people
david holz and the people around midjourney — the leap motion cofounder, the staff and advisors, and the community that writes the record.
the founder
- david holz · founder · davidsHolzfounder — he prefers it over ceo: 'ceo sounds very businessy, and we're not very businessy. we're an applied research lab that makes products.' southern florida tinkerer; a high-school microphone-array project took him to isef 2006 (he lost 'to somebody who cured a disease'). physics and math at unc, an applied-math phd he left while doing nasa langley and max planck research; then twelve years at leap motion — cofounder, cto through the 2019 ultraleap sale — before starting midjourney in august 2021 to escape 'a big venture-backed company.' runs near-weekly wednesday office hours on voice with ~1,000 listeners; society for science trustee.
- michael buckwald · co-founderthe leap motion cofounder — holz's friend since middle school in florida, ceo through the controller launch, the collapsed apple talks, and the 2019 sale to ultrahaptics, at which point he departed. he is not a midjourney founder; he belongs to the prehistory.
the writing
midjourney writes collectively — the about page's "independent research lab" self-description, the release notes that serve as the de facto blog, the legal filings that argue the company's own theory of fair use, and the medical announcement. institutional voice, not personal authorship.
- 2022the about page · document, midjourney.com · the lab's own voicethe 2022 about page — eleven staff by first name, the advisor list (keller, friedman, rosedale, warner, crowson), ~40 volunteer moderators. today's version reads 'a community-funded research lab of 60 people… a lean, self-funded, distributed team.'
independent research lab exploring new mediums of thought and expanding the imaginative powers of the human species
- 2022–the release notes · post, midjourney updates · the lab's own voiceupdates.midjourney.com — the company's de facto blog and the primary record for every model release from v6.1 through v8.2, the editor, rooms, patchwork, mjtv, and the 'secret hardware project' teaser. most posts carry the byline 'caleb.'
- 2025-08-06the fair-use answer · document, c.d. cal. filing · the lab's own voicethe answer to the disney/universal complaint — the company argues its own theory of training: extracting statistical information to understand concepts, the way a person learns by looking. 'many dozens' of the plaintiffs' own employees hold subscriptions; bob iger is quoted back at them.
limited monopoly… must give way to fair use
- 2026-06-17midjourney medical · document, midjourney.com · the lab's own voicethe midjourney medical announcement — the scanner (water-immersion ultrasound-ct, 40 butterfly modules, ~½mm detail), the 300 grant ave spa targeting end-2027, and the ambition claims: 50,000+ scanners by ~2031, 'a billion scans a month.' announcement confirmed; the claims are goals.~30k livestream viewers
the team
- ahmad abbashead of hardware, joined december 2023 (revealed february 2024) — ex-apple vision pro engineering manager (~5 years), ex-neuralink (~9 months), ex-leap motion (~4 years). the team's early focus was 3d data capture; 'orb' was the reported project nickname. the program culminated in the june 2026 midjourney medical / scanner reveal.
- max kreminskihead of the storytelling lab — leads patchwork, the multiplayer infinite-canvas worldbuilding research preview launched december 2024: the first public artifact of the world-model agenda.
- banu gülerchief design officer by august 2026 — co-star co-founder and longtime holz friend; surfaced publicly co-hosting office hours with duncan wilson while holz was away.
- duncan wilson · nacnudweb team lead — co-hosted the august 2026 office hours covering v8.1 draft mode and site-redesign items in alpha.
- the 2022 rosterthe archived about page listed eleven full-time people: holz as executive; research & engineering as first names only — daniel, max, jack, thomas, red, sam, nadir, sebastian; legal & finance as max sills (legal advisor) and nadia ali. alongside them, ~40 volunteer discord moderators and guides listed by handle. the names are confirmed by the archived page; current roles are not.
- the advisorsthe 2022 about page's advisor list: jim keller (lead silicon at apple, amd, tesla, intel; cto tenstorrent), nat friedman (ex-github ceo), philip rosedale (second life founder), bill warner (avid founder — and a 2011 ocuspec angel), and katherine crowson — the independent researcher whose clip-guided diffusion is the work holz says 'struck my eye' in 2021. everydev additionally lists daniel gross; weaker sourcing.
- the aggregator rosterrocketreach and everydev list current execs — nadia ali (coo), sharmeen chapp (cpo), tom calloway (vp special projects), alex matzner (vp operations), max sills (general counsel), bhavin patel (head of finance), brian kappus (technical director), keith caskey (principal mechanical engineer). aggregator data — reported, not verified; the org chart is one of this dossier's open gaps.
- the community benchnon-employees who carry the news: nick st. pierre (@nickfloats), the evangelist whose relays first surfaced the stability ban; alie jules; and the recap writers — henrique centieiro, brian sykes, daniel reiser's imagine weekly, 'enthusiastically midjourney' weekly, paul delsignore. community coinage: 'miss journey,' the recurring default female face in early models.
- the lab's own voicethe company writes collectively — the about page's 'independent research lab' self-description, the updates-site release notes (named author of most posts: 'caleb'), the livestreamed reveals. institutional voice, not personal authorship.
interviews and talks
- 2012-05-24the first profile · bloomberg businessweek'david holz's leap motion wants to kill the mouse' — the first national profile: holz 23, the florida tinkerer, the isef microphone project.
- 2013-06the leap founding story · inc.the inc. founding story — two 30-pound backpacks, a radio-shack prototype, and $45m raised for hand tracking.
- 2022-08-01already profitable · the registerthe register's claburn gets the business model on record a week before open beta went wide — self-funded, already profitable, and a credit to katherine crowson's clip-guided diffusion as the work that caught his eye.
- 2022-08-02an engine for the imagination · the vergejames vincent's canonical profile — 'an engine for the imagination,' the dog→pink dog→aztec space dog co-imagining anecdote, ai-as-water, 'aesthetic accelerationism,' miss journey, and the first on-record training-data candor: 'everyone grabs everything they can… and they kind of set it on fire to train some huge thing.'
- 2022how computers dream · what future'how computers dream with david holz' — joshua topolsky's what future; the dreaming-machines frame before 'slop' entered the vocabulary.
- 2022-09-16the consent answer · forbesrob salkowitz's ethics interview — the most-quoted holz on record: 'a big scrape of the internet,' no opt-out of training and none of being named in prompts, a corporate license for companies over $1m revenue. three months later petapixel resurfaced the quotes as a flashpoint; the studios now cite them in filings.
- 2022the scale on record · mixed newsthe scale disclosures: ~10 employees, 'several 100,000 customers,' ~10,000 servers, millions of images a day — self-reported, but the earliest numbers on record.
- 2022-11-10the stratechery interview · stratecheryben thompson's stratechery interview — generative ai, vr, silicon valley. paywalled; the contents are cataloged but not verified.
- 2023-07-07the name, at waic · waicthe waic shanghai video talk — the name's origin in a favorite translation of zhuangzi (中道, 'mid-journey') and 'ai should be an extension of ourselves.'
- 2023-10-30the uist keynote · uist'a wide-ranging conversation with david holz' — the uist '23 keynote in san francisco, given the same day judge orrick largely dismissed the first andersen complaint.
- 2021–the wednesday office hours · midjourney discordthe near-weekly wednesday voice calls on the discord — the company's de facto disclosure channel and the reason no official transcript exists. the world-simulation roadmap, the stability ban, the sora 'good enough' verdict, the sims-as-final-medium line ('no hard distinction between creators and players'), and the disney-suit comment all surfaced here first, preserved only in community recaps.
- 2025the isef return · society for sciencethe society for science retrospective and a short student interview at regeneron isef 2025 — the isef-alum-to-trustee arc, and midjourney sponsoring the 'technology enhances the arts' award while the lawsuits pile up.
- 2026-03-29the 2026 information interview · the information'midjourney is profitable and chasing hardware dreams. but can it survive google?' — revenue 'significantly surpassed' $200m and still growing despite declining traffic; the hardware ambitions might force the first vc raise. paywalled — relayed via winbuzzer and texxr.
the philosophy
themes tracked across the writing: aesthetic accelerationism, bootstrap independence, co-imagining community, engine for the imagination, human infrastructure, spatial computing, the consent answer, the world-simulation bet.
- 2022–the candor that became an exhibitthe consent candor — holz's on-record 'no' to artist consent and 'a big scrape of the internet' became the most-quoted founder statements in the whole training-data debate, then plaintiffs' exhibits in the andersen and disney filings.holz frames it as honesty about how everyone trains — 'something that 100% of people do'; artists and their lawyers read it as the confession.
- 2018the anonymous quotesthe apple quotes — business insider's account of the collapsed leap motion deals quotes holz calling apple's technology 'sucked' and the company 'the devil,' all from anonymous employees. holz has never publicly confirmed them.the quotes do load-bearing work in every retelling of holz's anti-vc posture — they are marked reported, not confirmed, throughout this dossier.
AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.