Solo Founders #7: Building solo with Anjan Katta

“Daylight is me finding my own identity.”

Solo Founder Playbook — Anjan Katta Edition

Last week, Anjan Katta, Founder & CEO of Daylight, joined us for dinner at the SFP house. He spoke candidly about the brutal difficulty of building Daylight — solo founder, consumer hardware, deep tech during COVID — but also about how the journey was deeply rewarding as a path to finding his own identity.

Here are a few ideas that stood out the most:

Authorship Without Compromise

Solo founding is often framed in Silicon Valley as a high-variance path — you own more equity, make more of the calls, and take on more risk. But, Anjan pointed out, there’s another kind of variance that rarely gets mentioned: the internal kind. As a solo founder, the company is a direct extension of you — your quirks, values, and personality traits. That’s risky in its own way, but also what can make it so personal and high-variance.

Without a co-founder to smooth out your edges or pull you toward consensus, you’re less likely to be homogenized — less likely to default to the familiar formulas around raising, metrics, and fitting into the Valley mold. Going solo permits you to stay uncompromising in specific areas, to play the long game, and to build a company that reflects a different relationship with the process itself.

We’re seeing this play out firsthand in the Solo Founders Program. As Julian wrote in an internal post last month:

Hiring for Alignment

One of the surprising advantages of solo founding, Anjan said, was that it helped him attract and hire senior leaders. Without a co-founder in the mix, there was no ambiguity about who to appeal to — just a single, clear line of leadership. That clarity seemed to resonate with high performers who wanted to plug into a mission without having to navigate traditional org politics.

Still, getting hiring right took time. Early on, Anjan leaned heavily toward recruiting other founders. On paper, it made sense — smart, driven people who’d already built things. But in practice, the fit was more complicated. Many of them had strong beliefs and wanted to pursue their own ideas. What Anjan really needed at that stage was alignment: people who could get behind a specific plan and execute it with focus.

Through trial and error, he developed a clearer picture of what worked better for his company. The strongest team fits tended to share three things: they had taste for their domain, so they didn’t need to be micromanaged; they had enough pain tolerance to do what was required, not just what was rewarding; and they had a deep alignment with Daylight’s mission, which gave them the energy to deal with the inevitable messiness of early-stage startup work.

Validate the Right Thing

Another key point Anjan emphasized at dinner: customer validation has to be specific to the implementation. With Daylight, he noticed a difference between the feedback he received from someone casually trying the product versus someone who had paid a $200 deposit. The latter had skin in the game. They were willing to get over the initial activation energy. Since all of his actual customers are going to put money down, he knew he needed data that would correlate to that real-world scenario.

He also encourages founders to be much more scientific about how they collect data. The sample size, buyer profile, and circumstances of use must all mirror the real environment where the product will live. Otherwise, you’re running a flawed experiment. If your inputs are off, your data will be too.

Rigor Is a Practice

Underpinning all of this is a way of thinking that requires substantial effort. Anjan's approach to rigorous thinking is a combination of three distinct but complementary practices: bottom-up model building, top-down reasoning, and structured accountability.

The bottom-up part is about input quality — increasing the amount of data you absorb to train your internal model, much like how an LLM works better with more data. At Daylight, this meant trying every note-taking and to-do app he could find, including obscure ones in Chinese. He watched videos, read Reddit threads, and reviewed YouTube comments. He paid attention to little things, such as the reactions people had to devices with big bezels, and anything that hinted at what made a product feel great or frustrating. Even if he couldn’t verbalize every pattern he picked up, the volume of examples helped shape a deep, intuitive sense of what mattered.

But collecting data isn’t enough. The second part is top-down: thinking rigorously about what all that data means. Most people don’t think rigorously because there are few mediums or forcing functions for it in our daily lives. A fundraising pitch isn’t about rigor; it’s about storytelling. A sales conversation isn’t about rigor either. Since we lack the forcing functions to think rigorously, we need to create this space intentionally — places where you’re required to notice your assumptions, sharpen your logic, and write or speak with precision.

And the third piece is accountability. He says the absence of a co-founder creates more space for laziness, but it also forces growth. You have to actively seek out people to talk to. You have to explain your logic from the ground up. And that’s hard: it can feel awkward or performative. The trick, he said, is to find someone you can speak to freely to get to the true essence of what you’re doing.

There are tools to make this easier. He uses Otter to record himself talking through problems, then plays it back or asks AI to find holes in his reasoning. Whether it’s a human or AI, the goal is the same: think rigorously, uncover blind spots, and force clarity.

Thanks again, Anjan, for being part of Solo Founders and sharing your experiences with the Program and this community.

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Solo, together.

— Kieran, Julian, and the SFP team