text 2 image. He built his team and worked on his AI. It took him a while but it was totally worth it. He waited till the release of DaLL E 2, and then MidJourney was also ready to be released. They introduced its beta version in Discord Server and people liked it, though at the start MidJourney was taking longer time than any text 2 image AI but the amount of details and quality compensated for all the time it took. people also loved the Discord platform so Holz made up his mind and kept the things as they were.
Generally, companies launch sites where they provide the service but they took a different approach and made MidJourney exclusive to the Discord server, Holz said that if people like it then it’s what we will do.
Currently, MidJourney is the top-ranked text 2 image and even won the Art of the Year title. They also have their art magazine and they are constantly working on making it a better platform.
That was the whole journey of David Holz failing and making it to MidJourney, I hope You Enjoyed it :)
Thank You
Be kind
