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Polaroid followed a path that has since become familiar in Silicon Valley. Tech genius founder has a fantastic idea and finds like-minded colleagues to develop it. They pull a ridiculous number of all-nighters to do so, with as much passion for the problem solving as for the product. Venture capital and smart marketing follows. Everyone gets rich, but not for the sake of getting rich.

The possibilities seem limitless. The most obvious parallel is to Apple. Both companies specialized in relentless, obsessive refinement of their technologies. Both were established close to great research universities to attract talent. Both fetishized superior, elegant, covetable product design.

And both companies exploded in size and wealth under an in-house visionary genius. At Apple that was Steve Jobs. At Polaroid it was Edwin Land. Just as all Apple stories lead back to Jobs, Polaroid lore always focuses on Land. In his time he was as public a figure as Jobs.

Land and his company were for more than 4 decades indivisible. At Polaroid's annual meetings, Land got up on stage, deploying every bit of his considerable magnetism, and put his company's next big thing through its paces. A generation later, Jobs did the same thing. Both men were college dropouts, both became as rich as anyone could ever wish to be, and both insisted that their inventions would change the fundamental nature of human interaction. Jobs, more than once, expressed his deep admiration for Edwin Land.

He called him a national treasure. After Land was coaxed into retirement by Polaroid's board, Jobs called the decision 1 of the dumbest things I've ever heard of. The 2 men met 3 times when Apple was on the rise. The 2 inventors described to each other a singular experience. Each had imagined a perfect new product, whole, already manufactured, and sitting before him, and then spent years prodding executives, engineers, and factories to create it with as few compromises as possible.

Polaroid operated almost like a scientific think tank that happened to regularly pop out a profitable consumer product. Land was frequently criticized by Wall Street analysts for spending too much on his R&D operation. That was Land's philosophy. Do some interesting science that is all your own and if it is, in his words, manifestingly important and nearly impossible, it will be fulfilling and maybe even a way to get rich. That was an excerpt from the book that I'm

going to talk to you about today, which is Instant, the story of Polaroid, and it was written by Christopher Bananos. So this is the third book that I've read about Edwin Land in the last about 10 days. In fact, all 3 of the books that I have read in the last 10 days I actually re-read. So in total I've read 5 biographies of Edwin Land. 3 of them I've read twice.

So if you haven't listened to the past episodes make sure you go back. It's episode

263, 132, 133, 134,

and 40. I'll put these in the show notes as well so you can remember them. And the reason I spent time reading almost a thousand pages or re-reading almost a thousand pages of Edwin Land is very simple. If Steve Jobs studied Edwin Land, I think every other founder should as well. And the book I hold in

my hand does a really great job, maybe the best out of every book that I've read on Edwin land so far comparing and contrasting and really showing how much in many ways Edwin land was Steve Jobs before Steve Jobs. So I want to jump right into a story from his early childhood and says nearly Every account of Edwin lands youth conforms to the classic boyhood inventor cliches. Did he once blow all the fuses in his parents house? Of course he did when he was 6 years old. Did he once disassemble a significant household object resulting in parental anger or parental pride?

Certainly. So it's really fascinating that paragraph really jumps out because I'm also I've also started to reread the book becoming Steve Jobs the evolution of a reckless upstart into a visionary leader and the section I just got to in fact was reading this last night was something that Steve Jobs father did I thought was a really really brilliant from a parenting perspective is his father's a craftsman he had his own like workshop in his garage and when Steve was 5 years old, he took Steve in the garage, cleared off a part of his workbench, and said, Steve, this is now your workbench. And he showed his son how to build things that you could manipulate the devices and the things that are in the house and that everything around you was made by somebody else and they had to learn how to do that and so his father encouraged him to take things apart to realize that you can build new things, you can combine new things in interesting ways. And it's fascinating that Land is doing this at 6 years old because Jobs was doing this exact same thing at that age. The second thing I want to point out to you is that they both optimized for breadth as well as depth.

They did not... This is 1 of the biggest criticisms that Steve Jobs had of of Bill Gates. He has a hilarious quote where he's like he would have been a broader person if he would have dropped acid. So it says, Land was introverted in person but supremely confident when it came to his ideas. Accustomed as we are today to the Silicon Valley style, this may imply that he was a big nerd.

But that is not right. Alongside his scientific passions lay knowledge of art, music, and literature. He was a cultured person, growing even more so as he got older, and this is why that's so important, and his interests filtered into the ethos of Polaroid. And this sentence is going to sound eerily similar to Steve Jobs. Edwin Land liked people who had breadth as well as depth, chemists who were also musicians, or photographers who understood physics.

So I got to that part, made me think of 1

of my favorite paragraphs that came from the Steve Jobs biography written by Isaacson, where at

the very end of his life, Steve is talking about the influences on his work that people like Edwin Land, Da Vinci, and Michelangelo had, and what he tried to essentially copy. And he says, Edwin Land of

Polaroid talked about the intersection of

the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There's something magical about that place. There's a lot of people innovating and that is not the main distinction of my career. The reason Apple resonates with people is that there's a deep current of humanity in our innovation.

I think great artists and great engineers are similar in that they both have a desire to express themselves. In fact some of the best people working on the original Mac were poets and musicians on the side. It's the exact same idea that was just expressed in this book. Let me finish this sentence that Jobs has here, because I think it even expresses that idea on a deeper level. In the 70s, computers became a way for people to express their creativity.

Great Artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were also great at science. Michelangelo knew a lot about how to quarry stone, not just how to be a sculptor.

And so I think that idea leads into the next thing I want to

tell you about because this is very similar to Land. Land and Jobs shared a

series of heroes, Thomas Edison being 1, but this reminds me of Henry Ford, who I've read, what, like 4 or 5 books about, something like that. Land was looking for ways to get undiscovered talent. He got a lot of talent from MIT, from Harvard because Polaroid is obviously right next

to them. But he desired what he wanted. He's like, I want somebody to come brand new to my company so I can teach them the way I do science and the way that we do our experiments. I don't want to have to take somebody that's already been trained up fully in the wrong ways to do things. And so he winds up developing a close relationship

to an art history professor. And this art history professor winds up saying, hey, these are I have, you know, the smart gifted some

of my smartest gifted students. I bet you they'll be they'll work well at Polaroid.

And so Henry Ford did that exact same thing. He's like, I just want somebody brand new, and then I will train them myself. I'm not going

to outsource the training and education that I need for my company to somebody else. Lan grew close to Clarence Kennedy, who was an art history professor at Smith College and also a fine photographer. Their relationship not only helped refine Land's eye, but also began to feed Polaroid with brainy, aesthetically inclined Smith graduates. So think about the competition for an MIT graduate, or the competition for a Harvard graduate, compared

to the competition for a technology company. Remember, Land built, if this is your first, maybe you don't know this, but if this is your first time ever hearing about Edwin Land, Edwin Land built 1 of the greatest technology monopolies of his day.

And so this is a technology company founder targeting art history graduates. So it says he began to feed Polaroid with brainy, aesthetically inclined Smith graduates handpicked and recommended by Kennedy. It was a clever and this is the reason I'm reading this to you, it was a clever end run around the competition for talent because few corporations were hiring female scientists and even fewer were looking for them in Smith's art history department. And here's another parallel to Jobs. Lan was extraordinarily tenacious.

As a child, Lan had been forced to visit an aunt he disliked. As he sat in the backseat of his parents' car, he set his jaw and told himself, I will never let anyone else tell me what to do ever again. Lan's control over his company was nearly absolute and he exercised it to a degree that was compelling and sometimes exhausting. And so I just have 1 more example from

his early life and then we'll get into the beginning of Polaroid. And again, this is parallels to Jobs as well. And it's this idea that land found what he wanted to do it a very young age and he did it till he'd almost he died his work maybe called different things but essentially to me after reading so much about him from the age of 17 until he retires forced kind of force out when he's like 71 72 something like that he's working on Polaroid it is all Polaroid just like if you go back and look at Steve Jobs early life he had this desire to build these devices to create some kind of tangible product he does that an extremely young age and we of course we know he works on that until he dies. And so even though land did not grow up in this as it didn't really grow up in like an intellectual household. There wasn't a lot of books in his house his parents didn't prioritize reading.

He actually found himself a copy of a book that was published in 1911 and it's by this physicist named Robert Wood. And so I talked about this last week how Land said that he would read this book

at night, how other people read the Bible. He would sleep with it under his pillow. And 1 particular chapter influenced his life's work and that was a chapter about the polarization of light and so the first very first invention he does what the first like 2 decades of his career is all about polarization so I'm just gonna be a quick overview because it was very confusing to me you know I had to reread it but land is able to give a simple explanation of what it was that he invented. A polarizer is a unique type of filter. If you picture a beam of light as a handful of thrown straws oriented in every direction, the polarizing filter is a picket fence.

The only straws, or the only light, that comes through are the ones that align with the slots between the pickets. Adding a polarizing layer to sunglasses blocks light vibrating in that 1 plane, wiping out the glare and helping drivers see the road. And he used the example of helping drivers see and then adding it to sunglasses because those are the 2 main domains that he tried to build his business on before he starts in before he invented the industry of instant photography.

And I think that speaks to another reason

why he's so important to study is because for the first 2 decades of his career to the point he is 37 years old, remember he starts on these experiments when he's 17, by the time he's 37 he's achieved everything he wants except success. And so when you read a biography of Edwin Land you see an incredibly smart, gifted, driven, focused person endure decade after decade of struggle, and more importantly, finally work his way through. So he gets to Harvard, does not stay very long, and it's because of this. He withdrew, frustrated by the rigidity of the classroom and his unserious classmates.

So he turns his apartment to basically a lab for the experiments of polarization. He's gonna wind up just at age 19. He actually gets his first scientific breakthrough. And so this is a quick description of his scientific breakthrough. He says his innovation was 1 that a few people had tried before him without success.

So he had the idea, it's like, hey, we can't grow large crystals because there's actually polarizers that exist in nature. So he

had studied the entire history of the field that he's trying to do. He's like, everybody's trying to grow big crystals. What if I grow millions of what he called sub-microscopic crystals? Then if I could line them up somehow, it might do the same, like it might do the trick. It might actually polarize light.

And he put it on a clear sheet, And the alignment of these millions of submicroscopic crystals on a sheet turns it into a filter. And this was an extremely big deal. It says, Lan, age just 19, first broke through. His first synthetic polarizer, the world's first, was a genuinely major scientific discovery. And then it goes through all the ideas,

the different ideas, commercial applications that he thought he could, like the synthetic polarizers could be used for. He had a mindset very similar to Thomas Edison. If you go back and read Edison's biography, He's like, I only want to invent things that actually have an application, that the public finds so useful that they will buy. That was like his main ethos. And what was fascinating about, like I'm gonna skip over that part where they're describing all the different applications that Land is hypothesizing about, because there's another parallel to Jobs and this idea where, you know, in Jobs, he

had like a second or third act. He was forced to reinvent himself and the company he founded. Same thing with Edwin Land. You may be noticing that none of this has anything to do with instant photography. Polarizers, rather than pictures, would define the first 2 decades of Land's intellectual life and would establish his company.

Instant photos were an idea that came later on. A secondary business around which his company was completely recreated.

So the first version of Polaroid the company is actually called Land Wheelwright Laboratories. It's his last name and the last name of his partner. The first product they make out of this laboratory is actually gonna be called Polaroid. So then they originally then they changed the name of the company around their product. Okay But the reason I want to read this to you is because land had a gifted way of Managing people and 1 way he did that was he would orient them around a mission So this is

gonna remind me 1 of my favorite quotes from Jeff Bezos is that? Missionaries make better products that you usually attract 2 different types of people to your company missionaries and mercenaries mercenaries are there for the perks the money maybe the prestige or status the missionaries make better products because they believe in what the actual company is doing it is not just a company to them and we see at the very beginning of his career Same situation here with land a chalkboard in their lab read every night 50 people will die from highway glare. Land wanted to make sure everyone there understood that they were all on a mission a manifestly important mission.

And so that was Edwin Land's first big idea. He's like, hey, these polarizers, yeah, we

could put them on sunglasses, but we could also put them on windshields and headlights, and then we could reduce,

at the time, this is in the 19, I think 1920s, A lot of people were dying due to headlight glare at night. Driving at night was a lot more dangerous than it is now. He is also going to fail at convincing Detroit to actually adopt his invention, which was a very important failure for him to experience because it taught him, he's like, hey, I don't want anybody between me and the customer so I want to design a product

that I have complete control over and that I can go and sell directly to customers so Edwin land is definitely 1 of the entrepreneurs that I most admire But I want to make it clear I admire like his work and what he brought to the world and his ideas on how to do something that's manifestly important. I do not want his personal life. Here's an example of that. Though by all accounts he and Terry had a fine marriage, 1 that lasted 61 years, she would certainly get frustrated at his absence and his distractedness. 1 of his employees recalls accompanying him on a night when he had to pick her up at Logan Airport and he was quite a bit later than he said he would be.

As they arrived Terry shouted, you're always late, you've always been late, even when Jennifer who which is a their daughter graduated and kept giving him a hard time all the way back to their home in Cambridge. Land didn't say a word and after dropping her off at

the house he went back to the office. Everyone who worked for Land seems to have a memory of the man's intense work days, whether in the early years or decades later. There's a story I've read previously in another biography of Edwin Land that demonstrates this point exactly. He's at his father's funeral, and I think his nephew asks him, "'Hey, Edwin, why don't we ever see you? You're never at any family gatherings.

We'd like to get to spend more time with you, that kind of thing. And his response is, my work is my life. And so this over-optimization of your professional life at the detriment of your personal life is something I read over and over again in the biographies and some entrepreneurs regret that they did that and some get to the end of their life and don't regret it. Another interest of Edwin Land's that informed the way he built his company was the fact that words and language and literature and books were extremely important to him. He's got this fantastic idea of having somebody within your company, and he calls him the keeper of the language.

Check this out. Lan could write, too. As Polaroid grew, his letters to shareholders gradually became a particularly dramatic showcase for his language and his thinking. And let me interrupt myself here. There's another story where people are like, did you, what did you want when you were younger?

What did you, like, what was your goal in life? He's like, I wanted to be the world's greatest scientist and I wanted to be the world's greatest novelist. So that gives you an idea of this guy's, the scope of

his thinking, right? These letters were really more like personal mission statements. They're thoughtful and compact and just eccentric enough to be completely engaging. Instead of discussing earnings and growth, they laid out Land's world, inviting everyone to join him. He cared about words.

When he elevated the marketing executive Ted Voss to become a corporate officer. Land gave him a 4 word job description. Keeper of the language.

So I mentioned earlier how just like Jobs had to reinvent Apple when he came back. Edwin Land had to reinvent his company. There's like a line of demarcation in the history of Polaroid if you think about it. And that line of demarcation is World War II. Pre-World War II, they're having some success selling polarized sunglasses.

They're trying to, they invented 3D technology for movies, but it wasn't adopted by the movie industry and they're trying to invent a way to reduce headlight glare for the automobile industry to not a lot of success. Then you have all the war work they did which was rather remarkable how Polaroid like almost every other American business kind of turned on a dime where they start they go from trying to produce things for the consumer to things that will help the allies win the war. And then once World War II comes to an end, then is the history of Polaroid why we know the company's name. It's all the invention of the instant photography industry and the instant camera and that becomes lands Focus for the remainder 30 years of his career.

And so before I jump into the instant photography I just want to bring 1 sentence that describes a tiny part of Polaroids war work and really just a way to understand that we're not dealing with a normal person here. Wartime production brought out 1 aspect of Lan's personality that nearly everyone from Polaroid remembers. His ability to invent on the spur of the moment. 1 time an Air Force general called Lan to ask for advice about a problem with his gun sites lands reply was that he would fly down to Washington the next day to describe the solution the general said oh so you have a solution and land responded no but I'll have 1 by then and he did he invented the ring site based on circ on circular polarizers something that was invented overnight and on demand.

The great thing about this book compared to the other biographies of Edwin Land that I've read, is there is a ton of pictures. You can actually see all the different, not only the inventions that Polaroid did during the war, but before the war and then after the war. If I ever write a biography or something about what I've learned from doing all this research for founders I would make it look like this book it's less than 200 pages and I think that you know a ton of books have like these pictures but they're usually like in groups together like halfway through the book where this is like spread out the entire time and you actually see the picture of what they're talking about at that point so if they're talking about the SX-70 they show like what it looked like at the very beginning, say in the 1940s and its finalized form in the 1970s. It actually enhances, at least it greatly enhanced my understanding of what was taking place at that point in Polaroid history. It's fantastic.

So I want to skip ahead to where he gets this idea where he has this visualization in his mind of this instant camera where it's like his daughter asked him this famous like founding myth of the sx-70 it's like we took pictures daddy why can't I see them now and lands like why didn't I ask that question and I just want to pull this 1 paragraph out for you because This is something

that you see over and over again as you study history that great inventions have a tendency to seem obvious after the fact. It's almost like we're under this mass psychosis. And it says, inventors sometimes experience a fevered paranoia just after they had a great idea. And this is why. It seems so clear and burns so bright that they're sure someone else will come up with the same thing any moment.

And they compare the experience that Land is going through in his life and career with the founders of Xerox. I have 2 books on

the founders of Xerox, another great technology monopoly that I can't believe I haven't covered on the podcast yet. So that's my fault. I will rectify that soon in the future.

So it says, Land's contemporary, Chester Carlson, after his own invention of the Xerox photocopier, immediately called up

a friend, dictated his scheme, and asked a friend to sign and date the notes. Land already had a strong patenting instinct, and by coincidence, his patent lawyer, Donald Brown, happened to be on vacation in Santa Fe, New Mexico himself, where Land is having this experience, okay? The 2 spent half the night getting everything written down. Now, this is a funny joke, like a funny, because Land was gifted at, he's

very much a showman, obviously extremely intelligent, could describe even a complex idea in a very simple way. But it's humorous, but the reason I wanna bring it to your attention is because it speaks to 1

of the most important things that entrepreneurs can do, and that's the idea of perseverance and persistence.

And then in many cases, this probably is going to take you decades to get to the point where you actually want it to where you want your product to be. That's exactly what Land went through. And I'm pretty sure I've highlighted in the book later on that speak to this very important point. Land joked that he roughed out the details in

a few hours, except for the ones that took from 1943 to 1972 to solve. So then we go back to another parallel between jobs and land that we've already discussed a few times in the book, and that's they were both gifted at product demonstrations. I want to

bring out 1 sentence though, because this is extremely important. So it says, an ad executive once said that Polaroid was the easiest sell imaginable, because all you have to do is show the product. That is fascinating

that that is occurring in the 1940s. This is the first product demonstration, it was

1947, right? But you and I know that this is a very old idea. The greatest copywriter to ever live is that guy named Claude, I almost said Claude Shannon, the guy named Claude Hopkins, right? If you haven't studied Claude Hopkins, you need to go back after done listening to this episode and listen to 170 my life in advertising okay he says he wrote the clock was doing most

of his work and maybe about 30 years about 30 years before we are in the stories early 19 hundreds and he said in his book scientific advertising which has been read by generations of founders and advertising and marketers, he said that no argument in the world can ever compare with 1 dramatic demonstration. That is a great line that describes Polaroids and LANS superpower.

And you could argue Steve Jobs. Think about this, because this is something we actually live through. If you're old enough to remember a Steve Jobs product demo, How much free advertising did the media give Apple and Steve Jobs just because they put on

an event, they put on a show? Who knows what

the number is? It's a gigantic number. And it was all built on this aspect of human nature that there's just no argument in the world. No sales copy, no nothing that can actually, so those things can perform well, obviously. That's what Claude Hopkins did for, you know, every day, you know, 12 hours a day, 7 days a week for his entire life.

But his whole point is like, I'm gifted with words and I'm telling you right now, I'm gifted with copy. And I'm telling you right now that no argument in the world can ever compare with 1 dramatic demonstration. And we see

that not only in the presentations that Edwin Land does for the company, which I'm

going to about to read to you here, But also when they go and try to sell the product when they put them in stores They don't have it just hidden in a box. They have people they're saying hey try this camera take a picture This is gonna blow your mind and when people see hey

I took this picture It usually takes 50 to 60 seconds for the for the Polaroid to appear people go crazy like start pushing each other grabbing things. So again, I think that

that idea is extremely important and it's an old idea. Hopkins wrote that 110, 120 years ago,

and it's still true to this day, which is fascinating. So let's go to where 1 of the most famous pictures ever taken. If you Google image search Edwin Land, this is 1

of the first pictures that come up. It's him looking at a big, his own face, right? It says what he revealed was a perfect portrait of himself. It may have been an accident that the 8x10 camera produced a photo almost the same size of his actual face, but it only added to the eeriness. There was land sitting at a table in his striped tie, displaying a fresh picture in which he sat at the same table, wearing the same striped tie.

This is happening in 1947. A gasp rippled around the room. Newspapers all over the country ran the story.

So again, I just got done saying how much on how much free publicity did the media give Steve Jobs because of his dramatic demonstration skills. Same exact thing is happening here. This has built the success. The commercial success that Polaroid enjoyed was built on this. The fact that not only did they have an invention that was patentable, right?

The 1 they own completely and

they can sell directly to customers, but they were gifted at getting publicity. 1 day I'll learn how to pronounce that word. And the reason that it was such an important story is because it was a genuine technological advancement. And they talk about this. Remember that amateur photography in 1947 had come along only a modest amount since George Eastman, that's the founder of Kodak, first film in 1888.

So that is what, 60 years? In 60 years, the only thing that was getting better was the cameras But the processing in the film had not changed That's crazy says when it came time to process your pictures you had 2 choices Build yourself a darkroom what you know No one's gonna do unless you're super into photography right or get your film to a lab the leap to Polaroid This is such great language by Christopher, and I hope I'm probably pronouncing his last name incorrectly But he's a really good writer Christopher Bonanno's bananas maybe The leap to Polaroid was like replacing a messenger on horseback with your first telephone And I really do hope you pick up the book because on the very next page it shows Okay, they'll pick the camera that he that Polaroid was able to make in 1947 doesn't look at all like the final version, the version that he saw in his mind. 1 that

you could almost fit in a pocket. I mean there's another story I have to tell you a little bit about that but the idea is like I want something that you know you carry with you, you can fit in your pocket, you could take pictures all day long. The first land camera, the first Polaroid camera does not look like that.

And what this book does so great is that you see the dimensions, you see the pictures, you see the evolution of these ideas, this slow iteration decade after decade after decade.

Here's another idea that you and I should copy and it's that this idea that you should hire a paid critic. So I'm gonna read this to you. This is an idea that I first discovered when I read the biography of the founder, the co-founder of Sony. I covered that book all the way back on Founders 102. If you haven't listened to that, make sure you listen to it and read the book because Edwin Landler from Kiyomorita, and I've heard his name pronounced a couple different ways, but that's the way I pronounce it.

Steve Jobs studied at Kiyomorita and Jeff Bezos have all been on record. There's been a ton of founders, but those are the 3 that popped my mind. And I'm gonna tell you why that idea is so powerful and why I've mentioned on several podcasts when it pops up, because I think it's important. And so we're seeing that right here. It says for

a retainer of $100 a month, Lan got Ansel Adams. So Ansel Adams is maybe the most famous photographer in this time period. He says he got Ansel Adams formidable knowledge on tap. So what does that mean? Adams stayed on the payroll for the rest of his professional life, though, as he hastened to point out in 1972, the stipend had risen to considerably more than $100 a month.

Thank God, he said. Whenever, and this is why this is so important and why it's beneficial for founders to take this idea and use it in their own company, whenever Polaroid introduced a new product line, Adams trooped off to the mountains or the desert to try it out. Back came reports packed with detail, containing rows of photos at varying exposures or apertures. Eventually, Adams filed more than 3, 000 of these reports. You now have 1 of the best photographers on Retainer and all he's doing is testing your product, finding where it's weak, where it can be improved, and then sending you back reports.

That is worth way more than whatever you're paying him every month. Now they use the same thing. Akio and his co-founder used

the exact same thing when

they were building Sony. The same idea that is. And at the time, they're making audio tape recorders. Listen to what he does here. So this is now Akio writing his book.

I'm gonna read this paragraph to you, okay? So it says, Nuriya Oga had been a vocal arts student at the Tokyo University of Arts when he first saw our audio tape recorder back in 1950. I had my eye on him for all these years because of his bold criticism of our first machine. He was a great champion of the tape recorder, Just like Ansel Adams is a great champion of the of the photograph right same exact things happening here. It's amazing He was a great champion the tape recorder, but he was severe with us because he didn't think our early machine was good enough It had too much Wow and flutter.

He said and he was right of course our first machine was rather primitive We invited him to be a paid critic. This is

genius man We invited him to be a paid critic.

This is genius, man. We invited him to be a paid critic even when he was still in school. His ideas were very challenging, just like Ansel Adams' ideas were challenging to Polaroid. And Norea also had a brain, because he says, he said then, a ballet dancer needs a mirror to perfect her style and her technique. And so that is exactly what he is giving to Sony.

Sony's the ballet dancer, I'm the mirror. Now here's the punchline, It's even crazier.

At the time that this book was written, which I think is probably it's gotta be 25 years old, maybe even older, Norea was the president of Sony. He starts off working for Sony as a paid critic when he's still at university And he winds up being so good and so dedicated that he wants to become working his way all the way up to the president Of Sony it's 1 of my favorite stories So once the cameras released it's immediately successful They sell more than they can even produce and again This is why it's really important to study Edwin land because he founded 1 of the great technology monopolies of his day. And with that comes monopoly profits.

What was it like to work at Polaroid in its heyday? For 1 thing, the company had a lot of money because the land photography system was a technological outlier with all the necessary patents locked up. It was going to be a long time before it was commercially challenged. Polaroid was able to sit out the price competition that can force companies to nickel and dime their customers, suppliers and employees. The profit margin on a package of film was 60%.

So let's skip ahead to another parallel with jobs. The fact that Polaroid was a 1 man company. This idea also echoes throughout the history of entrepreneurship. The greatest entrepreneurs you can think of them more as like they're not building democracies. They're benevolent dictators.

And here's

an example of that. These little teams did not operate entirely without interference because land was at the top of every invisible organizational chart. A former colleague once described his involvement by saying, don't kid yourself. Polaroid is a 1 man company. Land circulated among the offices, roving, probing, asking questions, pausing only to catnap in a Barkalinger he kept in his cluttered office.

Occasionally, beleaguered employees hoped that he would get obsessed with something far away from their purview so they could avoid those late night phone calls. That sentence is also found when you're studying how Steve Jobs approached building Apple. A lot

of things that his focus is so intense that sometimes you wished it wasn't directed at you. So it's very similar to what these Polaroid employees are experiencing under land.

And this leads into 1 of the most important ideas that that land would repeat over and over again. Nan Rudolph, 1 of his employees, recalls that land sometimes popped into her lab and asked to sit in the dark room just to hide out from questions and think. He wasn't kidding some years later when he said, my whole life has been spent trying to teach people that intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out in people resources they didn't know they had. Land also understood something that jobs understood as well and it's this idea it's like I'm not building a commodity product my product is aspirational says he grasped that Polaroid could be positioned as an aspirational product and should be packaged and marketed that way There's a fantastic discussion that is happening. I read this in Johnny Ives biography which I covered back on 178

and it's a discussion between Steve and Johnny and they're trying to figure out like what are they going to build. This is right when when jobs came back to Apple so right around 97 and jobs right away like he always did even when

he was younger he did he wanted to deviate from what the rest of the industry was doing and the way he thought about what what they should be doing is like building like the BMW of the computer industry I'm gonna read this section from this book for me because I think it's interesting. Instead, Jobs argued that there's no reason that well-designed, well-made computers couldn't command the same market share and margins as a luxury automobile. A BMW might get you to where you're going in the same way as a Chevy that costs half the price, but there will always be those who will pay for the better ride in the sexier car. Rather than competing with the commodity PC makers like Dell, Compaq and Gateway. Think about the computers that existed in the late 90s, right?

That's exactly what was taking place. They all kind of

look the same. Instead of

competing with commodity PC makers like Dell, Compaq, and Gateway, why not make only first class products with high margins? Is that not what is happening with Polaroid? It's the exact same idea. This stuff gets

me hyped up, man.

Why not make only first class products with high margins so that Apple could continue to develop even better first-class products. It's exactly the way Landau. He's like, we're gonna build first-class products with high margins, right? We're gonna take the money we're making and then we're gonna, instead of, you know, going out and buying Ferraris and yachts, we're gonna have this excessively high research and development budget. And we're going to keep doing that for decade after decade.

So why not make only first-class products with high margins so that Apple could continue to develop even better first-class products? The company could make much bigger profits, still jobs here, okay? The company can make much bigger profits from selling a $3, 000 machine rather than a $500 machine, even if they sold fewer of them. Why not then, this

is the punchline, and this

is so important, why not then just concentrate on making the best $3, 000 machines around? So think about what the book just said. It's not only that we built a first class product. It's a it's the only 1 like that. You can't sound like you can buy a Polaroid or something else like there is no competition.

There's a great line says Polaroid only competed with itself. But part of that after you build a great product is first class product needs first class packaging and first class marketing. And so what do they do here? They hire a paid critic. Part 2, Polaroid convened a Graphic Design Summit, bringing in the best minds in graphic design to look over the previous year's work.

The previous year's advertising, the previous year's packaging, all of our logos, everything, all of our branding, okay? So it's like, and they got, by this time, we're in the, I think we're in the early 70s, but yeah, we're in the early 70s at this point in the story. They got really damn good at this okay but again they're already really good they're already making a ton of profits their stock is through the roof at this point Edwin Land is already 1 of the richest richest Americans right and they still go out that's not enough they're like okay let's go find another critic And so they have this graphic design summit, they bring in

the best minds in graphic design to look over the previous year's work. They hire, or

they attempt to, the legendary Paul Rand. That is the guy who drew the IBM, ABC, and UPS logos. And about a hundred others everyone knows. They asked him to size up their work and he delivered a concise verdict. You don't need me.

You don't need anybody.

Moving ahead.

I got to bring out another idea that I absolutely love the fact that history does not repeat human nature does Polaroid with Snapchat before Snapchat. And so think about the use case here, okay? Before, you took a picture, you had to send it off, and some lab technician actually made the picture for you and got it back to you. So you took a picture, and another human being was gonna see that picture, right? But now you have Polaroid, it's only you that sees it.

And so people start using it to take naked pictures of their lover and of themselves in many cases. So it says, we will never know exactly who first figured out that using a Polaroid camera meant whatever happened in front of the lens never needed to be seen by a lab technician. There are plenty of naughty first generation Polaroid photos out there to confirm that instant photography success was at least in part built on adult fun. So Snapchat's obviously very different than it is today than it started out, but it started out as like a sexting app. And what's fascinating about this is that, I read a

book a long time ago. It's called How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars. It's the story of Snapchat. It's episode 22. It was in

the early days of founders, where today, I'm not interested in reading books about entrepreneurs that

are still operating. I think it's actually a mistake to do that because time is the best filter. And so I get a lot of book recommendations about like, hey, you know, cover like the Ubers or the Airbnbs. Like I'm not doing that. These people, those founders can go on, get interviewed.

I only want to focus on people that are either at the very end of their career, maybe in their 60s, 70s, 80s, they're retired or they're dead. Primarily I like to, as much as I can, just study dead entrepreneurs. But back then, I was just kind of reading about any kind of founder.

But what was fascinating is when you read that book, what blew my mind is that 1 of Evan Spiegel's, the founder of Snapchat, his hero was Edwin Land. And that blew my mind because like, how the hell, at that point he's like 21 years old, 22, how the hell does somebody that young even know who Edwin Land was? So I wanna pull out 2 quotes from that book. It says, Evan wanted to build Snapchat as an art and technology company, modeled after 2 of his heroes, Edwin Land and Steve Jobs. And the second quote, like Land and Jobs, Evan was more of a discoverer than an inventor.

He also didn't believe users could tell him what they wanted He simply had to discover what was next and show it to them. And then I was listening to him talk 1 time and I thought it was such a weird way to describe in a unique way,

I don't mean that as a pejorative by any means, to describe his company. Cause you know, everybody's like, it's a social network or it's whatever, it's an app. He's like, we're a camera company. It's exactly what Polaroid was. So in

any case, to tie that together, like this desire, this human desire, most of the people that were taking naughty photos to use it to use the author's language with the first Polaroid camera are dead and yet that was exactly the use case of the early days in Snapchat.

History doesn't repeat human nature does. Okay so the next thing I want to talk to

you about this is my note. How is this even possible? How could he see the future so clearly so this also speaks to

the benefit of the like think about the innate knowledge that Edwin Land accumulated over his entire life Thinking about light and all the different things you could do with it, the effects it has from 17 until 72 or whatever the number is, and all the different applications, like all the different experience and all the learnings from that experience goes into Edwin Land's brain, is basically what I'm trying to say in

an unclear way, right? And so as a result of this, like he's built up this very unique set of knowledge that maybe probably nobody else on the planet had. And it also gives you an idea of like where things may be going. So in 1970, he is going to predict what sounds a

hell of a lot like

a smartphone. In 1970, Edwin Land stood before a movie crew in an empty factory outside Boston and without a script described the deep future of photography. We are still a long way from the camera that would be, oh like the telephone, something you use all day long. A camera which you would use not on the occasion for parties only or for trips only or when your grandchildren come to see you But a camera that you would use as often as your pencil or your eyeglasses It's going to be something that's always with you, he said, and it would be effortless. Point, shoot, see.

The gesture would be as simple as, and here he demonstrated it, reaching into his coat, taking a wallet out of your breast pocket, holding it up, and pressing a button. This is a punchline. His future is our present. And what he's describing pretty nearly is a smartphone. In 1970 however, the only place you'd see such a thing was in a rerun of Star Trek.

Now I want to get to the part where I mentioned earlier.

And the note here is like, how your product is today is probably not the ideal way you want it to be. That is normal. It took Lan 30 years to get there.

So I think the implication of the story of Edwin Lan is like, don't quit, just keep working on it.

You've already found, If you're lucky enough to already found your life's work, why would you stop? And what's remarkable is there's documentation of Lan calling his shot decades before. As early as 1944, Lan had told Bill McCoon, who was like his second in command, they had like a weird relationship and they're gonna wind up having a fight that leaves, that makes Lan leave the company. But Lan told Bill McCoon what he really wanted to build. And it was nothing but grace.

McCoon never forgot the conversation. I remember very well, he said, you know, I can imagine a camera that is simple and easy to use. You simply look through the viewfinder and you push the shutter and out comes a finished dry photograph in full color. 20 odd years later, it's seen both wildly advanced and within reach, because the first Polaroid cameras did that, right, but they didn't do

it in color. So it was like, they did sepia and then black and white. And I may have the order reversed, but there was no, what he was talking about was like, yeah, I had this idea I saw in 1943 and I got all of it down except what took till 1972 to get. He's talking about not only the size of the camera, but also the fact that the print would be in color. And here's what's fascinating is because we're gonna see another parallel between Polaroid and Sony.

Lan knew exactly how petite and how neat he wanted this camera to be. He went to 1

of his top engineers with a wooden box. It measured about 3.5 by 6.5 inches. The camera should be this size. Land told him and the photographer will hold it vertical in front of his eyes and then click the shutter. Why that size?

Why did land want that size? It was so it would fit in your coat pocket. So then you would carry it with you often and easily. And this isn't ever stated. I don't think land made many decisions for financial reasons.

But the reason if you think about

like why is that and so important that you carry with you. So therefore the more you carry it with you, the more you would use it. Well, most of their profits came from high margin film. So if we make the camera smaller, they're more likely to carry it with you. If you're more likely to carry it with you, you'll take more pictures.

And if you take more pictures, you'll spend more money on film. Now, the reason I say there's a parallel with Sony here is because Land is not

the first person to try to fit the product that they're making into a pocket. It kind of gets there. You need like a big pocket for Land's camera. But it was hilarious. In the story of Sony, they have this idea.

They're like, hey, we're going to make a Sony that is. We're going to make a small radio powered, excuse me, a small radio powered by batteries. And our goal, like the, Keo

gave the goal for the Sony engineers, just like Land is giving the goal for the Polaroid engineers. He's like, listen, our goal is that it needs to be small enough to fit into a shirt pocket and he's like we don't want it portable we want it pocketable and so they get it done but it's a little larger than

it's just funny that they did this back in the day because again there's there is an element of showmanship to great entrepreneurship isn't there So it says it was a bit... I'm reading from Made in Japan right now.

It was a bit bigger than a standard men's pocket and that gave us a problem. We liked the idea of being able to demonstrate how simple it would be to drop into a shirt pocket, so we came up with a simple solution. We had some shirts made for our salesmen with slightly larger than normal pockets, just big enough to slip their radio into.

And the note I left myself when I read that book probably 2 years ago was, what do you do when your pocket-sized radio doesn't fit into a pocket? You make the pocket bigger.

So I just mentioned I don't think Land made many decisions exclusively on finance. The way to think about Land, the best description of the founder's role in the

company I've ever heard was that the founder's the guardian of the company's soul. The founder is the guardian of the company's soul. And You usually see that because the best founders have sold the game and it becomes apparent not only what like how they build a company and what products are building and like the love and energy they put into it, but how they speak about it. I said I've told you over and over again probably I don't know 15 different times that I've read 3 biographies of Enzo Ferrari and if you hear how Enzo describes his car, he describes his car, which is his product, like the way you would describe your lover.

And so we see Lan doing the exact same thing here. Lan went so far as to claim that the SX-70, which is like his, the best product he ever made, right? Had the power to heal all the rifts in contemporary life Here is what he had to say in 1 long sentence Remember before I read this to you. He's talking about a product. This is insane We would not have known and only just learned that a new kind of relationship between people and groups is brought into being by the SX-70 when the members of a group are photographing and being photographed and sharing the photographs.

It turns out that buried within us, there is latent interest in each other. There is tenderness, curiosity, excitement, affection, and humor. It turns out, in this cold world where man grows distant from man and even lovers can reach each other only briefly, that we have a Yen for and a primordial competence for a quiet good humor delight in each other. We have a prehistoric tribal competence for a non-physical, non-emotional, non-sexual satisfaction in being partners in the lonely exploration of a once empty planet. So hearing that is it any wonder that the founder that speaks that way about his creation is not optimizing for the bottom line but optimizing for the most impact.

And you know that because you see how much money he put into his product demonstrations. Here's the most legendary example of that. When it comes to beautiful extravagances, everyone remembers the tulips. Soon after the full rollout of the SX-70, This is the color version, right? Elko Wolf got a call asking him to come to Land's office.

You're Dutch, right? Land asked. We need 10, 000 of these and handed him a tulip of a variety called Keys Neelis. And it was important because it's a kind of tulip that is has a very vibrant yellow and red and Those the vibrant yellow and red is the the colors that look the best on the film that comes out

of the sx-70 So he says the meeting was just a few weeks away So the product demonstration just

a few weeks away and Wolf had to immediately find a farmer who was willing to accelerate his crop to hit the deadline. Then he had to strike a further deal with KLM Royal Dutch Airlines to air express the tulips from the city in and it's called Schiphol I guess to Boston where they could be rushed to the meeting. All the resulting photos of flowers were, of course, lovely. It was another unforgettable Landian demonstration, this 1 at a god awful expense. So there's both strength and weakness to this financial Recklessness when it comes to hey, I'm putting quality above everything else including the finances That is thinking that land shares with people like Enzo Ferrari and Walt Disney That works if your product is a hit and people can't get it anywhere else.

That same trait

can also cause your downfall, and that is when your product fails. And that is what causes Land to lose the company that he gave his entire life to. So Land spent hundreds of millions of dollars on research and development of this thing called Polavision. You could think of it as like a small handheld camera to make home movies that were becoming extremely popular at this point in history. Except his version, the movies were only 3 minutes long and there was no sound.

And this is where his friend Akio Morita tells him, this is a bad idea. You're too late. He obviously knows because there's camcorders, there's Betamax, there's VHS, there's all this other technology that's popping up that is just superior to what Land has spent decade after decade and hundreds of millions of dollars. It just he was just too late. That's basically what a key total.

And I just want to pull out I guess there's 2 ideas that I think are important. Actually know what I'll read that to you after I read this section. In the

past, land had pushed his company to produce new products at the very edge of what the market might bear. Every big bet from the sheet polarizers to the SX-70 had required a leap of faith, a trust that the genius in charge was right. He's never been wrong before, people seem to be saying, and he's made us all rich. He must know something that we don't. At least 1 outsider knew better.

Shortly before Polar Vision came to market, Akio Morita, the founder and chairman of

Sony and a good friend of

Land's, in many ways his Japanese counterpart, paid a call to Land in Cambridge and a demonstration was arranged. So after the demonstration, Land asked Morita, well what do you think of that? Marita responded, ah, well, you could sell 50, 000 of anything. It's an unbelievable scientific development, but you're too late. He was right.

The number of buyers couldn't begin to cover the development costs. The ledger showed a $68 million write down. I've seen other estimates that the numbers at 5 times as large that they lost hundreds of millions of dollars on this. For the first time, Land's ego and high handedness were not backed up by a perfect sense of what people wanted. And so the 2 notes I had was a key marina new pole vision was too late.

The other was eventual failure. Failure is inevitable. No 1 stays on top forever. And that is something I learned from Grandpa Charlie Munger. And so think about how many businesses and founders Charlie has analyzed over his extremely long career.

And I think it adds weight to what he says here

over the very long term history shows that the chances of any business surviving in a manner agreeable to a company's owners are slim at best. Edwin Land is 1

of the greatest entrepreneurs to ever do it. But if you live long enough, Failure is inevitable.

And so as a result of the failure of

Polar Vision, there's a reorganization. Land still is there, but the president is now Bill McCune. And so this is where Land and Polaroid break up. In 1978, Polaroid had more than 20, 000 employees. By 1991, it had 5, 000.

A decade later, Polaroid was bankrupt. Was the problem simply that Polaroid did not work without Edwin Land? Ken Olsen, the chairman of Digital Equipment Corporation and a longtime Polaroid board member said that Land was teaching him how not to do succession. Other executives who had hoped to inherit Land's chair had eventually gave up and left. Polaroid's general manager bolted in 1975.

His departure shook up Wall Street analysts even further, and Bill McCoon was able to use that as leverage, demanding the company's presidency. Both men knew that a second high-profile departure would give the impression of a company that was in chaos. McCoon had a strange relationship with Land after taking over. Although Land was still chairman and director of Researcher, he had to get approval for his projects, sort of, and the resultant friction was unsustainable. The final break came a few years later.

Land had wanted to make a small camera, 1 that would be barely larger than a pack of cigarettes. As his team figured out what to do, it became Lan's role to get the project budgeted. He approached McCoon, who didn't want to do it. Lan countered, saying either you fund this or I quit. McCoon said no and that was that.

Though he retained a lab for a couple of years, that arrangement would end soon enough. After 45 years Edwin Land was leaving Polaroid. The founder cut all of his ties and sold all of his stock. He didn't say it out loud but the sentiment was pretty clear. If I can't play this game my way I'm not sticking around.

In retirement he kept doing what he loved without distraction. To feed his admitted addiction of an experiment a day, Land financed the creation of a research institution called the Roland Institute of Science. The Roland kept him busy and content, even as age-related health problems began to approach upon him. On March 1st, 1991, Lan died at the age

of 81. The World Wide Web was 9 weeks old. And That is where I'll leave it for the full story read the

book if you buy the book using the link that's in

the show Notes in your podcast player you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time You could also find the links for this book and every other book at founders podcast comm that is

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books down 1, 000 ago, And I'll talk to you again soon.