Anjan
Katta

The screen problem that became a company

In 2016, Anjan Katta graduated from Stanford University with a background in engineering and medical device technology - specifically portable X-ray imaging using dielectric laser accelerators. Then he did something unusual: he spent two years traveling internationally, reading on tablets and e-readers, increasingly irritated with every device he picked up.

Every screen flickered. Every backlight blasted blue light. Every interface was engineered to pull his attention somewhere he hadn't chosen to go. He wasn't looking for a startup idea. He was looking for a computer that didn't treat him as the product. He couldn't find one. So in 2018, he incorporated Daylight Computer Co. in San Francisco and started building it himself.

First, the money. His own.

Before Katta pitched a single investor, he put $300,000 of his own savings into Daylight Computer. This is worth pausing on. Hardware is notoriously capital-intensive. The graveyard of hardware startups is littered with companies that died because the unit economics never worked. Katta knew this, and he still wrote the check to himself first.

Eventually he raised $12 million from a group of current and former executives at Oculus, Pinterest, and Dropbox - people who had spent careers at companies that built the very kind of addictive technology Katta was trying to counter. Total funding reached $20 million. The irony wasn't lost on anyone.

The display problem, solved from first principles

The DC-1's key innovation is what Daylight calls "Live Paper" technology. Conventional LCD displays work by transmitting backlight through liquid crystals. Reflective LCD displays bounce ambient light instead, like E Ink, but historically ran too slowly for general computing. Katta's team solved what he calls the "polarization problem" - diffusing light while maintaining the polarization necessary for LCD functionality - achieving paper-like visual aesthetics at full-speed 60-120Hz refresh rates. Katta holds three patents on this.

The result: a 10.5-inch grayscale display with warm amber LED backlighting that eliminates blue light entirely, runs flicker-free, reads clearly in direct sunlight, and runs every Android app via the company's custom SolOS operating system built on Android 13. It weighs 1.2 pounds and sells for $729.

The launch nobody predicted

Katta launched the DC-1 in May 2024 at the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park - a deliberate act of anti-Silicon-Valley stagecraft. No Las Vegas convention center. No keynote deck. A glass greenhouse full of plants, in a city park, for a computer that's supposed to feel like the opposite of a notification.

He had projected modest demand: somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 units for the Founder's Edition run. What happened instead: five consecutive Founder's Edition batches sold out, roughly 5,000 units total by end of 2024. The people who bought it weren't just gadget enthusiasts. They were parents, writers, lawyers, therapists - anyone who had quietly grown exhausted by what conventional screens were doing to their attention.

The structure is the message

Daylight Computer isn't just incorporated differently - it's a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), a legal structure that gives Katta a formal mandate to balance shareholder returns against a defined public benefit mission. In Daylight's case: ensuring technology and humanity live happily ever after. This isn't marketing language. It's in the articles of incorporation.

Katta's argument is that harmful tech outcomes aren't caused by bad individuals but by incentive structures. When your fiduciary duty is only to shareholders, engagement metrics win. When your legal charter includes human wellbeing, the calculus changes. The PBC structure is Katta's way of building the constraint into the architecture of the company rather than relying on the good intentions of whoever runs it next.

Building slow on purpose

With 31 employees and a deliberately constrained headcount, Daylight is a small team by any measure for a hardware company. Katta talks openly about protecting his team's capacity for deep thinking - scheduling, focus, and the ability to run empirical experiments without interruption. He applies the same philosophy internally that he's selling externally: the environment shapes the work.

On pricing, he's unapologetic. "If you want to introduce new technology without billions in budgets, the bezels will be bigger, thicker, and pricier." He points to Tesla's early roadster as the model: premium product first, scale the economics later. At 15,000-20,000 units, he's said, the cost picture looks very different.

A third option

Katta proposes what he calls a "third timeline" - not the Luddite rejection of technology, not the uncritical acceleration of it, but a different kind of computing altogether. One where the design constraints are human. Where ambient light matters. Where flicker is a problem worth solving, not a specification nobody reads.

He appeared alongside Alan Kay - the computer scientist credited with inventing the concept of the personal computer - in a Generalist interview about fundamentally reimagining what computing should be. Wired described Daylight as "returning computing to its hippie ideals." Katta would probably take that as a compliment.

He's been on dozens of podcasts ranging from Ben Greenfield Life to The Bitcoin Standard to Wellness Mama - a spread that tells you something about who is listening. The DC-1 isn't a product for one tribe. It's finding an audience across everyone who has silently arrived at the same conclusion: that the computers we have are not the computers we deserve.