#264 The Story of Edwin Land and Polaroid

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/02566a4543acd0ea

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 had
He was as public a figure as jobs.
Land and his company were for more than four decades.
Indivisible.
At Polaroid's annual meetings, Lan got up on stage deploying every bit of his considerable magnetism and put his company's next big thing to 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 Polaroids Bord.
Jobs called the decision.
One of the dumbest things I've ever heard of.
The two men met three times when Apple was on the rise.
The two inventors describe to each other
A singular experience.
Each had imagined a perfect new product.
Hm.
Already manufactured.
And sitting before him.
And then spent years.

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 and D operation.
That was Lance philosophy.
Do some interesting science that is all your own and
And if it is, in his words, manifestly 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 gonna 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 Lan in the last about ten days.
In fact, all three of the books that I've read in the last ten days I actually reread. So I've in total I've read five biographies of Edwin Land. Three of them I've read twice.
So if you haven't listened to the past episodes, make sure you go back. It's episode two sixty three.
One thirty two, one thirty three, one thirty four, and forty. 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 rereading 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'm gonna jump right into
uh a story from his early childhood, and says nearly every account of Edwin Land's 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 six 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 I was reading this last night was
Something that Steve Jobs' father did that I thought was really, really brilliant from a parenting perspective is his father was a craftsman.
Uh he had his own like workshop in his garage and when Steve was five 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 six 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 breath
as well as depth. They did not this is one 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 uh Lan was introverted in person, but supremely confident when it came to his ideas. Accustomed as we are today at 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 interest filtered into the ethos of Polaroid.
And this sentence is gonna sound eerily similar to Steve Jobs. Edwin Lan liked people who had brept as well as depth.
chemists who were also musicians, or photographers who understood physics. So I got to that part. Made me think of one of my favorite uh paragraphs that came from the Steve Jobs biography written by Isaacson.
where at the very end of his life
Steve is talking about the influencing on his work that people like Edwin Lan, Da Vinci, and Michelangelo had, and what he tried to b essentially copy. And he said Edwin Lan 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. This is the exact same idea that was just expressed in this book. Let me finish this uh sentence that that Jobs has here, because I think it even expresses that idea on a deeper level. In the seventies,
Computers became a way for people to express their creativity. Great artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were also great at science.
Майканло кню ала або корі стоун.
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
Uh Land and Jobs shared uh series of heroes, Thomas Edison being one, but this reminds me of Henry Ford, who I've read what, like four or five books about something like that.
And
Lan was looking for ways to get undiscovered talent. He got a lot of talent from MIT, from Harvard, because he's obvious the polarity is obviously uh right next to them, but he
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 wanna 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, these smart gifted some of my smartest gift students.
I bet you they'll be they'll work well at Polaroid.
And so Henry Ford did that exact exact same thing. He's like, I just want somebody brand new and then I will
I will train them myself. I'm not gonna 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 Lan'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 a conf uh the competition in 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
One 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.
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 back seat of his parents' car, he set his jaw and told himself, I will never let anyone else tell me what to do ever again.
Ландсь контрол
Over his company.
Was nearly absolute.
And he exercised it to a degree that was compelling
And sometimes exhausting.
And so I just have one more example from his early life and then we'll get into the beginning of Polaroid. And again, this is parallels to jobs as w as well. And it's this idea that Lan found what he wanted to do at a very young age, and he did it till
He almost he died.
His work may be called different things, but essentially to me, after reading so much about him.
From the age of seventeen until he retires, forced kind of forced out when he's like seventy one, seventy two, 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 at 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 it says it didn't really grow up in like an intellectual household.
There wasn't a lot of books uh in his house. His parents didn't prioritize reading.
He actually found himself a copy of a book that was published in nineteen eleven.
And it's by this physicist named Robert Wood.
And so w I talked about this last week, how Lan said that he would read this book at night.
how other people read the Bible.
He would sleep with it under his pillow. And one particular chapter influenced his life's work, and that was a chapter about the polarization of light.
And so the first very first invention that he does
What the first like two decades of his career is all about polarization. So I'm just gonna give you a quick overview'cause it was very confusing to me. I 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
Orient 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 was
Bloc light vibrating in that one 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 is because those are the two d main domains that he tried to build his business on before he starts in uh 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 two decades of his career to the point he is thirty seven years old. Remember, he starts on these experiments when he's seventeen. By the time he's thirty seven, 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
Uh, 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 nineteen.
Uh, he actually gets his first scientific breakthrough. And so this is a quick description of his scientific breakthrough.

was one that a few people had tried before him without success. So he had the idea is 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 can 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 the alignment of these millions of sub microscop microscopic crystals on a sheet.
turns it into a filter.
And this was an extremely big deal. It says Lan, age just nineteen, 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 very 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 I that that the public find so useful.
That they will buy.
That was like his main ethos.
And what was fascinating about like I'm gonna skip over that that part where they're describing all the different applications that Land is h 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 two 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 one way he did that was he would orient them around a mission. So this is gonna remind me, one of my favorite quotes from Jeff Bezos is that missionaries make better products. That you usually attract two 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.
Fifty people will die from highway glare.
Lan wanted to make sure everyone there understood.
That they were all on a mission.
A manifestly important
Mission.
And so that was Edwin Lance's first big idea. He's like, hey, these polarizers, yeah, we could put them on sunglasses, but we could also put them on
Uh windshields.
And headlights and then we could reduce at the time this is in the nineteen I think nineteen twenties.
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.

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 then I can go and sell directly to customers.
So Edmund Land is definitely one 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, one that lasted sixty one years. She would certainly get frustrated at his absence. One 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 i which is uh their daughter, graduated.
and kept given a hard time all the way back to their home in Cambridge.
Lan 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
That demonstrates this point exactly.
He's at his father's funeral and I think his like nephew asks him, Hey
Like 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 his response is My life 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 Lands 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 them 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. Let me interrupt myself here.
There's another story where people are like, Did you what did you want your 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 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 офісер.
Land gave him a four 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 Two.
Pre World War Two
They're having some success selling polarized sunglasses.
they're trying to in they invented three D technology for movies, but it wasn't adopted by the movie industry, and they're trying to invent a way to reduce headlight headlight glare for the automobile industry to 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 kinda turned on a dime where they start they go from trying to produce things for the commer for the consumer to things that will help the Allies win the war.
And then once World War Two 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 Land's focus for the remainder thirty years of his career.
And so before I jump into the instant photography, I just wanna bring one sentence that describes a tiny part
of Polaroid's war work and really just a way to understand that we're not dealing with a normal person here. Wartime production brought out one aspect of Lan's personality that nearly everyone from Polaroid remembers.
His ability to invent on the spur of the moment.
One time an airforce general called land to ask for advice about a problem with his gun sites.
Lan's 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 one by then.
And he did.
He invented the ring site based on circ on circular polarizers, something that was invented overnight.
And on demand.
And 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 so you can actually see
All the different not only the the inventions that he that uh 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 learned from um
Doing all this research for founders.
I would make it look like this book. Uh it's less than two hundred pages. And I think
Not 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 actually see the picture
of what they're talking about at that point. So if they're talking about the S X seventy, they show like what it looked like at the very beginning, say in the nineteen forties, and its finalized form in the nineteen seventies. It actually enhances
At least it ha it ha greatly enhanced my understanding of what was taking place at that point in Polaro 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 asks 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 Land's like, Why didn't I ask that question?
And I just want to pull this one 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 like 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 Lan is going through in his life and career with the founders of Xerox. I have two 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 says Land's contemporary Chester Carlson, after his own invention of the Xerox photocopier, immediately called up a friend, dictated his scheme, and asked the 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 where Land is having this experience, okay? The two spent half the night getting everything written down.
Now this is a funny joke, like a funny'cause 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 it's humorous, but the reason I want to bring it to your attention
is because it it speaks to one of the most important things that entrepreneurs can do, and that's the idea of perseverance and persistence.
And then in many cases it's probably gonna take you decades to get to the point where you actually want it to h where where you want your product to be.
It's exactly what Lan went through, and I'm pretty sure I've highlights in the in the book later on that speak to this very important point. Lan joked that he roughed out the details in a few hours, except for the ones that took from nineteen forty three
to nineteen seventy two 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 wanna bring out one 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 nineteen forties. This is the first product demonstration. It was nineteen forty seven, right?
But you and I know
Та десь авео ідея.
Is that guy named Claude Sh uh Cla I almost said Claude Shannon, the guy named Claude Hopkins, right? If you haven't studied Claude Hopkins, you need to go back after you're done listening to this episode.
And listen to one seventy.
My life in advertising.
Okay, he says he wrote uh Claude Hopkins was doing most of his work in maybe about thirty years about thirty years before we were in the story, so early nineteen hundreds.
And he said
in his book Scientific Advertising.
which has been read by generations of founders and and advertising
And marketers.
He said that no argument in the world can ever compare with one dramatic demonstration. That is a great line that describes
Polaroids and lands superpower.
And you could argue st argue Steve Jobs. Think about this. Like, cause this is something we actually live through. Like if you can if you're old enough to remember a Steve Jobs product demo, right? How much
free advertising did the media give
Apple and Steve Jobs just because they put on an event, they put on a sho.
Who knows what the number is? It's gigan 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, tr you know, twelve hours a day, seven 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 one dramatic demonstration.
And we see that not only in the presentations that Edwin Land does for the company, which I'm gonna about to read to you here, but also when they go and try to sell the product, when they put'em in stores, they don't have it just hidden in a box. They have people there 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 fifty to sixty seconds for the for the Polaroid.
To appear, people go crazy. They like start pushing each other, grabbing things. So again, I think that that idea is extremely important and it's an an old idea.
Uh Hopkins wrote that, you know, 110, 120 years ago, and it's still true to this day, which is fascinating. So let's go to where
One of the most famous pictures ever taken. If you Google image search Edwin Land, this is one of the first pictures to come up. It's him looking at a big f his own face, right? It says what he revealed was a perfect portrait of himself. It may have been an accident that the eight by ten camera produced a photo almost the same size of his actual face, but it only added to the eeriness.
There was Lan sitting at a table in his striped tie, displaying a fresh fresh picture in which he sat at the same table wearing the same striped tie. This is happening in nineteen forty seven. A gasp.
Rippled around the room.
Newspapers all over the country ran the story. So again, I just got done saying how much un 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 one they own completely and they can they could sell directly to customers, but they were gift at getting publicity.
One 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 nineteen forty seven had come along only a modest amount since George Eastman, that's the founder of Kodak, first film in eighteen eighty eight.
So that is what almost sixty years uh in sixty years the only thing that was getting better was the cameras, but the processing of the film.
had not changed. That's crazy.
says when it came time to process your pictures, you had two choices. Build yourself a dark room, which 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 Bonanos.
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.
The pick the camera that he that Polaroid was able to make in nineteen forty seven doesn't look at all
Like the final version, the version that he saw in his mind, one that you could
almost fit in a pocket. I mean there's another story I have to tell you in 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.
Із сіменщи, і всі фікш, і всі еволюція.
of these ideas, this slow iteration
Decade after decade after decade.

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 then read the book because Edwin Lan learned from uh Kio Marita.
And I've heard his name pronounced it di a couple of different ways, but that's the way I pronounce it.
Uh Steve Jobs studied Aquita Marita and Jeff Bezos have all been on record. There's been a ton of founders, but those are the three that pop to my mind. And I'm gonna tell you why.
that idea is so powerful and why I I I've 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 a hundred dollars 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? Adam stayed on the payroll for the rest of his professional life.
Uh, though as he ha hastened to point out in nineteen seventy two, the stipend had risen to considerably more than a hundred dollars 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 detailed.
Containing rows of photos at varying exposures or apertures.
Евенчу адам фалд морзен в репорс.
You now have one 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.
Akeo 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 uh this is now Akeo writing his book. I'm gonna read this paragraph to you, okay? So it says Naria Oga
had been a vocal art student.
At the Tokyo University of Arts when he first saw our audio tape recorder back in nineteen fifty.
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 ph uh of the photograph, right? Same exact thing's happening here. It's amazing. He was a great champion of 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 critique.
This is genius, man.

Even when he was still in school.
His ideas were very challenging, just like Ansel Adams ideas were challenging to Polaroid.
And Nurea 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 on the mirror.
Now here's the punchline it's even crazier at the time that this book was written, which I think is probably
gotta be twenty five years old, maybe even older.
Nurea.
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 present of Sony. It's one of my favorite stories.
So once the camera's released.
They sell more than they can even produce. And again, this is why it's really important to study
Edwin Lair because he founded one 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 one 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 one man company.
This idea also echoes throughout the history of entrepreneurship. The greatest entrepreneurs
You can think of them more as like a 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 one man company.
Land circulated among the offices, roving, probing, and
Asking questions, pausing only to catnap in a barka longer 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 uh approached building Apple.
lot of things said his his focus is so intense that sometimes you wished it wasn't directed at you. So it's very similar to what these Polaroid emplo employees are experiencing under land.
And this leads into one of the most important ideas that that Lan would repeat over and over again. Nan Rudolph, one of his employees, recalls that Lan 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 one seventy eight.
And it's a discussion between Steve
and Johnny and they're trying to figure out like what are they gonna build. This is right when when jobs came back to Apple, so right around ninety seven.
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 he what they should be doing is like building like the BMW of the computer industry. I'm gonna read this section from this book from you because I think it's for you because I think it's interesting.
Uh instead, Jobs argued 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's still uh the 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, Compact, 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 Compact 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.
Uh, why not make only first class products with high margin so that Apple could continue to develop even f better first class products?
exactly way land on we're gonna build first class pro 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 gonna 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 could make much bigger profits from selling a three thousand dollar machine rather than a five hundred dollar 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 three thousand dollar machines around.
So think about what the book just said.
It's not only that we built a first class product
It's a f it's the only one like there you can't sound like you can buy a Polaroid or something else. Like there is no competition. Comp there's a great line says Polaroid only competed with itself.
But
Part of that after you build the 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 two.
Polaroid convened a grafic 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 g they got by this time we're in the I think we're in the early seventies. By the yeah, we're in the early seventies 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 one 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 gotta 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 the use case here, okay?
Before you took a picture.
Uh you had to send it off and some lab technician actually made the picture for you and got it back to you. So that so you had 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 Polaro 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 today than it started out, but it started out as like a sexting app, right? And what's f what's fascinating about this
is that I read a book a long time ago.
Uh it's called How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars. It's the story of Snapchat. It's ep episode twenty two.
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.
Th 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, you know, sixties, seventies, eighties are 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's fascinating is like when you read that book
What blew my mind is that one of Evan Spiegels, the founder of Snapchat, his hero.
was Edwin Lant.
And that blew my mind because like
How the hell at that point he's like twenty one years old, twenty two. How the hell does somebody that young even know who Edwin Land was? So I want to pull out two quotes from that book. Says Evan wanted to build Snapchat as an art and technology company modeled after two 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 one time.
And I thought it was such a weird way to describe in a unique way. I don't mean that it's 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.
That's exactly what Polaroid was.
So in any case to tie that together, like this desire, this human desire, most of the people

Naughty photos to use uh to use the author's language, with the f first Polaroid camera are dead.
And yet
That was exactly the use case of the early days in Snapchat. History doesn't rebate
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 Lan accumulated over his entire life. Thinking about light
And all the different uh like things you could do with it, the effects it has, from seventeen until seventy two or whatever the number is.
And all the different applications, like all the different experience
And all the like the 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 no probably nobody else on the planet had.
And it also gives you an idea of like where things may be going. So in nineteen seventy.
He is going to predict what sounds a hell of a lot like
A smartphone.
In nineteen seventy, 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 eye glasses.
It's going to be something that's always with you, he said, and it would be effortless.
Point.
Shoot.
C
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 nineteen seventy, however, the only place you'd see such a thing was in a rerun of Star Trek.
Now I'm gonna 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 Land thirty years to get there.
So I think the implication in the story of Edwin Land 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 land
Calling his shot decades before.
As early as nineteen forty four, 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 uh 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.
Twenty odd years later, it seemed both wildly advanced and within reach.
'cause the first uh
Polaroid cameras did that, right? But they didn't do it in colour.
So it was like uh they did sepia and then black and white.
And I may have the order reversed, but there was no the the the what he was talking about is like, Yeah, I had this idea I saw it in nineteen forty three and I got all of it down except what took'til nineteen seventy two to get. He's talking about
Not only the the size of the camera.
But also the fact that the the 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 one of his top engineers with a wooden box. It measured about three point five by six point five inches. The camera should be this size, Lan 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.
And this isn't ever stated. I don't I don't think
Landmade.
Many decisions for financial reason, but the the
the reason if you think about like why is that so important that you carry it with you, so therefore the more you carry it with you, y the more you would use it. Well most of their m 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 Lan is not the first person to try to fit what they're the product that they're making into a pocket. It kinda gets there.
It was hilarious, like in the story of Sony.
they have this idea. They're like, Hey we're gonna make a Sony that is, we're gonna make a small radio powered
Uh excuse me, a small a small radio.
Powered by batteries.
And our goal like the the Keo gave the goal for the Sony engineers, just like Land is giving the goal for the Polaroid engineers. 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,'cause again, there's a there is an element of showmanship to great entrepreneurship, isn't there? So it says it was a b I'm reading from made it in Japan right now. It was a bit bigger than a standard men's pocket.
And that gave us a problem.
We like 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 shirtsmen with slightly larger than normal pockets, just big enough to slip their radio into.
And the note I left myself when I read that, you know, book probably two years ago was, What do you do when your pocket size 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 but the best uh the best description of the founder's role in the company I've ever heard was that the founder is 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 soul in the game.
And it it'll becomes apparent not only what like how they build their company and what products they're building and like the love and energy they put into it, but how they speak about it. I said I've s told you over and over again.
probably I don't know, fifteen different times that
I've read three 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 S X seventy, 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 one 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 roll out of the XX seventy, this is the color version, right? Elko Wolf.
Got a call asking him to come to Lan's office.
You're Dutch, right? Land asked.
We need ten thousand of these.
And handed him a tulip.
And it was important because it's a kind of tool of
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 seventy. So he says, the meeting was just a few weeks away, so the product demonstration is 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 in called Shiple, 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 one
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 Polovis. 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 three minutes long and there was no sound.
And this is where his friend Akian Marita tells him it's like, This is a bad idea, you're too late.
He obviously knows because
There's camcorders, there's beta max, 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 Akeo told him.
And
I just wanna pull out d I guess there's two
ideas that I think are important. Actually, you know what, I'll read that to you after I read this section. In the past, Lan had pushed his company to produce new products at the very edge of what the market might bear.
Every big better.
from the sheet polarizer through the S X seventy 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 one outsider knew better.
Shortly before Polar Vision came to market, a Q Marito, the founder and chairman of Sony, and a good friend of Land
Lands in many ways, his Japanese
Country.
paid a call to land in Cambridge, and a demonstration was arranged.
So after the demonstration, Land asked Marita.
Well, what do you think of that? Marita responded, Ah, well
You could sell fifty thousand 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 two a sixty eight million dollar write down. I've seen other estimates that the number's five times as large, that they lost hundreds of millions of dollars on this.
For the first time, Land's ego and high handedness were nap backed up.
By perfect sense.
Of what people wanted.
And so the two notes I had was Aquia Marita knew polar vision was too late. The other was eventual failure failure is inevitable. No one 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
Are slim
Uh
Best.
So I read that a long time ago. That comes from the book The Town of Charlie Munger.
I saw the note I left myself a few years ago when I read that.
And it says you should take your craft seriously.
But don't make yourself miserable.
None of us get out of this alive.
So again, Charlie says 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 Lane is one 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 Polision, 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 nineteen seventy eight, Polaroid had more than twenty thousand employees.
By nineteen ninety one, it had five thousand.
A decade later
Polaroid was bankrupt.
Was the problem simply that Polaroid did not work without Edwin Land?
Ken Olson.
The chairman of Digital Equipment Corporation, and a longtime Polaroid board member, said that Lan 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 nineteen seventy five.
His departure shook up Wall Street analysts even further.
And Bill McCoon, you 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.
Makun had a strange relationship with land after taking over.
Although Lan 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.
Lan had wanted to make a small camera.
One that would be barely larger than a pack of cigarettes.
As his team figured out what to do, it became Land's role to get the project budgeted.
He approached McCoon.
Who didn't want to do it.
Land countered.
Saying either you find 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 forty five years.
Edwin Lan 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 finance the creation of a research institution called the Roland Institute of Science.
The rolling.
Kept him busy and content.
Even as age related health problems
began to encroach upon him.
On March first, nineteen ninety one.
Land died.
At the age of eighty one.
The world wide web
was nine 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 founderspodcast.com.
That is two hundred and sixty four books down.
One thousand ago.
And I'll talk to you again soon.