Founders - #132 Edwin Land (Steve Jobs's Hero)

Starting point is 00:00:00 High technological drama was the way Edwin Land described his company's situation in the spring of 1971. This phrase impressed me more than any other single thing I had read from him, perhaps because it was so characteristic of his entire outlook and approach. At the time he said it, the SX-70 camera system, one of the dreams of Land's life, had already cost millions of dollars and had not yet turned back a dime. The company was establishing manufacturing capability and experiencing wrenching growing pains in the process. And the solutions to the myriad of scientific issues attending the camera's evolution were looming just out of reach. I could easily imagine other corporate leaders of international stature retreating behind such well-worn expressions as negative cash flow,

Starting point is 00:00:54 unfavorable balances, and unforeseen developmental increments. But to Edwin Land, facing what Fortune magazine would call the biggest gamble ever made on a consumer product, amidst this onslaught of seemingly insurmountable problems, inside the corporation in the form of cost overruns and the technologies which refuse to be born, and outside in the form of a gradually deflating consumer economy, was to be regarded as the stuff of high technological drama. The next several years after 1971 would be increasingly difficult ones for Polaroid,

Starting point is 00:01:33 a company whose dazzling success had little prepared it for lean times. But I was struck by the observation that the word problem had completely departed from Edwin Land's vocabulary to be replaced by the word opportunity. What was it about this man and his company that allowed such confidence and seeming lack of concern with the traditional top priorities of American business? My continuing interest, as I attempted to analyze it, seemed to stem at least partially from the elements that set Polaroid apart from virtually every other American company, and also from a man who is impossible to typecast by any readily applicable standard. The Polaroid story is several different but interrelated stories, all converging in the

Starting point is 00:02:27 singular personality of Edwin Land. Polaroid is far from the largest, nor has it grown the fastest, of its high-technology bellwethers. There is, however, something unique about Polaroid, having to do both with the human dimension of the company and with the unity of vision of its founder and guiding genius. Polaroid executives now take great pains to point out that the almost 70-year-old Land is not the company, but its development and the development of the industry it pioneered is the story of Edwin Land. In Land, I saw a number of American types and traditions coming together. He is a New England inventor in direct spiritual lineage from Eli Whitney, Charles Goodyear, and George Westinghouse. He is perhaps the last of

Starting point is 00:03:21 the major technological visionaries come business entrepreneurs in the larger-than-life tradition of Henry Ford and the other photographic giant, George Eastman. He is the contemporary incarnation of the American dream. Perhaps the single most important aspect of Land's character, and the one to which he owes his and Polaroid's success, is his ability to regard things around him in a new and totally different way. There is the instant camera, his most famous invention, the polarizing filter which began his career and founded his company, and most recently, the polar vision system of instant motion pictures. All of these are radical departures from previous thought and practice, each coming at a moment and forming into an instant image of what needed to be done

Starting point is 00:04:11 to see it through to reality. Right from the beginning of his career, Land had paid scant attention to what experts had to say, trusting his own instincts instead. For example, most experts who continually predicted that land and Polaroid would fail in the marketplace with each new product or development were evaluating those products only in terms of the way they fit into the current market. Clearly, in most cases, the new products had little to do, technologically, with what was available on the current market except that they too produced photographs and there was a market for cameras. But Land has always believed that for any item sufficiently ingenious and intriguing, a new market could be created. Conventional wisdom has little capacity with which to evaluate a market that did not exist prior to the product that defines it.

Starting point is 00:05:07 Land had already gotten his co-workers out of the habit of relying on what was already there. It is not merely a concept of successful marketing, but the basis of his theory of inventiveness and creativity. He feels that creativity is an individual thing, not generally applicable to group generation. As he wrote in the Harvard Business Review, I think human beings in the mass are fun at square dances, exciting to be with in a theater audience, and thrilling to cheer with at the California Stanford or Harvard Yale games. At the same time, I think whether outside science or within science, there is no such thing as group originality or group creativity. Land is a man deeply caught up in the creative potential of the individual. This is not surprising since Land owes his success

Starting point is 00:06:01 to the realizing of his own creative potential. But it's not just himself, his scientific brethren, and his artistic peers that Land is talking about. He is talking about all of us. That is an excerpt from the book that I want to talk to you about today, which is The Instant Image, Edwin Land and the Polaroid Experience. And it comes from a section in the book called The Lengthened Shadow. And what that is a reference to is a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who says an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man. And that is a great way to think about

Starting point is 00:06:39 Polaroid and the influence that Edwin Land had on his company. So this is going to be the start of a three-part series that I'm going to do on Edwin Land. I previously covered two different books on Edwin Land, all the way back on Founders 40. I talked to you about what I learned from reading Insisting on the Impossible and the book Instant, The Story of Polaroid. About two months ago, a listener named Dustin sent me a message that he went down this rabbit hole reading every single book that he could find on Edwin Land. And he's the one that put me on to the next three books that I'll be talking to you about. Interesting to note, the book I have in my hand is 42 years old, and it smells like it's 42 years old. And before I jump into the book,

Starting point is 00:07:24 you might be wondering, in case you don't know who Edwin Land is, I'm going to be covering a giant book on Edwin Land. It's called A Triumph for Genius, Edwin Land, Polaroid, and the Kodak Patent War. I want to read the product description before I jump back into an instant image so you have an understanding in case you're coming to Edwin Land brand new about why he's so important. And it says, Apple founder Steve Jobs once hailed Edwin Land, the about why he's so important. And it says, Apple founder Steve Jobs once hailed Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid and the father of instant photography, as a national treasure, and once confessed to a reporter that meeting Land was like visiting a

Starting point is 00:07:56 shrine. By his own admission, Jobs modeled much of his own career after Lands. Both Jobs and Land stand out today as unique and towering figures in the history of technology. Neither had a college degree, but both built highly successful, innovative organizations. Jobs and Lanz were both perfectionists with an almost fanatical attentiveness to detail. In addition to being consummate showmen and instinctive marketers, in many ways, Edwin L Land was the original Steve Jobs. Okay, so let's jump in the book. I want to start with this great quote by Edwin Land. It's one of my favorite quotes of his, and it gives you an insight into the extreme character that he

Starting point is 00:08:34 definitely was. He says, there's a rule that they don't teach you at the Harvard Business School. It is, if anything is worth doing, it's worth doing to excess. And we're going to see several examples today of him living that quote in his life. Something to understand about him, this is not like a typical biography. He's extremely private. He was a private driven person. And this gives us a little insight into what was driving him. He says, on one of the few occasions that Land did briefly open up to someone outside his small and fiercely loyal inner circle, he confided to a professor friend that he had always been tremendously impressed and overwhelmed by his businessman father and determined from an

Starting point is 00:09:17 early age that he would someday outdo him. This confession seems to be typical of great men and has a sort of classical ring to it. It helps to explain, however, only the drive and not the imagination and insight. So the foundation for the company that would one day become Polaroid happens. He's a 17-year-old freshman at Harvard University. He's actually visiting New York and he sees the glare from, there's two different stories, the glare from Times Square and then a glare from an oncoming headlight. And he invents, he had a fascination with light and optics and perception. And in an instant, this is why the book's called Instant Image, this is why I'm telling you this section, he comes up with the idea. He invents the polarizer, right? Something you know about Edwin Land. If you took every single person that we've covered so far on the

Starting point is 00:10:08 podcast, he would place number three in the most in terms of number of patents. So number one would be Thomas Edison. Number two would be Adi Dassler, the founder of Adidas. And then three, Land had, I think, over 535 patents in his life. And this is one of the first ones. So I'm going to skip over that section, but I want to talk about this idea. This is also something that Steve Jobs referenced in an interview. When he met Land, they had a discussion about seeing the product in their mind in finished form, knowing where they wanted to go and then figuring out a way to invent it to like almost uh reverse engineer it um through a series of obviously trial experiments and in the it was

Starting point is 00:10:52 interesting to me is um jobs is leaving the meeting and he's talking to scully john scully at the time um who eventually uh kicks steve jobs out of the company um and he and he says something that's interesting he said yeah that's interesting. He said, yeah, that's how he was referencing his meeting with Edwin Land. He's like, that's how I feel. And I thought that choice of word was really interesting. Not that's how I am, that's how I think, that's how I feel. And I think that just speaks to the bond that Jobs had with Edwin Land.

Starting point is 00:11:21 In fact, right before he died, Jobs died, he's reflecting back on, he says, I always, this is Jobs speaking, he says, I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics. Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences. And I decided that's what I wanted to do. So not only does Jobs share that belief and that idea, but he also shared this belief that you could have this instant image experience. And so this is a description of that. Here we see the first important example in Land's career of the instant image, an idea of tremendous moment and far-reaching implication occurring without warning in a flash of brilliant inspiration.

Starting point is 00:12:08 Nearly every major insight of Land's career would happen in a similar fashion. In each case, the instant image would be neither the beginning nor the end of the work, merely the moment when all the elements came magically together so that the problem could be seen, understood, and approached. The inspiration, Land would be quick to point out, was neither blind luck nor a fortunate gift of the gods. He had prepared himself through countless hours of familiarization with all the elements of the challenge, whether consciously or not, and he would spend the next several years filling in many gaps in his and the world's understanding of the subject. And the note I left to myself on this next section is, In a world full of cooks, Edwin Land was a chef.

Starting point is 00:12:55 And that's me recalling a podcast I did a long time ago on Tim Urban's essay, long blog post essay on Elon Musk. I think it's called The Cook and the Chef. I'll link to it in the show notes if you want to read it. It's fantastic. You can also go back and listen to the podcast I did on it. Land seems never to have been bound by or wedded to what has happened before. Though he's always been able to build on past knowledge and discoveries, he has not been put off by what previously had been considered impossible.

Starting point is 00:13:24 What is more unusual than this is that Land was able to maintain this fresh and unburdened outlook into mature life and infuse it into so many of his associates, co-workers, and students. And so right after Land makes this discovery when he was really young, we see an example of Land's resourcefulness. So he's going to drop out of harvard and he says and it says land took a leave of absence from harvard and moved to new york city during the day he availed himself of the voluminous resources of the new york public library reading everything he could get his hands on relative to the subject of light polarization in the evenings he began conducting. This is an example of

Starting point is 00:14:05 relentless resourcefulness here. He's using New York Public Library so he can read everything. He's doing that for free. And now he needs a place to run his experiments. But he doesn't have a lot of money. He doesn't have access. He doesn't know anybody. So he figures a way around that. He says when he found himself in need of more sophisticated equipment than he personally owned, Land scouted out a well-equipped physics laboratory at Columbia University. He discovered he could get in after dark by entering through a habitually unlocked window

Starting point is 00:14:33 and conduct his experimental inquiries there into the early morning hours. So when he was at Harvard, it says his physics section leader was this guy named George Wheelwright. So George becomes interested in land experiments and they get together and they start a company. It's called Land Wheelwright. And this is the company that eventually changes into Polaroid.

Starting point is 00:14:54 So let's talk first about the first days of the company. And then there's some traits or ideas that Land kept. He started at an early age and kept throughout his life. So it says neither Land nor Wheelwright had much in the way of business experience, both being in their 20s. But they had enough enthusiasm for their work and enough confidence in their own abilities to be basically unconcerned about making money. That's another thing that Land repeats his whole life, that he just wants to make the best. He wants to do science and he wants to make the best products possible. And he feels if he does those two things that money will take care of itself um so it says on

Starting point is 00:15:28 a larger scale land had has maintained this trait throughout his life knowing his market ahead of time has never been one of land's primary concerns he feels and already did at the beginning of his career that a market would come to exist for any worthwhile product or service he could come up with so the first product is this uh his first invention which is the polarizing sheet plastic and land's application of this this is before they realize hey you know they're young they're idealistic they're like okay um he came up with an application where it could reduce um headlight glare so at time, a lot of people were dying because they'd be blinded by the headlights of oncoming traffic. In fact, in the

Starting point is 00:16:10 early days of the company, they put on the board, I think 50 people a night died. So he used that as like a company-wide announcement that, hey, we're on a mission to solve this problem. And the faster we solve it, the more lives we save, right? And so this is the difference between what they had to do to survive in the early days of the company and what they wanted to do. And he's also going to understand later in life that, you know, if he's making products for other companies, he has no control. He needs to control the entire system and the relationship with the customer, which he doesn't have. So he'll learn that later. The importance of the headlight idea in the early days of the company as an ongoing dream and motivation cannot be overstated.

Starting point is 00:16:49 It represented at the same time a chance for a financially secure base. So there was already more than 20 million cars on the road in the United States at this time. So he's like, okay, we have a huge opportunity here because, of course, if we could save lives, all 20 million of those cars would need to be converted. And they're going to use my invention, which I own the patent on. That doesn't occur. It occurs over time slowly, but not on the scale, at the time scale they need it. OK, also would represent a significant improvement in public safety in the United States.

Starting point is 00:17:20 The notion that they would one day see this idea come to fruition is the basic motivation that kept land and wheelwright in business again an abiding sense of faith in self and that everything eventually would work out so that's two things that um you need to know about edwin land he he has unlimited confidence in his abilities to figure things out and he feels if he figures things out the problems will the solutions to the problems will take care of themselves. While there's slow going on the meetings with the automotive manufacturers at the time, they start meeting with Kodak and they agree to a deal where,

Starting point is 00:17:56 it says Kodak agreed to use Polaroid, that's the name of the polarizing sheet plastic, it's not the name of the company yet, for photographic light filters so they get a deal uh with kodak kodak's the a giant company i will eventually do the biography of george eastman um because he was such an important uh entrepreneurial figure in the late 1800s but this is the result of the contract he says the revenue from the kodak contract furnished land and wheelwright with a little breathing space, allowing them to continue their research.

Starting point is 00:18:28 And so at this point, we're going to see how we're going to get into Land's idea for his life. And we're going to see where that deviates from most other people's. So it says so far, the story has been as most of the elements of the standard American business venture saga. Two bright and optimistic entrepreneurs with an idea that they are sure in time will catch on. And there's little to distinguish it from numerous other undertakings. Land, however, had other ideas. And this is where we begin to diverge from the traditional scenario. First of all, the business world, where he could be his own boss and his own company and not be constrained by typical university formality appealed to him so something

Starting point is 00:19:05 to know about land is later in life he was asked by he always gave these lectures like mit and harvard and other places because that's um polar bear was the headquarters was in cambridge and somebody asked him when i think he's like 70 years old something like that and they're like what did you like what did you what was your ambition just when you were a kid, like when you were younger? What did you want your life to be? And he said, I had two goals, to be the world's greatest scientist and to be the world's greatest novelist. So again, that really does speak to the kind of outsized intellect, ambition, and drive that Edwin Land has. This is a very extreme character. So let's get back to this. So he's talking about, hey, maybe I'll be an academic, but he didn't like to be

Starting point is 00:19:47 constrained by typical university formality. Okay. So that's one of his motivations to starting a company. So he says, also, he saw himself primarily as an inventor and innovator, and he figured the best place to carry on his work was in an environment of his own creation. As Land later explained, I planned a company in which I could work scientifically and still have my inventions used. What the 28-year-old inventor vaguely envisioned, the 68-year-old corporate chairman still adheres to. So something important to know about this book is this book ends and Land is still in control of his company. He loses control of his company. I think he's like 75 years old at the time when he loses control

Starting point is 00:20:25 a few years after this book is published. It's also the decision that Jobs says is one of the dumbest things he's ever heard in his life. So what I like is that the book I'm doing next week is published about 10 years after this book is. So we see after Landon already left the company

Starting point is 00:20:42 and then the third book I'm going to do is published 20 years, 25 years after that. So there's this idea that I learned from David Olgravy. I don't know if I learned it from him, but he's the one that put it into words. And he talks about like why he was so obsessed with doing research and getting really good at his craft was because he wanted to transform himself into a formidable individual, right? And that's a good description of Edwin Land. The note I left myself was Edwin Land was a formidable individual, and this is an example of

Starting point is 00:21:11 that. So even at this stage, the 28-year-old Land struck the Wall Street establishment as being so unique that they turned back control of the company they had just bought and made the man they had bought it from promise to stay around for at least a decade everyone acknowledged that the future of polaroid corporation would be determined by what went on in the brain of edwin land unlike most new business capital ventures what they had brought what they had bought into was not a new technology a new product or concrete assets but one man's mind so they're talking about they didn't really buy a company for me they're talking about bankers helped them organize polaroid and raise money and it's a public company so that's what they're

Starting point is 00:21:54 talking about there so i want to tell you a little bit about pull now the name of the company's polaroid this a little bit about the early years there's a quote um he talks about he's like i got a motto to organize my life around it works for me but it's not for everybody and he says don't do anything that someone else can do and we see that he he realized this idea even when he's extremely young so it says land was undoubtedly beginning to see the advantage of producing items no one else could offer he decided then with a clarity of vision few others could adhere to that there was no point in ever having polaroid produce products that were already on the market let me pause there before i get back to the rest of the

Starting point is 00:22:29 paragraph this is he he applies this to the extreme polaroid winds up doing about a decade's worth of research and development on a photocopier before xerox exists then xerox winds up going to market before they finish all the research and development needed so polaroid just scraps it before Xerox exists. Then Xerox winds up going to market before they finish all the research and development needed. So Polaroid just scraps it. It's like, well, we don't need to make it because they did. 30 years later, Land wrote an annual report. Fortunately, our company has been one

Starting point is 00:22:56 which has been dedicated throughout its life to making only things which others cannot make. Land's genius was such that others could not think up what he could or turn out the kinds of products his company could turn out. And the ever more impressive wall of patents he erected between his discoveries and the outside world, enforced by a dedicated cadre of specialist patent attorneys, meant that once the technological cat was out of the bag,

Starting point is 00:23:23 it was still exclusively Polaroids. So this goes more into, this paragraph's about Land's primary motivation not being financial. We've heard Steve Jobs echo this. He said, I have no desire to be the richest person in the cemetery. I want to go to work every day

Starting point is 00:23:37 and feel like I'm doing something, contributing and doing something good, building the best products. Land would say something similar. He says, there's no evidence to suggest that Edwin Land was averse to becoming rich. He winds up becoming, I think at the time, like the eighth richest person in the United States.

Starting point is 00:23:50 Like he's unbelievably wealthy. But that came from a lifetime of ownership and control of Polar Rights. So it says, although his family's comfortable circumstances probably prevented his having the kind of security grounded hunger for success of, say, a Charles Goodyear. Charles Goodyear is actually compared to Edwin Lane a few times in this book. You'll remember, if you haven't listened to it, I did a podcast on his biography, which was insane. He's literally homeless, having to sell possessions, and still trying to invent rubber. I think it was Founders No. 69, but I could be wrong about that.

Starting point is 00:24:25 Whose family was literally starving when he came up with the formula for vulcanized rubber. And if one examines the biographies of many other successful businessmen, it can be noted that their amassing of fabulous wealth became a goal in and of itself. That is, they had a way of gauging their success because of a very real need to accomplish and achieve success in accumulating dollars. They're saying it's the most easily quantifiable standard. Being a man who could measure his success in scientific and technical terms, Land had no such need for large sums of money as a tangible symbol of personal advancement.

Starting point is 00:24:59 Like George Lucas before him, Land unapologetically invested in what he believed in most, which was himself, and this is the result of that land had far more faith in his own potential and that of the company he inspired than did any of the other experts looking in from the outside so what they're talking about there is at the time polaroid still working uh they're licensing stuff to kodak they're trying to sell things to the automobile manufacturers and so financial analysts at the time are saying, you know, you should just close up shop, give up. Like, what are you doing here? This direct quote says, from a narrow dollar and cents point of view, Land and his colleagues might easily benefit financially by selling out to a large established firm. Certainly, Land would acquire greater financial security by doing so. Wrong. Not

Starting point is 00:25:43 even close, buddy. 24 years after the Harvard study was published, Fortuneless and Land is one of the eighth wealthiest men in America. We've seen this before, right in the early years of Amazon. Jeff Bezos goes and gives a talk at Harvard Business School, and you got this arrogant, snotty-nosed Harvard Business School student saying, hey, you seem like a nice guy, but really I think you should sell it to Barnes and Nobles before they flatten you. Moving on, one of the greatest things about this book in particular is we see that success was a slow process. There was a lot of false starts.

Starting point is 00:26:18 So it says, during this period, a steady stream of inventions and new applications were emerging from Edwin Lynn's brain and polaroids labs and were meeting with varying degrees of financial success but the company had yet to make the big splash which its founders and backers had hoped would come with the polarized headlights so it talks about like they're meeting a lot of resistance something big something else big was needed to take its place so they thought they were going after this giant market of 20 million automobiles it's not coming yet guys what are we going to do we need something else um so that's something else that they come up with is hey let's make this is hilarious um because this is happening in 1950s i think 1940s uh they decided hey we're

Starting point is 00:27:00 going to make a bunch of 3d glasses so says, during the brief heyday of three-dimensional movies, Polaroid did sell over 5 million pairs of cardboard frame glasses a year. They're like, yes, we hit on it. According to reports, the craze was over so quickly that the company and the movie studios were left sitting on warehouses full of lenses. Uh-oh. So it talks about the potential, the unrealized potential of both two, of these two markets that they thought they were going to hit on.

Starting point is 00:27:26 That being the polarized headlight system and then 3D movie glasses. It says each would have involved millions of dollars in revenue for the company. But each invention involved a certain degree of transformation of an existing industry controlled by existing power structure. That's such an important sentence. I'm going to read it again. And this is a fundamental understanding that Land realizes like i need i'm not doing this anymore i'm wasting a ton of time and i cannot convince these other people these third parties of the brilliance of my inventions each invention involved a certain degree of transformation of an existing industry

Starting point is 00:28:00 controlled by an existing power structure so this is where he's like i'm going to bypass bypass this by inventing uh products i can sell directly to consumers so i'm going to expound on this on the next page um talks about learning the need for control and integration polarity could go on supplying filters for kodak cameras and lenses for sunglasses and polarizing discs for school rooms but this is essentially the role of a supplier. And we have to conclude that a man of land's depth and scope did not see his company spending its corporate existence tapping into other people's vision. So this is one of the vice presidents of Polaroid at the time writing in 1969. He says, we learned an important lesson. In the movie business,

Starting point is 00:28:40 there were too many forces, too many people to deal with. It was an undisciplined industry. We learned that the best way is to sell as directly to the consumer as possible, where we could control as many factors as possible in the marketplace. So that was true in 1969. It was true in 1869. And it sure as hell true today. The next big invention, and Land certainly was confident that there would be one would have to be controlled right from headquarters no longer trusting outsiders for the translation

Starting point is 00:29:12 of his ideas into usable commodities the inventor would next time take his case directly to the people polaroid would do the next one themselves from beginning to end. So now I'm fast forwarding in the history of Polaroid. This is where he hits on. He's on vacation. He's taking photographs of his three-year-old daughter. And she says, Daddy, why can't I see the picture? And this is the instant image example of inventing instant photography. And he says, like, by the time he pondered this for several hours,

Starting point is 00:29:45 and by the time he was done with that brainstorm he had said he'd solved every problem except the problems that it took from like 1941 to 1972 to solve so there's a little tongue-in-cheek there he's a really funny person if you hear him speak he's extremely he's again he reminds me a lot of jobs later let me give an example of this um he loved using superlatives you know if you ever watch jobs product demonstrations, Land would talk about how wonderful his inventions were. It's the best camera ever made. He would disparage later in his life, Kodak.

Starting point is 00:30:16 Polaroid winds up winning the largest patent infringement case against Kodak. This is like four decades into the future. That's where we are in the story. Kodak winds up having to pay him almost a billion dollars. And he's just relentless. Even as like an old, he's like 70 years old, 70, old, older person at the time.

Starting point is 00:30:35 And he said he was comparing like their cheap imitations. Reminds me of Jobs talking about Windows in the Macintosh days and later on Google's Android operating system compared to ios and lan says he's really dismissive of kodak's uh products and you know because the the product that kodak copied is you know you take the picture and it's like the polar picture the famous thing you know you take the picture and out comes this you know white uh framed uh picture and within

Starting point is 00:31:02 like a minute or so 30 seconds whatever is, you see the picture you just took. And so he talks about, you know, Kodak imitated that. They violated my patents. But he talked about it's slow, like it comes out, takes forever. And he says, gives you an insight into like his showmanship and his flair for the dramatic and understanding of how like humans react to superlatives. And he says, theirs evac evacuates ours ejaculates

Starting point is 00:31:26 and so after he has this experience with this brainstorm at the the prompting of his three-year-old czar's question he realized it is possible for instant photography remember there's nothing like this time kodak has a a monopoly because they they have a great uh tagline i think it's like you press the button and we do the rest so So you take a picture of Kodak camera. Once the roll of film's out, you just drop it in the mail. And seven days later, they're going to send you back their pictures, right? And the profit margin on that film was something like 60 to 80%. So Kodak is printing money, right?

Starting point is 00:31:56 They're not worried about instant photography. But the section I want to read to you is that the Polaroid camera, land was secretive, just like jobs. The Polaroid camera was developed in secret, just like the iPhone was. If you want to know more about the development of the iPhone and went into that, I did a bonus episode on Steve jobs based on the book creative selection. But anyways, it says within six months of his original inspiration land had worked out most of the essential details of the instant photography system. The work was done by him and a small

Starting point is 00:32:23 group of associates in secret. Not too different from what we learned about Henry Ford and the Model T, right? The rest of the company's employees knew nothing of the research going on in the Locke laboratory. So it's true for Edmund Land and the Polaroid camera, true for Steve Jobs and iPhone, true for Henry Ford and the Model T. I'm sure there's other examples as well throughout history. Now, keep in mind, this is going to take a lot of research and development they have to solve. Again, keep in mind, this is going to take a lot of research and development. They have to solve. Again, he thinks of his work as he's a scientist, right?

Starting point is 00:32:49 That's how he thinks of himself. So he's solving scientific problems. And so it's important to remember during this time, Polaroid was struggling at this point in their history. It was not clear that they were going to survive. This is post-World War II. They had done some military work. That work had dried up but it says the first three post-war years saw polaroid strapped with record deficits while the great hope of the corporate future uh the automobile headlight project had continued

Starting point is 00:33:20 to languish and so we see he's having to invent a completely new technology and a completely new product that doesn't exist in a time where there's not a lot of money. They're going through severe financial distress. So at this point, the author's talking about comparing and contrasting

Starting point is 00:33:35 Kodak with Polaroid and Land with George Eastman. I'll eventually cover the book by Eastman, but I do want to just, this thing, this surprised me. It says Eastman's influence lived long after him. He himself lived into his seventies, at which point he decided he had enough and put a bullet through his heart. So he committed suicide. He was in great pain. He had like a spine, like severe bone on bone pain at the time. And it was never diagnosed,

Starting point is 00:34:02 but he had some kind of deformity with his spine that caused great pain. In fact, I looked it up. His suicide note says, to my friends, my work is done. Why wait? Signed, G.E. George Eastman. But the reason I bring this up was one that was surprising, so I wanted to share that with you in case you didn't know that. But Eastman and Land built their companies around, Jeff Bezos has this idea that you need to build your business around things that don't change, right? Don't follow fads. So he says, like in Amazon's case, hey, 10 years from now, are people going to want less selection?

Starting point is 00:34:33 No. Are they going to want to get their packages slower? No. Are they going to want to have bad customer support? No. So we invest heavily in things that do not change. And in Land and Eastman's case the delight of photography the human the delight that humans get from it is something you can build upon the delight that people get from that

Starting point is 00:34:51 um is constants just like today we take you know billion trillions of i don't even know how many photographs we take now in the digital era but it says the newness of photographs had worn off within a few years of eastman's first kodak. The delight of capturing each other on film never did. Land has a lot of quotes and ideas around inventions having to come to a world that's not ready for it, right? And what we see is when he releases this system, just like the iPhone, it seems like, oh, once you see it, that's, that's, yes, that's, it seems obvious in retrospect. So it says the device land used is so simple that this is a reports in the media of the product demonstration, the reaction to it. Okay. The device land use is so simple that it's hard to believe that it really could do the job. All this seems so simple that as usual, we wonder why it was not done before.

Starting point is 00:35:44 Okay. So I want to talk about some of the early marketing efforts that i found very interesting on how you know they have a product uh that should have universal appeal but how do you educate people about it and how do you get them excited for it so this is some of the ideas they had polar would have to handle the marketing of the instant camera itself this was one field of business in which the company had relatively little experience in the past most of the products they made had been manufactured for other companies. Land apparently lost little sleep

Starting point is 00:36:08 over this initial situation, calling to mind that the same, this is beautiful because he's, just like we are, he's inspired by and learns from people that came before him. So Land has an affinity for somebody that I cannot believe.

Starting point is 00:36:22 I have not read their biography yet and I apologize to you in advance. I will rectify have not read their biography yet. And I apologize to you in advance. I will rectify this as soon as I can. And that's the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell. So he's like, I'm not worried about the marketing of this, right? Because Bell went through the same thing. Land apparently lost a little sleep over the initial situation, calling to mind that the same sort of reaction had greeted the public introduction of Bell's telephone 70 years earlier. The telephone had been a dominant symbol in land's thinking in later years he began making numerous connections between his camera and telephone and i got a lot of quotes on that i

Starting point is 00:36:55 don't know if they're going to be in this book uh or the next one but i will talk to you more about that land concluded that the company would follow the traditional sales route and offer its product to retail stores they were not quite sure how to go about actually putting the cameras in the store nationally, though. So they're like, OK, we don't know how to do this nationally. And this is the smartest thing. People don't like, again, everybody thinks of the company. The reason I spend so much time focusing on the early days of the founder's life and the early days of the company is because we know what Polaroid is now. I mean, it's kind of, it's gone now, a shell of itself, whatever the case is. But at this time, they had so much more opportunity and unknown in the future than looking backwards,

Starting point is 00:37:37 right? And so it's like, well, I don't know how to sell this thing. I'm going to put it in retail stores, but how do I do that nationally? It's like, okay, well, I don't know. Why don't we just try with one store? Do the most simple thing first. And that's what they do. And it's a good indication that they invented something there's a lot of demand for, it says. So they put the first camera,

Starting point is 00:37:53 it was first offered to sale to the public at the Jordan Marsh department store in Boston. This is 1948, the day after Thanksgiving. As this was the only retail outlet in the country selling the camera, demand was intense. So they thought, okay, we might be able to sell out. They put like 50, what is it, 56 cameras, something like that.

Starting point is 00:38:14 Let's say 50 something cameras. And they're like, maybe we'll sell all these from the day after Thanksgiving to Christmas. They sell out the first day, they're gone. This was exactly the reaction that they had hoped for. This display of enthusiasm to the point where the retailer was unable to keep up with demand gave the camera an added fascination. So then they build on this. They don't have any more they can sell right now because they're manufacturing them. So it says the next marketing mini blitz took place in Miami. This is January of the following year. The logic was that since, again, we'll start with one city, right? Or excuse me, one store. Now we're going to start with one city. The logic was that since

Starting point is 00:38:48 a good percentage of the people in Miami at any given time were vacationers with a fair amount of pocket money on hand, they would provide a receptive market for a new luxury item. And of course, the fact that they were travelers was at least equal significance since they would be expected to be taking a lot of pictures. this is just common sense stuff right and when they returned home this is also genius and they would turn home they would rapidly spread interest in the camera to all parts of the country in that way each community would be seated with cameras to build up anticipation for the time when the product could finally be distributed on a national basis next step was to select one major store in each target city and offer that establishment.

Starting point is 00:39:29 There's another smart move. I'm going to pick one. I started with one store in Boston, went in one city. Now in all cities, I'm going to pick one store for a 30-day exclusive. But guess what? We don't have any money for marketing. That means if you want this contract, you're going to pay for it. Another genius idea.

Starting point is 00:39:42 So it says they'll give you a 30-day exclusive on selling the camera in return for certain considerations polaroid one was to provide advertising and promotion in that city something polaroid did not have the money for itself and having the camera sold in but a single store in each city would further contribute to the image of exclusivity and desirability that polaroid was after A lot of what I found most interesting in this book is really when Land just speaks about his philosophy, the way he thinks of what he's doing. And this is Land on human nature, how human nature interacts with new inventions. So he's speaking to Forbes, there's an excerpt from an interview, Forbes magazine in 1975, and this is Edmund Land speaking. Over the years, I've learned that every single significant invention has several characteristics.

Starting point is 00:40:28 By definition, it must be startling, unexpected, and must come to a world that is not prepared for it. If the world were prepared for it, it would not be much of an invention. The second great invention for supporting the first invention is finding how to relate the invention itself to the public. Listen to this next sentence. How fascinating is this? It is the invention itself to the public. Listen to this next sentence. How fascinating is this? It is the public's role to resist.

Starting point is 00:40:51 All of us have a miscellany of ideas, most of which are not consequential. It is the duty of the inventor to build a new gestalt to quietly substitute the gestalt the old one took, the old one had place in the framework of society when he does so he's comparing the instant photographer for photography to codex system like if you can get a picture right away why would you ever wait seven days for it that doesn't make any sense so i'm going to educate you on why i feel that that my way is better is what he's saying there and when he does his invention calmly and equitably becomes part of everyday life, and no one can understand why it wasn't always there.

Starting point is 00:41:28 It took us a lifetime to understand that if we are to make for every man a new commodity, a commodity of beauty, then we must be prepared for the extensive teaching program needed to prepare society for the magnitude of our invention i was surprised by this next idea this is something i talked about all the way back on the podcast i did on akio marito the genius founder of sony sony did something that's freaking genius i don't understand why more companies don't he hired a paid critic i think if i remember correctly i don't have in front of me he was a music student sony was making speakers at the time, maybe? Something that needed somebody with a good ear.

Starting point is 00:42:08 And so this person was just writing in about all that. He loved Sony products, but he's like, you have a lot of deficiencies. I want to point them out to you so you can fix them. Akio Murito loved that idea. He hired him to point out the flaws in his product. And like two decades later, that person winds up becoming the president of Sony. So again, I think it's natural for human service criticism. But if you truly have somebody that loves what you're doing, and they think it could be improved in certain ways, like that's be receptive to that information. And this is very similar to what Edwin Land's doing here. He says, this guy named Adams, Adams signed on as a paid consultant, let's really say paid critic, to Polaroid and became famous within the company for his long memos, which were as detailed as some of his photos. Oh, so I didn't, I need to back up and tell you who this is. This is

Starting point is 00:42:55 the legendary photographer Ansel Adams, that he winds up building a lifetime friendship with Edwin Land. He said, later in his life, he said Edwin Land not only had the greatest mind that he ever encountered, but the greatest heart too. So Ansel Adams signed on as a paid consultant to Polaroid and became famous with the company for his long memos, which were as detailed as some of his photographs, suggesting ways in which the value of Polaroid film could be enhanced, as well as new applications for Polaroid photographic technology. Adams was credited with several Polaroid product innovations. This is Edwin Land on patents and individual creativity. Land is one of the major supporters of the American

Starting point is 00:43:36 patent system. His type of work essentially involves marketing the results of new scientific and technological breakthroughs. Land therefore sets great store in the protection of the innovator with regard to his own ideas, which, at its best, the patent system represents. So this is Land talking about it. To a large and fundamentally uncreative... Come on, tell me this is not going to sound like Steve Jobs here. To a large and fundamentally uncreative company, patents are a threat and a nuisance. For such organizations, innovation elsewhere represents a dangerous threat rather than a wholesome challenge. that innovation of great significance will not thrive and also so that they may acquire at low cost the results of any innovation elsewhere which happens to become significant in the same speech

Starting point is 00:44:33 lan went on to reaffirm his faith in the individual innovator he feels that all innovation comes from the individual um and that history is not guaranteed like progress is not guaranteed just as time passes on. He does not believe that at all. He calls that idea nonsense. And there's some speeches of his that I'll quote from heavily moving into future podcasts with his regard to this. And it usually comes with his scathing criticisms of formal education. And then it beats out of the individual student his desire for greatness. So it's something to know about land.

Starting point is 00:45:06 He's going to bring up the power of individuals over and over and over again. Something I obviously very, very much believe in. He implied that only the individual and not the large group can see a part of the world in a totally new and different way as he himself had. So this is him talking about. Now, this is a long section. I love what he's going to say here. Spontaneously and unpredictably, individuals arise here and there in the world, here and there in time, who introduce great clarifications, new words, new languages, and fresh statements, which cause the rate of scientific progress to jump ahead by 10, 20, or 100 years. We accept these men by paying tribute to their names, Ptolemy, Copernicus,

Starting point is 00:45:56 Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Einstein, but then we fail to learn the lesson that their names teach. Just as the great steps in scientific history are taken by the giants of the centuries, where they slough off the tentacles of the group mind, so every significant step in each lesser field, in each single field, is taken by some individual who has freed himself from a way of thinking that is held by his friends and associates who may be more intelligent, better educated, better disciplined, but who have not mastered the art of the fresh, clean look at the old, old knowledge. If these individuals whom we call creative are in the domain of pure science in a university, their reward and encouragement will come naturally from their scientific peers. If, however, they are working in the domain of implied industrial science, which is how he thinks

Starting point is 00:46:58 of product creation and what he's doing, applied industrial science, then they themselves and the industry that supports them must be encouraged to disseminate that knowledge promptly in this era when pure science and implied science are almost indistinguishable. One way to think about how Land ran, like what's Land's philosophy on running Polaroid, right? And I would say if you had to, if you could,

Starting point is 00:47:23 I don't even know if it's possible, but if you had to, if you could, I don't even know if it's possible, but if you could summarize, he would tell you that you need to be scientifically daring and financially conservative. So this is a little bit more about that. And though it has grown enormously, Land still maintained tight control of Polaroid. The degree of fiscal conservatism exercised by Polaroid

Starting point is 00:47:41 is as unusual for a large corporation as is the degree of Land's of Polaroid explaining. He explains that as part of the chief's basic philosophy meaning land land's view is that the company should be scientifically daring and financially conservative uh talks about they don't have debt and then they put a lot of their money into um municipal bonds and this is why i wonder i i this is really me questioning i wonder if he did this on purpose let me read this to you and I'll tell you what I mean there. Because, you know, he grew up around academia, even though he criticizes it heavily. You know, he never spent much time more than a few miles away from Harvard and MIT. income from a large holding of municipal bonds, which produces tax-free revenues for the company. This income source almost approximates the endowment concept of a large university.

Starting point is 00:48:51 So I wonder if he was, I haven't found anything on this. I'm just speculating here. I wonder if he was inspired by what MIT and Harvard and other institutions like it do with their money, which I think now is obviously different than it was, you know, we're talking almost 50 years ago where we are in the story right now. Actually, closer to 60 years. I think another thing I admire a lot about Edwin Land is he set up the company around his natural instincts. And that's a great way to think about Charlie Munger's quote.

Starting point is 00:49:24 He's like, you need to follow your natural drift. Like you can't just try to copy what me and Warren Buffett did because that may not suit your personality. This suits our personality. Who are you? What's important to you? And build your company around that. And we see that with Edwin Land. So it says, Land had established the company in such a way that its practical economic pursuits were keeping with his own personal intellectual interests. There's a great deal of alignment there. There's no conflict. Depending on whom one talked to, Land was primarily thought of as an inventor, a corporate leader, a sophisticated engineer, a renegade academic. I really like that term. He referred to himself as

Starting point is 00:50:01 a scientist. Land had begun both his scientific and business careers with the study of the behavioral and properties of light. This study created an industry. That's a hell of a statement. His own natural intellectual interest created an industry. It also created in Land a lifelong interest in the aspect of light. Once he understood the basic properties of light, a feat he accomplished in his teens by going through every volume in the New York library possessed on the subject. So that's that. You know what that reminded me of? In my notebook, which you have access to, there's I took this notes on one of my favorite lectures ever. It's by this guy named Bill Gurley. He's an he's an investor. He gave a talk. I think it was to Texas MBA students.

Starting point is 00:50:45 It's called Running Down a Dream. So in this talk, Bill Gurley talks about what he learned from Danny Meyer, Bobby Knight, and Bob Dylan and how they approach their craft. So there's a couple of quotes in there I think line up with what,

Starting point is 00:50:59 you know, Edwin Landon, 17 years old, reading every single book in the New York Public Library about the subject he's interested in. So he says, this is Bill Gurley now, he says, strive to know more than anyone else about your particular craft. You should be the most knowledgeable person. It is possible to gather more information than somebody else. Be obsessive about learning in your field. Hone your craft constantly. Understand everything you can possibly about your craft. Consider it an obligation. Hold yourself accountable. Keep learning over time study the history know the pioneers

Starting point is 00:51:29 what we're doing here right and then this is the final quote that made me think of what edwin land did uh the good news if you're going to research something this is your lucky day information is freely available on the internet the bad news you have zero excuse for not being the most knowledgeable person in any subject you want. The information there is right there at your fingertips. So that's in the Internet age. It's way easier. Imagine having to sit in a library all day. Much more difficult, right? But that's exactly what Edwin Land did.

Starting point is 00:51:57 There's a lot of text in here that him talking about the problems of formal education. I'm just going to read one to you. He says, our young people, for the most part, unless they are geniuses, after a very short time in college, give up any hope of being individually great.

Starting point is 00:52:15 Land saw that as a catastrophic, catastrophic problem for society, one that needed to be fixed right away. Something I love about Edwin Land is he was comfortable saying the words, I don't know. So an example of this, they would go and give lectures and seminars. Land and other executives,

Starting point is 00:52:35 there's actually somebody, it's called the Vision Research Laboratory. And so they'd go and meet with the students, right? This is very important to him. He spent a lot of time with students. And so this is an example of him being comfortable saying, I don't know. It says Land's strong inclination towards control this is very important to me spent a lot of time with students um and so this is an example of of him being comfortable saying i don't know he says land strong inclination towards control apparently

Starting point is 00:52:49 did not carry over to the actual realm of scientific knowledge he is able to express doubt a trait many leaders in and out of the scientists sciences have difficulty with uh so a student in one of the seminars gives an example of that uh so he says another student in the seminar uh was quoted saying, I asked John McCann, John McCann is the person working at Polaroid that's in charge of the Vision Research Laboratory, right? So he says, I asked John McCann a question

Starting point is 00:53:14 and he gave me a vague runaround answer. Then I went and asked Dr. Land and he said, we have no idea. I love this. This is Land's reaction to Sputnik and at the same time reveals his priorities. Edwin Land argued eloquently that the Russians were teaching their youth

Starting point is 00:53:31 to enjoy science and focus on basic research, while in the United States, we are not now great builders for the future, but are rather stressing production in great quantities of things we have already achieved. So it's like we're focused on we made something now let's just make more of it. And land's like no no focus on things that only you can do that no one else can do invent new things bring new products and services to bear. So now I've come to an idea that I think personally is going to make the

Starting point is 00:54:00 largest impact of my life and it's something that's echoed through several other founders that we've studied together on the podcast, right? And it's the importance of concentration. And again, I think this can be applied to anything, to what I'm working on, to what you're working on. He says, among all the components in land's intellectual arsenal, the chief one seems to be simple concentration. Direct quote from Land. So he says, I find it very important to work intensively for long hours when I'm beginning to see solutions to a problem. At such times, atavistic competences seem to come welling up. So let me pause there. I don't know if you know what that word is. I had to look it up.

Starting point is 00:54:38 It means relating to or characterized by something ancient or ancestral. So at times, activistic competences seem to come welling up. You are handling so many variables at a barely conscious level that you can't afford to be interrupted. If you are, it may take a year to cover the same ground you could otherwise cover in 60 hours.

Starting point is 00:55:03 So it says, Land views his work in the same light that he views Beethoven's. Science is for him a process of uncovering individual human potential. There's that word again. He also believes that discoveries

Starting point is 00:55:17 are not arbitrarily transferable from one person to the next, nor might the same individual under different circumstances be able to might the same individual under different circumstances be able to achieve the same scientific results. Land is therefore extremely careful in optimizing his and his associates' chance for success by reminding them of the fragile, tenuous nature of scientific discovery, or on a more basic level, scientific uncovery. This seems to be one of the chief tenets of his

Starting point is 00:55:49 Polaroid experience. This next section, it just really speaks to the importance of having self-belief, which Edwin Land definitely did. So it says, with assets totaling at least half a billion dollars, Fortune magazine recounted Polaroid's shaky financial plight at the end of World War II. A direct quote from Fortune. What has happened since is one of the great miracles of business. Fully documented and widely publicized, but still awesome to contemplate.

Starting point is 00:56:16 I agree. Land probably agreed with the awesome part of the statement. But given his own abiding faith in himself and his company, he considered the outcome something less than miraculous. Either way you say, he expected it. Just a few more things here. He's got a great quote on life and work. If anything characterized the company, the thing that drives the analyst wild is that we grow and grow and grow, not on the basis of the bottom line, but on the basis of faith.

Starting point is 00:56:50 That if you do your job well, that the last thing you have to worry about is money. Just as if you live right, you will be happy. And that's one of the things I personally admire most about Edwin Land is he doesn't see business as the separate thing. He sees everything's related to everything else, the way he lives his life, how you maintain happiness, how you build a good business, how you do great scientific work, how you educate the people around you. Everything is connected. You see that in the way he talks and communicates. He's got this, it's really a philosophy on life that just happens to be tangentially related to product creation, businesses, craftsmanship, stuff like that. He's also very artistic and rather romantic in his writing. So this is from marketing materials for one of their cameras.

Starting point is 00:57:34 This is land writing. It's very interesting. We could not have known and have only just learned, perhaps mostly from children from two to five, that a new kind of relationship between people and groups is brought into being by the sx70 so again i'm not crazy about his product names honestly uh sx70 is the most important it's the camera took 30 years to make it's the one he had the idea of he had cameras before that you could take the picture but this is the the full uh realization of his dream that

Starting point is 00:58:03 you just you pointed at something you look through the viewfinder you press the button and out comes the picture okay uh so that's the sx70 and this is what he's the product he's describing uh so it says uh we learned this from children in the two to five that a new kind of relationship between people and groups is being brought into being by sx70 when the members of the group are photographing and being photographed and sharing the photographs. Now, this is where he gets more, you know, idealistic maybe. It turns out that buried within us, there is a latent interest in each other. There is tenderness, curiosity, excitement, affection, companionability, and humor.

Starting point is 00:58:43 Imagine somebody today describing their product like that, right? 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 who the hell is talking about their products in this way 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 a few pages later we see more of this his uniqueness

Starting point is 00:59:26 the way he approaches he's writing some of these uh stuff i'm going to quote you he writes in in in shareholder letters and i read a lot i mean i read all of warren buffett shareholders i read jeff bezos's like they're very fascinating they're very interesting there's a lot of good information they're not like poetic um quote this this quote is an example of that the present is the past biting into the future other corporate leaders might head up businesses land sees himself as heading up an experience think about the subtitle of this book edwin land and the polaroid experience he sees himself as heading up an experience any man in land's position must certainly possess an ego of monumental proportions.

Starting point is 01:00:05 Land is no exception. Any statement coming from him or a Polaroid official that is not stated in the superlative is likely to be suspect. During student seminars, he has casually put down the chalk and stopped his equations long enough to make reference to my wonderful camera. It is the most apparent in land's frequently drawn analogies to the telephone he said at the 1972 annual meeting my fantasy is that this camera will be as widely used as a telephone says in time magazine i think that the camera can have the same impact as a telephone on the way people live and i'll close on this. In this Forbes interview,

Starting point is 01:00:48 Land was asked how he sees himself. His self-evaluation was no less ambitious than his evaluations of the products that are so tied to his personality. And it should come as no surprise that this was so. Direct quote from Land now. I suppose that I am, first of all, an artistic person.

Starting point is 01:01:02 I'm interested in love and affection and sharing and making beauty part of everyday life. And if I'm lucky enough to be able to earn my living by contributing to a warmer and richer world, then I feel that is an awfully good luck. And if I use all my scientific, professional abilities in doing that, I think that makes for a great life. That's 132 books down, 1,000 to go. If you want the full story, I'll leave a link that's in your show notes. If you buy the book using that link, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. And I'll talk to you again soon.

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Founders - #132 Edwin Land (Steve Jobs's Hero)

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