Good Monday to you all. Aaron is off riding roller coasters today and I love that for him. Lucky for me, there were lots of interesting things going on over the weekend. I mean, the first two bullets below are a roller coaster in themselves.

🎤Canva launched an enterprise product, but everyone’s talking about its rap song.

🍕Google says to put glue on pizza, and it’s bad AI answers are getting roasted.

💰Elon Musk’s xAI raised a fresh $6B in Series B funding, reaching a $24B valuation.

👩‍⚕️According to Crunchbase data, 53% of all the Series A funding has gone to biotech and health startups this year.

If you’re one of those people fed up with screen time, you’ll want to hear about Daylight.

On Friday, a new company called Daylight Computer launched its first tablet, DC-1. Six years in the making, DC-1 can be compared to a “Kindle on steroids,” or an iPad meets Kindle.

Not another ePaper tool. Most of today's other low-strain tablets, like Kindle, use E Ink technology, but Daylight calls its new tech “Live Paper.” In some ways, it's similar to E Ink — its monochromatic display is low-strain and gives users a tactile feel while writing, but those features usually result in tradeoffs in performance. DC-1’s Live Paper, on the other hand, allows for a lot more speed, making it possible to functionally use apps like Notion, Spotify, or ChatGPT.

Despite its speed and function, DC-1 is designed to be less distracting than other tablets and better for your health. Outdoors, the tablet can use the sun as its backlight, and indoors it uses a pure amber glow instead of blue light to better protect your circadian rhythm.

Not another hardware fail.You might feel burned by the recent failures of rabbit r1 or Humane Pin, but even weary tech founders are putting a different lens on Daylight.

“I take back what I said before. Clearly not just an LCD,” tweeted Ghost founder John O’Nolan after watching S3’s video interviews with Daylight founder Anjan Katta. In the video, Katta explains the motivations behind his work, pointing back to Steve Jobs and the early days of computing. “Daylight is just trying to come back to the early hippie days of computing for helping you think…,” Katta says.

On that note, despite my earlier comparisons to Kindle, Katta’s vision is bigger than a tablet. The founder says that DC-1 is just the entrance and that Daylight plans to apply the screen tech and OS they built for DC-1 to distraction-free phones, laptops, and more. “The ambition is ‘What does Apple for public benefit look like?’”

Not another VC darling. While we don’t know much about Katta, we know he’s got big ambitions and has been working hard to make Daylight a reality. “We’ve been funded almost entirely by aligned angel investors, institutional VC capital rejected us outright, Bootstrapped from life savings first 3 years before that,” the company posted on X.

The DC-1 can be pre-ordered for $729 for delivery in November.

Our picks

• IKI.AI is an AI-powered knowledge interface for professionals.
• Marlee lets you ask AI things like “How do I work with [colleague] better?”
• Jector kills the black hole of AI picture generation, giving you node-based creation flows instead.

Makers Corner

• This Fee Calculator for Lemon Squeezy estimates your fees and profits.
• YCloud offers a developer-friendly WhatsApp API and business tools.
• SaaS Names is a free domain marketplace to list & discover those hoarded domain names.

Shoutouts

🗣️ Founder favorite: Clerk is the most shout-outed authentication platform

🙌 Recent props: "After trying many different authentication-as-a-service providers, Clerk emerged as having the best developer experience and extensibility.”

❤️ From: Data Gems, an AI copilot for marketing data

Maker Stacks is our newsletter where we interview founders and find out what products they use in their stacks.

Last week: Tim Cherkasov

Tim is the founder of Clustr, a platform that makes it easier to analyze the risks of investing in different Web3 products. It highlights the risks behind each coin and uses on-chain data to project traction for smart investments. Clustr won a Golden Kitty award for best Web3 project in 2023.

Among Tim’s stack, you’ll find dev tools, community-building tools, and more. 

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