From ISEF finalist to Midjourney founder: David Holz reflects on creativity, entrepreneurship and the role of AI

When David Holz spoke to Regeneron ISEF finalists this past May, he hinted that Midjourney, his generative AI company best known for turning text prompts into images, was pursuing some unexpected new projects.

“We’re working on a bunch of hardware projects,” David told the finalists, describing experiments involving sensors, lasers and large-scale machines. “We have a lot of really weird projects.”

Those plans have since started coming into focus. This summer, Midjourney expanded into medical imaging with an experimental full-body ultrasound scanner intended to create detailed three-dimensional maps of the body. The company is also planning a San Francisco research spa that would combine the scanners with baths, saunas and other wellness amenities.

The unexpected venture is the latest chapter in a scientific journey that began long before Midjourney. David was named to the 2025 TIME100 AI. But before all of that, he competed at ISEF in 2006. He returned two decades later as the founder and CEO of Midjourney, which also sponsors the Technology Enhances the Arts (TECA) category at Regeneron ISEF, and as a member of the Society for Science Board of Trustees for a conversation with Society President and CEO Maya Ajmera.

From ISEF to an entrepreneurial career

David described himself as “just a random kid in Florida” who did not grow up surrounded by scientists. He said every adult who “cared and listened and encouraged” had “a bigger effect than you’d think.”

His 2006 ISEF project focused on locating and tracking sounds in three dimensions using microphones. “My board had a bunch of microphones built into it and the wires going into a computer,” David recalled. “As we would walk around the board and talk about the project, it would show in 3D where we were based off our voices.”

The project reflected an early interest in sensors and spatial tracking that later carried into Leap Motion, the advanced hand-tracking technology company he co-founded. “I was really into sensors and tracking and understanding things, and that ended up going into my first company, which was Leap Motion,” David said.

David left his Ph.D. program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to launch the company. He had originally imagined a more traditional career path: completing his doctorate, working at NASA and eventually running his own lab. Then he began to wonder whether he needed to wait.

“What if I just skip a lot of those steps and go straight to trying to make my own thing?” he recalled asking himself. “So I was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to take six months, 12 months, see what I can do.’ And never came back.”

That independent streak also shaped how David built Midjourney, which became profitable without outside investors. For David, earning revenue directly from customers was an important test of whether the product was genuinely liked by customers. “Raising money is very different than having a product that people are willing to pay for,” he said. “In some ways, if people aren’t willing to pay for it, is it really adding value?”

How should young people approach AI?

David offered the finalists a memorable way to think about generative AI: Treat it like “a friend that thinks they know everything, but they often don’t.”

AI systems can recognize patterns, generate possibilities and help people work more quickly, but they may not recognize gaps or biases within the information on which they rely. That makes human judgment, fact checking and verification essential.

David also encouraged students to distinguish between problems that require combining existing knowledge and those that demand genuinely new thinking. AI is particularly capable when it can blend concepts it has encountered before. Moving beyond those boundaries is much harder.

“Sometimes you have to rethink the whole world from scratch,” he said. “There are a lot of ways that new ideas can form, and that’s really where a lot of the opportunity is.”

Students who are comfortable pursuing “fuzzy, vague, not well-defined problems,” he suggested, possess an increasingly valuable skill.

“The second the numbers are gone, most people feel lost,” David says. “It’s a rare skill to be able to work on something that’s not particularly well-defined.”

Will AI replace human creativity?

David founded Midjourney in 2021 to explore the creative process itself: how people imagine new possibilities and how technology might help bring those possibilities to life.

“The most interesting question is not so much, ‘What do we want to build?’” he said. “The more interesting question is, ‘What do we want to become?’”

He compared working with generative AI to growing a garden. A person helps cultivate the result, but many influences contribute to what eventually emerges. “Did you make that tomato plant? I don’t know. I guess you grew that tomato plant,” David said. “That tomato plant is a reflection of yourself in some ways, but it’s also a reflection of every tomato plant that’s ever existed.”

Rather than using AI to avoid creative work, David believes people should use it to attempt more ambitious work. An artist might rapidly test ideas, experiment with color and composition, or pursue a project that would otherwise require prohibitive amounts of time.

“I think ideally we use these tools to make ourselves more ambitious and more confident,” he said. “We use these things to do bigger work that we wish we could do.”

His advice extended beyond AI. Looking back, David said many of his missed opportunities resulted from judging an unfamiliar idea too quickly instead of investigating what it might offer.

“Life isn’t necessarily about giving you answers as much as it is about giving you inspiration,” he said. “The more that you can take anything that comes at you, whether it’s good or bad or right or wrong, and say, ‘What kind of inspiration for new ideas can I draw out of this?’ everything just works better.”

Watch the full conversation with David Holz here.