- The piece discusses the similarities between Polaroid and Apple in terms of their founders, technologies, and success.
- Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid, and Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, were both college dropouts who became wealthy and believed their inventions would change human interaction.
- Both companies focused on refining their technologies and had a strong emphasis on superior product design.
- Land and Jobs admired each other, with Jobs considering Land a national treasure and criticizing his retirement from Polaroid.
- Both inventors had a vision of a perfect product and worked tirelessly to bring it to life with minimal compromises.
- Polaroid operated like a scientific think tank and was criticized for spending too much on R&D.
- Land and Jobs both valued breadth as well as depth in their interests and sought out talent from various fields.
- Land's control over his company was nearly absolute, and he worked on Polaroid from a young age until his retirement.
- The piece highlights the importance of studying Edwin Land for other founders, drawing parallels between him and Steve Jobs.

- Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid, was not raised in an intellectual household but found inspiration in a book about the polarization of light.
- His first invention was a polarizer, which acts as a filter for light, allowing only certain aligned wavelengths to pass through.
- Land tried to apply his invention to sunglasses and windshields to reduce glare, but failed to convince the automotive industry to adopt it.
- He believed in the importance of a mission and oriented his employees around it.
- Land's work consumed his personal life, leading to strained relationships.
- During World War II, Polaroid shifted its focus to war-related production and then reinvented itself with the invention of instant photography.
- Land had a talent for inventing on the spot, as demonstrated by his creation of the ring site for gun sights.
- The book provides visual documentation of Polaroid's inventions and progress over the years.

- The book being discussed is less than 200 pages and includes pictures throughout the text
- The book enhances understanding of Polaroid history by showing pictures of the inventions being discussed
- The idea for the instant camera came from Land's daughter asking why she couldn't see pictures immediately after taking them
- Great inventions often seem obvious after the fact and inventors can experience paranoia that someone else will come up with the same idea
- Land's patent lawyer helped him document his ideas for the instant camera
- Perseverance and persistence are important for entrepreneurs and their products may take decades to develop
- Both Land and Jobs were skilled at product demonstrations
- Polaroid's success was built on their ability to get publicity and their genuine technological advancement
- Polaroid's first camera did not resemble the final version, but the book shows the evolution of the design
- Land hired Ansel Adams, a famous photographer, to test and provide feedback on new products
- The idea of hiring a paid critic is beneficial for founders, as seen in the example of Adams and Polaroid

- The founder of Polaroid, Edwin Land, started as a paid critic for Sony and eventually became the president of the company.
- Polaroid had a monopoly in the market due to their patented technology, allowing them to have high profit margins.
- Land had a strong influence in the company, similar to Steve Jobs at Apple, and focused intensely on product development.
- Land believed in the power of concentration and intense focus to bring out people's hidden resources.
- Polaroid positioned itself as an aspirational product and invested in packaging and marketing.
- Polaroid held a Graphic Design Summit and hired Paul Rand, a legendary graphic designer, to evaluate their work.
- Polaroid's instant photography success was partly built on adult fun and the privacy it offered.
- The founder of Snapchat, Evan Spiegel, was inspired by Edwin Land and Steve Jobs in building his company.
- Land's unique knowledge and experience allowed him to see the future clearly and predict trends in the industry.

- Edwin Land described the future of photography in 1970, envisioning a camera that would be like a smartphone
- He wanted a camera that would be always with you, easy to use, and fit in your pocket
- Land's goal was to encourage people to take more pictures and spend more money on film
- Similar to Sony's goal of making a pocket-sized radio
- Land believed in the power and impact of his products, prioritizing quality over finances
- He spent a lot of money on product demonstrations, including an extravagant tulip demonstration
- However, Land's financial recklessness and failure of his Polavision product led to the downfall of his company
- Akio Morita from Sony warned Land that he was too late with Polavision, resulting in significant financial losses for Polaroid

- Polaroid, under the leadership of Edwin Land, experienced a reorganization and eventually failed.
- Land's departure and the lack of successful succession planning contributed to the company's downfall.
- Land's relationship with Bill McCune, the new president, became strained, leading to Land's departure from Polaroid.
- Land continued his passion for experimentation by funding the creation of the Roland Institute of Science.
- Land died in 1991, leaving behind a legacy of innovation and entrepreneurship.

The text discusses the similarities between Polaroid and Apple, focusing on their founders, technologies, and success. Both Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid, and Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, were college dropouts who became wealthy and believed in the transformative power of their inventions. Both companies emphasized refining their technologies and prioritized superior product design. Land and Jobs admired each other, with Jobs criticizing Land's retirement from Polaroid. Both inventors had a vision for a perfect product and worked tirelessly to bring it to life with minimal compromises. Polaroid operated like a scientific think tank and was criticized for spending too much on research and development. Land and Jobs valued breadth and depth in their interests and sought talent from various fields. The text highlights the importance of studying Land for other founders, drawing parallels between him and Jobs. Land's first invention was a polarizer, and he later invented instant photography. Polaroid's success was built on their ability to get publicity and their genuine technological advancements. Land had a strong influence in the company, similar to Jobs at Apple, and focused intensely on product development. Polaroid positioned itself as an aspirational product and invested in packaging and marketing. However, Land's financial recklessness and the failure of his Polavision product led to the downfall of Polaroid. Land's departure and the lack of successful succession planning contributed to the company's failure.

What I learned from rereading Instant: The Story of Polaroid by Christopher Bonanos.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Polaroid talked about the intersection of

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

It says, Lan, age just 19, first broke through.

His first synthetic polarizer, the world's first, was a genuinely major scientific discovery.

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.

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

He was forced to reinvent himself and the company he founded.

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.

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

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?

We'd like to get to spend more time with you, that kind of thing.

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.

As Polaroid grew, his letters to shareholders gradually became a particularly dramatic showcase for his language and his thinking.

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

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.

When he elevated the marketing executive Ted Voss to become a corporate officer.

So I mentioned earlier how just like Jobs had to reinvent Apple when he came back.

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.

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.

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.

the founders of Xerox, another great technology monopoly that I can't believe I haven't covered on the podcast yet.

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.

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#264 The Story of Edwin Land and Polaroid