everything to read instead of doomscroll this week by @stephthefounder (June 22)

Jun 22, 2026

The best succinct + fun weekly newsletter to learn about all the best things you need to know across tech, startups, VC, AI, etc, sent out every Monday. (and at the minimum, it will include the links I post about every week on instagram!). Feedback? Things I should add? Respond back here or comment below x

Midjourney, the well known ai-image generation company, was in the news extra this week because of their announcement of Midjourney Medical (a new initiative they’re building to allow anyone to accessibly get a 50 second MRI via beautiful Midjourney Spa - to be opened in 2027).

I’m excited about it (I’ve been debating getting a prenuvo scan for a while, but it’s $$$), but more importantly, I think people aren’t talking enough about how special of a company Midjourney is for being able to do this in the first place.

Midjourney has never taken money from external investors, has been profitable since month 6, and makes ~$500M+ revenue with ~160 employees 🤯
the founder, David Holz (amazing twitter follow btw), was a former vc-backed founder who raised ~90M, ended up selling his co for ~$30M (likely netting nothing), and decided to build Midjourney completely differently
David/Midjourney therefore have full control, and instead of having to optimize for financials/pleasing a board or investors, they can build a company they’re proud of

These quotes sum it up. Founder GOALS.

“We’re self-funded. We have no investors. We’re not really financially motivated. We’re just sort of here to work on things we’re passionate about and have fun. And we were working on a lot of different projects.”

💰 Companies that will make you a millionaire

Every week I highlight a few of my favorite startups that I personally think are really promising. They’ve typically received funding that week + are hiring, and occasionally I’ll include some special bonus ones.

And now you can easily earn some cold hard cash 💰: you can now use Shortlist (a fun product my company has been building) to earn $$ (anywhere from $5K to $30K) for successfully referring people to top startups. The brilliant part about this is:

you don’t even need to know the person who’s ultimately hired - if you post a link on LinkedIn and the algorithm shows it to someone who ultimately clicks the link and is hired, you get the $$$ 😏
all of these companies are great and highly respected, so your friend (or random person who saw your post) will also thank you 😉 win win

(PS are you a founder or do you work at a cool startup that’s hiring? reply back with the name so we can give you guys a shout!)

This week’s featured companies:

Helion: A fusion energy company developing power plants that generate electricity directly from magnetic fields, backed by Sam Altman. The company raised a $465 million Series G at a $15.5 billion post-money valuation led by Thrive Capital.
- Job openings can be found here
DeepSeek: A Chinese AI company developing open-source frontier language and reasoning models engineered to rival premium closed-source labs at a fraction of the training cost. The Hangzhou-based company raised over $7.4 billion in its first external funding round at a $50 billion+ post-money valuation, anchored by founder Liang Wenfeng’s $3 billion personal contribution, with Tencent as the largest outside backer.
- Job openings can be found here
Neura Robotics: A German robotics company building a shared intelligence network where every robot on its platform teaches every other robot. The company raised a $1.4 billion Series C at a $7 billion valuation — the largest VC round in German history.
- Job openings can be found here
Endurance Energy: A geothermal energy company founded by a former SpaceX engineer, developing power plants that harness energy from the ocean floor. The company raised a $54 million Series A led by Founders Fund.
- Job openings can be found here

Some bonus companies that were also funded last week:

CuspAI (AI material design) 🔬 → $400M Round (Job openings here)
Ent Security (AI agent security) 🛡️ → $100M Seed (Job openings here)
Rylo (deaf accessibility tools) 👂 → $85M Round (Job openings here)
Sandstone (AI legal automation) ⚖️ → $30M Series A (Job openings here)
Conduct (enterprise code mapping) 💻 → $60M Series A (Job openings here)
Odyssey (physical world models) 🌍 → $310M Series B (Job openings here)
XDOF (robotics training data) 🗂️ → $70M Round (Job openings here)
Pramaana Labs (verified AI systems) ✅ → $27M Seed (Job openings here)

🤓 Best things to read instead of doomscrolling

All the best things I’ve read this week

How much value is AI really creating? (FT): the number of new apps is at an all time high but real traction isn’t following
1. The original research paper that the data came from: Writing Code vs. Shipping Code: Productivity Effects Across Generations of AI Coding Tools by Demirer, et.al:
Has AI Already Killed How-To Nonfiction? Sales Trends, My Personal Data, and What It Might Mean for the Future by Tim Ferris: an interesting read from Tim Ferris about how AI is disrupting content / creators (using his own numbers as a basis of the article).

key takeaway? content sharing literal info is being commoditized (because everyone’s just asking claude), whereas interesting storytelling/comedy/entertainment will continue to be more valuable

📱 Everything you may have missed in tech/startup news

All the most important things that happened last week, from intellectual to guilty pleasure and optimistic to cringe:

Midjourney (the well known AI image generation company) announced a pivot to Midjourney Medical - a vision where anyone can accessibly get full-body scans in ~60 seconds via beautiful Midjourney Spas (first one to launch in SF in 2027). The power of being a hyper profitable, bootstrapped company that can do whatever it wants 😮‍💨
After being suspended by a US export control order and jailbroken within 48 hours, Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 is back up (with tighter safety controls, nationality-based access, and mandatory data retention)
Z.ai Open-Sources GLM-5.2 China’s Z.ai released GLM-5.2, a 744B open-weights coding model under MIT license. Beats GPT-5.5 on benchmarks at 1/6th the cost (!!) No regional restrictions aka the geopolitical counter-move to Fable 5’s ban
OpenAI + Samsung Mega-Deal Codex hit 5M weekly users, up from 3M in April. Samsung signed one of OpenAI’s largest enterprise deals ever — ChatGPT + Codex for all employees in Korea. Korea usage up 800% since Feb.
Snap Specs are AR glasses that look like that and cost $2,195 (the stock price dropped immediately).

🤪 Just because / for fun

aka random things that I found interesting enough to screenshot or take a picture of last week

tech media i’m obsessed with lately: founders fund created a show called Mafia with a great cast of players (Sam Altman, Palmer Luckey, Cyan Banister, etc etc) where everyone (you guessed it) plays the beloved game, Mafia. an idea so good i wish i thought of it first:
note to vc’s trying to figure out media: more of this ^^ and less of this (please):