A big week for solo founders: Midjourney's founder is reinventing the full-body scan, a new film series follows the builders who left everything to bet on themselves, and a solo-founded security company just sold to Databricks. Let's get into it!
Midjourney's Biggest Swing Yet
“Images that are higher quality than MRI, whole body captured in under a minute, virtually free to run. This is going to change medicine.”
Yesterday, David Holz, the solo founder of Midjourney, announced Midjourney Medical: a new division building what it calls “Ultrasonic CT.”
The vision is hard to overstate.
Whole-body scans in under 60 seconds. No radiation. No magnets. Just sound and water. Midjourney says it ultimately wants to deploy 50,000 scanners capable of performing a billion scans per month.
Anthropic researcher Sholto Douglas captured why the announcement resonated with so many people in tech:
“Giving the right person unlimited license to tinker can create wonders.”
Most founders spend their careers going deeper on the thing that already works.
Holz could have spent the next decade improving image generation models.
Instead, he's taking a swing at one of the largest problems in healthcare: making medical imaging dramatically cheaper, faster, and more accessible.
Holz didn't ask, “What's the next feature?”
He asked, “What's the biggest problem I can help solve?”
We need more of that energy.
Why America? A New Film Series from Lighthouse
“Almost every one of them came chasing something personal: a question they needed to answer, a problem they couldn't stop thinking about, a version of themselves they could only become by trying.”
Minn Kim, the solo founder of Lighthouse, recently launched First Landing, a short film series about founders, engineers, and technologists who left somewhere familiar to build something new in America.
The line that stuck with me was: “a version of themselves they could only become by trying.”
It reminded me of Julian's essay, Make Something of Yourself.
Many of you, the solo founders who read this newsletter, are doing exactly that. You're not just trying to build a company. You're trying to become the person you could only become by trying.
Databricks Acquires Solo-Founded Panther Labs
“It's a great business, but it doesn't have to do with my mission.”
This week, Databricks acquired Panther Labs, the security company solo founder Jack Naglieri started in 2018.
As I listened to Jack's interviews, one thing kept coming up: his willingness to ignore opportunities most founders would have chased.
For years, people pushed him to expand. Turn Panther into an infrastructure company. Become the “Segment for security.” Build adjacent products.
Many of them were good ideas.
Jack kept coming back to the same principle: “If you muddy the offering, it starts to lose.”
So while others saw new markets, Jack stayed focused on the idea he'd been pushing since his days as a security engineer: security is fundamentally a data problem.
He spent years saying no to good ideas so he could stay focused on the mission. There's a lot to learn from that.
Solo, together.
Kieran
