Don Q. Dao

@bcg @getnolla @wharton @utaustin

[Don Q. Dao @donqdao]

@juliapintar https://t.co/wr02sVQmaK

[Don Q. Dao @donqdao]

@bizdevelo playbook

[David @DavidSHolz]

dream harder

[Don Q. Dao @donqdao]

@tankots @WisprFlow 1. move the mac pill or let me drag it to whatever corner
2. any way to bypass the required swipe each time on iphone
3. make it work with airpods
4. a way to reload or force copy when it starts spinning out

huge fan of the product otherwise

[Don Q. Dao @donqdao]

the arc from anime slop generation to what might be one of the most significant medical innovators of this century is incredible

[Nick St. Pierre @nickfloats]

What Midjourney is:

- No investors, fully community-funded research lab
- Revenue from image generation product funds all R&D
- ~$100M in first 9 months, $200M by month 12, still growing
- 8 active projects: 4 hardware, 4 software
----2 hardware products coming to market soon (consumer-purchasable)
----2 are large-scale machines

DAVID HOLZ: Background and Philosophy
- Grew up in Florida, parents in medicine, dad had a dental office on a sailboat
- Physics and math background: drawn to the tension between predicting reality vs. absolute truth
- Core thesis: the interaction between humans and technology is the biggest limitation, not compute power
- Founded Leap Motion at 22: $10M in pre-orders in 48 hours from a website (not Kickstarter)
- Built hand-tracking VR: 600M-parameter mixture-of-experts model, 2015, CPU cluster, pre-TensorFlow
- Also shipped Northstar, an open-source AR headset

- Left Leap Motion wanting a “home,” not a 100x return
- Mentor Bill Warner told him he could bootstrap; he listened this time
- Started Midjourney with ~$200K, called Google for 10,000 GPUs on trust alone

THE SCANNER: Full Body Ultrasonic CT
- First new whole-body medical imaging modality in ~50 years
- Concept: “as powerful as an MRI, as casual as a trip to the spa”
- No radiation, no magnets, no x-rays; safe for unlimited scans

How it works:
- 40 rings, each with 8,960 transducers (200 microns wide), totaling 358,000 elements
- Fires ultrasonic waves at 100M times/second; sound travels through water at 1,481 m/s
- Sensors resolve motion down to picometers (sub-atomic range)
- Captures 17 GB/second of raw data; 806 TB per full scan reconstruction
- 21 on-site servers, 2 petaflops of compute
- Patient lowers into water at 4 cm/second; ~60 seconds for several hundred body slices
- Produces sub-millimeter 3D maps of internal tissue

Already outperforming MRI in some tissue boundary and muscle fiber detail on DAY ONE.

10x cheaper and 60x faster than MRI machines; scan cost effectively near zero.

Gen 2 scanner planned by end of 2026; Gen 3 will use custom silicon.

SCANNER vs. MRI: Key Differences
- MRI: 60-minute tube, loud, requires sedation for children, expensive, radiation-adjacent.
- This scanner: water immersion, 30-60 seconds, no sedation, no radiation, repeatable daily.
- Current limitation: not yet FDA-cleared beyond body composition; no AI layer yet applied.
- Already better than MRI in certain muscle/fiber/vein boundary resolution at day one

THE MIDJOURNEY SPA:
- First location: Union Square, San Francisco
- 25,000 sq ft, 4 floors
- Amenities: hot tubs, saunas, cold plunges, European spa features, gym
- 9-10 full scanners on-site
- Goal: open by end of 2027

Target:
- 50,000 scanners globally, capable of 1 billion scans/month
- 5,000 spa locations needed at ~10 scanners each
- Estimated $20B capex to scale; Midjourney self-funds the first location
- Payback period modeled at ~6 months per location

ROADMAP & REGULATORY PATH:
- FDA discussions already started; body composition on a clear path
- Ascending approval ladder planned:Body composition (near-term, easy)
- Sharing data with physicians
- Doppler / blood flow imaging
- Pregnancy / fetal imaging (ultrasound already approved; this is a natural extension)
- Therapeutic applications (tendon/muscle healing, eventually incisionless surgery)

AI not yet applied to imaging; planned as a layer once data volume grows

LONG-TERM VISION:
- Flag anomalies automatically, substitute some blood tests, enable daily health tracking

PRICING:
- No firm numbers yet; likely spa memberships plus walk-in and scan-only tiers; cost of scan itself is near zero
- Data analysis: day one is body composition only; physician sharing gated on FDA progression
- Form factors: current design is throughput-optimized (up/down elevator); bathtub and gym-sized variants possible later
- Blood test substitution: sub-millimeter daily differentials with AI may eventually replace some tests; acknowledged as frontier science
- Cancer destruction via focused ultrasound: technically possible, not on near-term roadmap

NEXT STEPS:
- Sign up for Midjourney Medical email list for research trial scan invitations
- Visit https://t.co/mWHl3Bj5WC for jobs and updates (page now live)

Gen 2 scanner presentation planned before end of 2026

More secret projects to be announced soon.

[Don Q. Dao @donqdao]

@jspujji ugc

[Don Q. Dao @donqdao]

ear crusher 3000s

[Nathie @NathieVR]

Evan Spiegel showing off the new Specs AR glasses to the public for the first time.

[Don Q. Dao @donqdao]

@usebland got Toby
@tryramp had Kevin
@getnolla gonna need to get Dwight?

huge congrats to @zaygranet, @sobhan_nejad, and the Bland team on raising 100 (big) bands!

[Bland @usebland]

Today, we’re announcing that we’ve closed our Series C and raised $100M to continue automating the world’s most complex phone calls.

We grabbed some guy named Paul to talk about it because nobody else in the office wanted to. 🧵

[Don Q. Dao @donqdao]

@zackpaid Higgs

[Don Q. Dao @donqdao]

@boardyai hey boardy

[Trung Phan @TrungTPhan]

an all-time bet on yourself

[Don Q. Dao @donqdao]

@w_milczynska Let's gooo - congrats Wiktoria!

[Don Q. Dao @donqdao]

Huge congrats to the @TryMinervaAI team - legendary crew creating the future of marketing

[Daniel A. Saedi (DataManDan) @TheRealDanSaedi]

AI can now read your customers' minds.

We raised a $20M Series A lead by 8VC & Lingotto to build this.

Introducing Minerva, built in collaboration with OpenAI:

[Don Q. Dao @donqdao]

@Camicees clay

[Don Q. Dao @donqdao]

if you spend all your time thinking about what the labs could do vs. what you can do you’re ngmi

[Paul Graham @paulg]

"What if the model companies do this?" is the new "What if Google does this?" I.e. the meaningless question investors ask that shows either that they're stupid or that they dislike you and are looking for ways to find fault.

[Nolla Health @getnolla]

AI has the power to democratize quality care. @michaelmina_lab with his vision of the future.

[Teddy Blank @teddypowday]

Your CEO should be strong.

Your CTO should be wise.

Your COO should be wicked, cunning, of mysterious origins, fluent in the dark arts, blurry in pictures,

[Don Q. Dao @donqdao]

typical fantasy football punishment at any SEC college

[asparagoid @asparagoid]

Just remembered the world sauna championship. Was one of the most interesting things I've read about

It used to be hosted in Finland every year until the incident in 2010. Rules were that it started at 110°C (230F). Then 1 litre of water was poured onto the stove every 2 minutes

The last person to walk out under their own power won

In 2010, both finalists had to be dragged out

The russian finalist died, burned all over, and the reigning Finnish champ went into a coma and woke up 6 weeks later with 70% of his skin burned, kidney failure and his airways completely roasted

One peculiar thing about it was there were no prizes. Only in one particular year did the winner get 1 small prize, some special heat resistant speakers that could be used in a sauna

But despite this, participants went to the edge of death every year and would do insane stuff like grow their hair out long specifically to cover their ears so it didn't get burned by the boiling water vapor

It was interesting to me because it's another piece of evidence that as soon as you create a ruleset... no matter how ridiculous it is, no matter how small the group of participants, no matter the extremely chance of death, and no matter a total lack of prizes. There will always be men willing to compete to the point of actually killing themselves

The male brain enters a kind of hypnotic trance where it will completely convince itself of the worthwhileness of the task, so long as it begins to venture seriously down the path of a competitive interest

It's kind of like a hijacking of the programming evolutionary mind, where no incentive makes sense but it happens anyway. You can find a million examples of this for every male interest on the planet. Just the simple act starting down a path confers it meaning to the person, and the more they are surrounded by other men who care about the same thing, the more they learn and compete, the more entranced by it they are, until their identity is fully subsumed by it and stuff like these sauna deaths happen

Seeing lots of things like this taught me to be very careful when I start down the path of any competitive interest or business, because getting hypnotized by what you are doing is essentially guaranteed. So it's good to assume it'll happen and be totally sure the outcome is worth your potential self-destruction

[Don Q. Dao @donqdao]

@kobyjconrad @big_duca interested too - dm please

[Don Q. Dao @donqdao]

ah yes i’ll have the dozen tortillas please just cut them up and deep fry them. and the tomato sauce thanks