Founders - Steve Jobs and Edwin Land

Starting point is 00:00:00 So a few months ago, I spent about seven hours with John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods. And it was during one of our conversations that John told me one of the craziest things that anyone has ever said about the podcast. By the time I met him, he had already listened to over 100 episodes. And he told me that if founders existed when he was younger, that Whole Foods would still be an independent company. That since the podcast and all of History's Greatest Entrepreneurs constantly emphasize the importance of controlling expenses, he would have made it much more of a priority, especially during good times, during boom times. I think it is very natural for a company and for human nature to not watch your costs as closely because everything is going so well.

Starting point is 00:00:39 In fact, you're going to hear something similar happens to Edwin Land late in his career. After Edwin Land was semi-coaxed into retirement by Polaroid's board, a decision that Steve Jobs, by the way, called one of the dumbest things that I've ever heard. Unfortunately, costs got out of hand and Edwin Land left Polaroid. This is something that happens a lot. In fact, when Steve Jobs was recounting some of the mistakes that he made in his own career, he mentioned losing the discipline of cost control. He was talking about his time at Next. And in one of his biographies, there's a line that says, not only was time slipping by quickly, but so too was the money. Jobs complained aloud that

Starting point is 00:01:15 we're not scrounging. We stopped nickel and diming for the stuff and it all adds up. This is something I talk about all the time with my friend, Eric, who's the co-founder and CEO of Ramp. Ramp is now a partner of this podcast. I've gotten to know all the co-founders of Ramp and spent a bunch of time with them over the last year or two. They all listened to the podcast and they've picked up on the fact, just like John Mackey did, that the main theme from the podcast is on the importance of watching your costs and controlling your spend and how doing so can give you a massive competitive advantage. That is the reason that Ramp exists. Ramp exists to give you everything you need

Starting point is 00:01:51 to control your spend. Ramp exists to give you everything you need to control your costs. They give you easy to use corporate cards for your entire team, automated expense reporting and cost control. Something that all of History's Greatest Entrepreneurs have in common is that they make cost control an obsession. In fact, if you go back to my

Starting point is 00:02:09 conversation with John Mackey, he told me this shocking idea about the role that Walmart played in Whole Foods' success. And it has to do with how impossible it was for other people, other grocery stores, to compete with Sam Walton and Walmart. There was about a decade where grocery stores tried to compete with Walmart on price instead of competing on the higher end of the market with Whole Foods on quality. And if you try to compete with somebody that's obsessed with their cough control

Starting point is 00:02:34 like Sam Walton was on price, you lose. Sam Walton would repeat that over and over and over again in his autobiography. One of my favorite lines from his autobiography, he says, our money was made by controlling expenses. You can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation, or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient. Ramp helps you run an efficient organization.

Starting point is 00:02:54 Ramp is everything you need to control and optimize all of your financial operations on a single platform. Ramp's website is incredible. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business control costs. That is ramp.com. I just finished re-listening to this entire episode. I am really proud of it.

Starting point is 00:03:13 I think of Founders Podcast as a tool. In fact, I recorded this episode over two years ago. I have not been able to reread this book since then, but the podcast allows me to spend less than an hour. I spent less than an hour re-listening to this episode, and I'm instantly reminded of all the valuable ideas and insights that I've since forgotten. I hope your experience is the same, and I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did. 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.

Starting point is 00:03:46 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,

Starting point is 00:04:17 covetable product design. And both companies exploded in size and wealth under an in-house visionary genius. At Apple, that was Steve Jobs. At Polaroid, it was Edwin Land. Just as all Apple stories lead back to Jobs, Polaroid lore always focuses on Land. In his time, he was as public a figure as Jobs. Land and his company were for more than four decades indivisible. At Polaroid's annual meetings, Land got up on stage deploying every bit of his considerable magnetism and put his company's next big thing through its paces. A generation later, Jobs did the same thing. Both men were college dropouts, both became as rich as anyone could ever wish to be, and both insisted that their inventions would change the fundamental nature of human interaction.

Starting point is 00:05:13 Jobs, more than once, expressed his deep admiration for Edwin Land. He called him a national treasure. After Land was coaxed into retirement by Polaroid's board, Jobs called the decision 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 described to each other a singular experience. Each had imagined a perfect new product, whole, already manufactured, and sitting before him, and then spent years prodding executives, engineers, and factories to create it with as few compromises as possible. Polaroid operated almost like a scientific think tank that happened to regularly pop out a profitable consumer product.

Starting point is 00:06:01 Land was frequently criticized by Wall Street analysts for spending too much on his R&D operation. That was Land's philosophy. Do some interesting science that is all your own, and if it is, in his words, 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 going to talk to you about today, which is Instant, the story of Polaroid, and it was written by Christopher Bananos. So this is the third book that I've read about Edwin Land in the last about 10 days. In fact, all three of the books that I have read in the last 10 days, I actually reread. So in total, I've read five biographies of Edwin Land. Three of them I've read twice.

Starting point is 00:06:48 So if you haven't listened to the past episodes, make sure you go back. It's episode 263, 132, 133, 134, and 40. I'll put these in the show notes as well so you can remember them. And the reason I spent time reading almost 1,000 pages or rereading almost 1,000 pages of Edwin Land is very simple. If Steve Jobs studied Edwin Land, I think every other founder should as well. And the book I hold in my hand does a really great job, maybe the best out of every book that I've read on Edwin Land so far, comparing and contrasting and really showing how much, in many ways, Edwin Land was Steve Jobs before Steve Jobs. So I want to jump right into a story from his early childhood and says nearly every account of Edwin Land's youth conforms to the classic

Starting point is 00:07:24 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. He had his own workshop in his garage. And when Steve was five years old, he took Steve in the

Starting point is 00:08:04 garage, cleared off a part of his workbench and said, Steve, this is now your 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.

Starting point is 00:08:20 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 is doing this exact same thing at that age. The second thing I want to point out to you is that they both optimized for breadth as well as depth. They did not. This is one of the biggest criticisms that Steve Jobs had of Bill Gates. He has a hilarious quote where he's like,

Starting point is 00:08:46 he would have been a broader person if he would have dropped acid. So it says, Land was introverted in person, but supremely confident when it came to his ideas. Accustomed as we are today to the Silicon Valley style, this may imply that he was a big nerd, but that is not right. Alongside his scientific passions

Starting point is 00:09:01 lay knowledge of art, music, and literature. He was a cultured person growing even more so as he got older, and this is why that's so important, and his interests filtered into the ethos of Polaroid. And this sentence is going to sound eerily similar to Steve Jobs. Edwin Land liked people who had breadth as well as depth. Chemists who were also musicians or photographers who understood physics. So I got to that part, made me think of one of my favorite paragraphs that came from the Steve Jobs biography written by Isaacson, where at the very end of his life, Steve is talking about the influences on his work

Starting point is 00:09:35 that people like Edwin Land, Da Vinci, and Michelangelo had, and what he tried to essentially copy. And he says, Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There's something magical about that place. There's a lot of people innovating, and that is not the main distinction of my career. The reason Apple resonates with people is that there's a deep current of humanity in our innovation. I think great artists and great engineers are similar in that they both have a desire to express themselves. In fact, some of the best people working on the original Mac were poets and musicians on the side. This is the exact same

Starting point is 00:10:10 idea that was just expressed in this book. Let me finish this sentence that Jobs has here because I think it even expresses that idea on a deeper level. In the 70s, computers became a way for people to express their creativity. Great artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were also great at science. Michelangelo knew a lot about how to quarry stone, not just how to be a sculptor. And so I think that idea leads into the next thing I want to tell you about, because this is very similar to Land and Jobs shared a 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 Land was looking for ways to get undiscovered talent. He got a lot of talent from MIT, from Harvard, because

Starting point is 00:10:54 Polaroid is obviously right next to them. But he desired what he wanted. He's like, I want somebody to come brand new to my company so I can teach them the way I do science and the way that we do our experiments. I don't want to have to take somebody that's already been trained up fully in the wrong ways to do things. And so he winds up developing a close relationship to an art history professor. And this art history professor winds up saying, hey, these are I have, you know, the smart gifted. So my smartest gifted students, I bet you they'll be they'll work well at Polaroid. And so Henry Ford did that exact same thing. He's like, I just want somebody brand new. And then I will, I will train them myself. I'm not going to outsource the training

Starting point is 00:11:33 and education that I need for my company to somebody else. Land grew close to Clarence Kennedy, who was an art history professor at Smith college and also a fine photographer. Their relationship not only helped refine Land's eye, but also began to feed Polaroid with brainy, aesthetically inclined Smith graduates. So think about the competition for an MIT graduate or the competition for a Harvard graduate compared to the competition for a technology company.

Starting point is 00:11:59 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 in Smith's art history department.

Starting point is 00:12:37 And here's another parallel to Jobs. Land was extraordinarily tenacious. As a child, Land had been forced to visit an aunt he disliked. As he sat in the backseat of his parents' car, he set his jaw and told himself, I will never let anyone else tell me what to do ever again. Land's control over his company was nearly absolute, and he exercised it to a degree that was compelling and sometimes exhausting. And so I just have one more example from his early life, and then we'll get into the beginning of Polaroid. And again, this parallels the job as well.

Starting point is 00:13:10 And it's this idea that Lan found what he wanted to do at a very young age, and he did it till almost he died. His work may be called different things, but essentially, to me, after reading so much about him, from the age of 17 until he retires, kind of forced out when he's like 71, 72, something like that, he's working on Polaroid. It is all Polaroid. Just like if you go back and look at Steve Jobs' early life,

Starting point is 00:13:32 he had this desire to build these devices to create some kind of tangible product. He does that at an extremely young age, and of course we know he works on that until he dies. And so even though Land did not grow up, and it says it didn't really grow up in like an intellectual household, there wasn't a lot of books in his house. His parents didn't prioritize reading. He actually found himself a copy of a book that was published in 1911, and it's by this physicist named Robert Wood. And so I talked about this last week, how Land said that he would read this book at night, how other people read the Bible. He would sleep with it under his pillow. And one particular chapter influenced his life's work. And that was a

Starting point is 00:14:09 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 going to give you a quick overview because it was very confusing to me. You know, I had to reread it, but Land is able to give a simple explanation of what it was that he invented. A polarizer is a unique type of filter. If you picture a beam of light as a handful of thrown straws oriented in every direction, the polarizing filter is a picket fence. The only straws, or the only light that comes through, are the ones that align with the slots between the pickets. Adding a polarizing layer to sunglasses blocks light vibrating in that one plane,

Starting point is 00:14:49 wiping out the glare and helping drivers see the road. And he used the example of helping drivers see and then adding it to sunglasses because those are the two main domains that he tried to build his business on 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 37 years old remember he starts on these experiments when he's 17 by the time he's 37 he's achieved everything he wants except success and so when you read a biography of edwin Land, you see an incredibly smart, gifted, driven, focused person endure decade after decade of struggle.

Starting point is 00:15:29 And more importantly, finally work his way through. So he gets to Harvard, does not stay very long, and it's because of this. He withdrew frustrated by the rigidity of the classroom and his unserious classmates. So he turns his apartment to basically a lab for the experiments of polarization. He's going to wind up just at age 19. He actually gets his first scientific breakthrough. And so this is a quick description of his scientific breakthrough.

Starting point is 00:15:54 It says his innovation was one that a few people had tried before him without success. So he had the ideas like, hey, we can't grow large crystals because there's actually polarizers that exist in nature. So he had studied the entire history of the field that he's trying to do. He's like, everybody's trying to grow big crystals. What if I grow millions of what he called sub microscopic crystals? Then if I could line them up somehow, it might do the same.

Starting point is 00:16:16 Like it might do the trick. It might actually polarize light. And he put it on a clear sheet. And the alignment of these millions of sub microscopic crystals on a sheet turns it into a filter. And this was an extremely big deal. It says land age just 19 first broke through. His first synthetic polarizer, the world's first, was a genuinely major scientific discovery. And then it goes through all the ideas, the different ideas, commercial applications that he thought he could like the synthetic polarizers could be used for.

Starting point is 00:16:47 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 the public finds so useful that they will buy. That was like his main ethos. And what was fascinating about like I'm going to skip over that that part where they're describing all the different applications that Land is hypothesizing about because there's another parallel to Jobs and this idea where, you know, 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,

Starting point is 00:17:33 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 going to be called Polaroid. So then they changed the name of the company around their product. 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 going to 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

Starting point is 00:18:07 your company, missionaries and mercenaries. Mercenaries are there for the perks, the money, maybe the prestige or status. The missionaries make better products because they believe in what the actual company is doing. It is not just a company to them. And we see at the very beginning of his career, same situation here with land. A chalkboard in their lab read, every night, 50 people will die from highway glare. Land wanted to make sure everyone there understood that they were all on a mission, a manifestly important mission. And so that was Edwin Land's first big idea. He's like, hey, these polarizers, yeah, we could put them on sunglasses, but we could also put them on windshields and headlights. And then we could reduce at the time. This is in the 19, I think 1920s. A lot of people were dying due to headlight glare at night. Driving at night was a lot more dangerous than it is now.

Starting point is 00:18:59 He is also going to fail at convincing Detroit to actually adopt his invention, which was a very important failure for him to experience because it taught him, he's like, hey, I don't want anybody between me and the customer. So I want to design a product that I have complete control over and that I can go and sell directly to customers. So Edwin Land is definitely 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 61 years. She would certainly get frustrated at his absence and his distractedness. One of his employees recalls accompanying him on a night when

Starting point is 00:19:42 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've always been late, even when Jennifer, which is their daughter, graduated, and kept giving him a hard time all the way back to their home in Cambridge. Land didn't say a word, and after dropping her off at the house, he went back to the office. Everyone who worked for land seems to have a memory of the man's intense work days whether in the early years or decades later there's a story i've read previously in another biography of edwin land that demonstrates

Starting point is 00:20:17 this point exactly he's at his father's funeral and i think it's 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 response is, my work is my life. And so this over-optimization of your professional life at the detriment of your personal life is something I read over and over again in the biographies. And some entrepreneurs regret that they did that, and some get to the end of their life and don't regret it.

Starting point is 00:20:45 Another interest of Edwin Land's that informed the way he built his company was the fact that words and language and literature and books were extremely important to him. He's got this fantastic idea of having somebody within your company, and he calls them the keeper of the language. Check this out. Land could write, too. As Polaroid grew, his letters to shareholders gradually became a particularly dramatic showcase for his language and his thinking. And let me interrupt myself here.

Starting point is 00:21:09 There's another story where people are like, what did you want when you were younger? What was your goal in life? He's like, I wanted to be the world's greatest scientist and I wanted to be the world's greatest novelist. So that gives you an idea of this guy's, the scope of his thinking, right? These letters were really more like personal mission statements. They're thoughtful and compact and just eccentric enough to be completely engaging. Instead of discussing earnings and growth, they laid out Land's world, inviting everyone to join him. He cared about words. When he elevated the marketing executive Ted Voss to become a corporate officer, Land gave him a four-word job description,

Starting point is 00:21:47 keeper of the language. So I mentioned earlier how just like Jobs had to reinvent Apple when he came back, Edwin Land had to reinvent his company. There's like a line of demarcation in the history of Polaroid, if you think about it. And that line of demarcation is World War II. Pre-World War II, they're having some success selling polarized sunglasses. They invented 3D technology for movies, but it wasn't adopted by the movie industry. And they're trying to invent a way to reduce headlight glare for the automobile industry to not a lot of success. Then you have all the war work they did, which was rather remarkable, how Polaroid, like almost every other American business, kind of turned on a dime,

Starting point is 00:22:25 where they go from trying to produce things for the consumer to things that will help the Allies win the war. And then once World War II comes to an end, then is the history of Polaroid why we know the company's name. It's all the invention of the instant photography industry and the instant camera. And that becomes Land's focus for the remainder 30 years of his career. And so before I jump into the instant photography, I just want to 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 Land's personality that nearly everyone from Polaroid remembers. His ability to invent on the spur of the moment.

Starting point is 00:23:04 One time, an Air Force general called Land to ask for advice about a problem with his gun sights. Land'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 sight based 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 inventions that Polaroid did during the war, but before the war

Starting point is 00:23:43 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 200 pages and I think that you know a ton of books have like these pictures but they're usually like in groups together like halfway through the book where this is like spread out the entire time and you actually see the picture of what they're talking about at that point so if they're talking about the sx70 they show like what it looked like at the very beginning say in the 1940s and its finalized form in the 1970s it actually enhances at least it greatly enhanced my understanding of what was taking place at that point in polaroid history it's fantastic

Starting point is 00:24:18 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 sx70 it's like we took pictures daddy why can't i see them now and lan'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 mass psychosis. And it says, inventors sometimes experience a fevered paranoia

Starting point is 00:24:48 just after they had a great idea. And this is why. It seems so clear and burns so bright that they're sure someone else will come up with the same thing any moment. And they compare the experience that Land is going through in his life and career with the founders of Xerox.

Starting point is 00:25:02 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 it says Land's contemporary, Chester Carlson, after his own invention of the Xerox photocopier, immediately called up a friend, dictated his scheme, and asked a friend to sign and date the notes. Land already had a strong patenting instinct, and by coincidence, his patent lawyer, Donald Brown, happened to be on vacation in Santa Fe, New Mexico himself, where Land is having this experience. The two spent half the night getting everything written down. Now, this is a funny joke, because Land was gifted at, he's very much a showman,

Starting point is 00:25:38 obviously extremely intelligent, could describe even a complex idea in a very simple way. But it's humorous. But the reason I want to bring it to your attention is because 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, this is probably going to take you decades to get to the point where you actually want it to,

Starting point is 00:25:58 where you want your product to be. That's exactly what Land went through. And I'm pretty sure I have pilots in the book later on that speak to this very important point. Land joked that he roughed out the details in a few hours, except for the ones that took from 1943 to 1972 to solve. So then we go back to another parallel between Jobs and Land that we've already discussed a few times in the book. And that's they were both gifted at product demonstrations. I want to bring out one sentence, though, because this is extremely important. discussed a few times in the book and that they were both gifted at product demonstrations.

Starting point is 00:26:29 I want to 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 is occurring in the 1940s. This is the first product demonstration was 1947, right? But you and I know that this is a very old idea. The greatest copywriter to ever live is that guy named Claude, I almost said Claude Shannon, the guy named Claude Hopkins, right? If you haven't studied Claude Hopkins, you need to go back after you're done listening to this episode and listen to 170, My Life in Advertising. Okay. He says, he wrote, Claude Hopkins was doing most of his work and maybe about 30 years, about 30 years before we were in the stories, early 1900s. And he said in his book, Scientific Advertising, which has been read by generations of founders and advertising and marketers. He said that no argument in the world can ever compare with one dramatic demonstration.

Starting point is 00:27:24 That is a great line that describes Polaroids and lands superpower. And you could argue, 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 show? Who knows what the number is? It's a gigantic number. And it was all built on this aspect of human nature that there's just no argument in the world, no sales copy, no nothing that can actually.

Starting point is 00:27:59 Those things can perform well, obviously. That's what Claude Hopkins did for every day, 12 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 about to read to you here, but also when they go and try to sell the product, when they put them in stores, they don't have it just hidden in a box. They have people there saying, hey, try this camera, take a picture. This is going to blow your mind. And when people

Starting point is 00:28:32 see, hey, I took this picture, it usually takes 50 to 60 seconds for the Polaroid to appear. People go crazy, like start pushing each other, grabbing things. So again, I think that idea is extremely important and it's an old idea. 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 that come up. It's him looking at a big, his own face, right? It says what he revealed was a perfect portrait of himself. It may have been an accident that the eight by 10 camera produced a photo almost the same size of his actual face,

Starting point is 00:29:07 but it only added to the eeriness. There was Land sitting at a table in his striped tie displaying a fresh picture in which he sat at the same table wearing the same striped tie. This is happening in 1947. A gasp rippled around the room. Newspapers all over the country ran the story. So again, I just got done saying how much 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

Starting point is 00:29:35 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 the one they can sell directly to customers, but they were gifted 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 1947

Starting point is 00:29:58 had come along only a modest amount since George Eastman, that's the founder of Kodak, first film in 1888. So that is what, 60 years? In 60 years, the only thing that was getting better was the cameras, but the processing of the film had not changed. That's crazy. It says, when it came time to process your pictures, you had two choices. Build yourself a darkroom, which you know no one's going to 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,

Starting point is 00:30:34 Christopher Bonanos, Bonanos 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 camera that Polaroid was able to make in 1947 doesn't look at all like the final version, the version that he saw in his mind, one that you could almost fit in a pocket. I mean, there's another story I have to tell you a little bit about that. But the idea is like, I want something that you can carry with you, you can fit in a pocket. I mean, there's another story I have to tell you a little bit about that. But the idea is like, I want something that you can 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

Starting point is 00:31:11 look like that. And what this book does so great is that you see the dimensions, you see the pictures, you see the evolution of these ideas, this slow iteration, decade after decade after decade. Here's another idea that you and I should copy. And it's this idea that you should hire a paid critic. So I'm going to read this to you. This is an idea that I first discovered when I read the biography of the founder, the co-founder of Sony. I covered that book all the way back on Founders 102. If you haven't listened to that, make sure you listen to it and read the book because Edwin Landl from Akio Morita. And I've heard his name pronounced a couple different ways, but that's the way I pronounce it. Steve Jobs studied Akio Morita and Jeff Bezos

Starting point is 00:31:52 have all been on record. There's been a ton of founders, but those are the three that popped my mind. And I'm going to tell you why that idea is so powerful and why I've mentioned on several podcasts when it pops up, because I think it's important. And so we're seeing that right here. It says for a retainer of $100 a month, Land 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. Though, as he hastened to point out in 1972, the stipend had risen to considerably more than $100 a month.

Starting point is 00:32:26 Thank God, he said. This is why this is so important and why it's beneficial for founders to take this idea and use it in their own company. Whenever Polaroid introduced a new product line, Adams trooped off to the mountains or the desert to try it out. Back came reports packed with detail containing rows of photos at varying exposures or apertures. Eventually, Adams filed more than 3,000 of these reports. You now have 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. It is worth way more than whatever you're paying him every month. Now, they use the same thing.

Starting point is 00:33:05 Akio and his co-founder used the exact same thing when they were building Sony. The same idea, that is. And at the time, they're making audio tape recorders. Listen to what he does here. So this is now Akio writing his book. I'm going to read this paragraph to you, okay? So it says, Nuriya Oga had been a vocal arts student at the Tokyo University of Arts

Starting point is 00:33:24 when he first saw our audio tape recorder back in 1950. I had my eye on him for all these years because of his bold criticism of our first machine. He was a great champion of the tape recorder, just like Ansel Adams is a great champion of the photograph, right? Same exact things 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 critic. This is genius, man. We invited him to be a paid critic even when he was still in school. His ideas were very challenging,

Starting point is 00:34:05 just like Ansel Adams' ideas were challenging to Polaroid. And Norea also had a brain because he said then, a ballet dancer needs a mirror to perfect her style and her technique. And so that is exactly what he is giving to Sony. Sony's the ballet dancer, I'm the mirror. Now here's the punchline, it's even crazier. At the time that this book was written, which I think is probably, it's got to be 25 years old, maybe even older, Norea was the president of Sony. He starts off working for Sony as a paid critic when he's still at university. And he winds up being so good and so dedicated that he winds up working his way all the way up to the president of Sony. It's one of my favorite stories.

Starting point is 00:34:44 So once the camera's released, it's immediately successful. They sell more than they can even produce. And again, this is why it's really important to study Edwin Land because he founded 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

Starting point is 00:35:04 with all the necessary patents locked up. It was going to be a long time before it was commercially challenged. 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 they're not building democracies, they're

Starting point is 00:35:34 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, asking questions, pausing only to catnap in a barcalonger he kept in his cluttered office. Occasionally, beleaguered employees hoped that he would get obsessed with something far away from their purview so they could avoid those late-night phone calls. That sentence is also found when you're studying how Steve Jobs approached building Apple.

Starting point is 00:36:17 A lot of things that his focus is so intense that sometimes you wished it wasn't directed at you. So it's very similar to what these Polaroid employees are experiencing under land. And this leads into one of the most important ideas that land would repeat over and over again. Nan Rudolph, one of his employees, recalls that land sometimes popped into her lab and asked to sit in the dark room just to hide out from questions and think. He wasn't kidding some years later when he said, My whole life has been spent trying to teach people that intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out in people resources they didn't know they had. Land also understood something that Jobs understood as well. And it's this idea, it's like, I'm not building a commodity product.

Starting point is 00:37:00 My product is aspirational. Says he grasped that Polaroid could be positioned as an aspirational product and should be packaged and marketed that way. There's a fantastic discussion that is happening. I read this in Johnny Ives biography, which I covered back on 178. And it's a discussion between Steve and Johnny. And they're trying to figure out, like, what are they going to build? This is right when when Jobs came back to Apple. So right around 97 and Jobs right away. Like always did even when he was younger he did he wanted to

Starting point is 00:37:28 deviate from what the rest of the industry was doing and the way he thought about what what they should be doing is like building like the bmw of the computer industry i'm going to read this section from this book for me because i think it's for you because i think it's interesting 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 will always be those who will pay for the better ride in the sexier car. Rather than competing with the commodity PC makers like Dell, Compaq, and Gateway,

Starting point is 00:38:02 think about the computers that existed in the late 90s, right? That's exactly what was taking place. They all kind of looked the same. Instead of competing with commodity PC makers like Dell, Compaq, and Gateway, why not make only first-class products with high margins? Is that not what is happening with Polaroid? It's the exact same idea. This stuff gets me hyped up, man. Why not make only first-class products with high margins so that Apple could continue to develop even better first-class products? It's exactly the way Land thought. He's like, we're going to build first-class products with high margins, right? We're going to take the money we're making, and then instead of going out and buying Ferraris and yachts,

Starting point is 00:38:37 we're going to have this excessively high research and development budget, and we're going to keep doing that for decade after decade. So why not make only first class products with high margins so that Apple could continue to develop even better first class products? The company could make much bigger profits, still jobs here, okay? The company could make much bigger profits from selling a $3,000 machine rather than a $500 machine, even if they sold fewer of them. Why not then, this is the punchline and this is so important, why not then just concentrate on making the best $3,000 machines around? So think about what the book just said. It's not only that we built a first-class product. It's the only one.

Starting point is 00:39:14 You can't sound like you can buy a Polaroid or something else. There is no competition. There's a great line that says Polaroid only competed with itself. But part of that, after you build a great product, is first class product needs first class packaging and first class marketing. And so what do they do here? They hire a paid critic, part two. Polaroid convened a graphic design summit, bringing in the best minds in graphic design to look over the previous year's work. The previous year's advertising, the previous year's packaging, all of our logos, everything, all of our branding. Okay. So it's like, and they got by this time we're in the, I think we're in the early seventies by that. Yeah. We're in the

Starting point is 00:39:53 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, OK, let's go find another critic. And so they have this graphic design summit. They bring in the best minds and 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 100 others. Everyone knows they asked him to size up their work and he delivered a concise verdict.

Starting point is 00:40:25 You don't need me. You don't need anybody. Moving ahead, I got to bring out another idea that I absolutely love. The fact that history does not repeat, human nature does. Polaroid was Snapchat before Snapchat. And so think about the use case here, okay? Before you took a picture, you had to send it off and some lab technician actually made the picture for you and got it back to you. So that, so you took a picture and another human being was going to see that picture, right? But now you have Polaroid. It's only you that sees it. And so people start using it to take naked pictures of their lover and of themselves in many cases. So it says, we will never know exactly who first figured out that using a Polaroid camera

Starting point is 00:41:02 meant whatever happened in front of the lens never needed to be seen by a lab technician. There are plenty of naughty first-generation Polaroid photos out there to confirm that instant photography success was at least in part built on adult fun. So Snapchat's obviously very different than it is today than it started out, but it started out as like a sexting app, right? And what's fascinating about this is that I read a book a long time ago. It's called How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars. It's the story of Snapchat. It's episode 22. It was in the early days of founders where today I'm not interested in reading books about entrepreneurs that are still operating. I think it's actually a mistake to do that because time is the best filter. And so I get a lot of book recommendations about like, hey, you know, cover like the Ubers or

Starting point is 00:41:47 Airbnbs. Like I'm not doing that. These people, those founders can go on, get interviewed. I only want to focus on people that are either at the very end of their career, maybe in their, you know, 60s, 70s, 80s, they're retired or they're dead. Primarily I like to, as much as I can, just study dead entrepreneurs. But back then I was just kind of reading about any kind of founder. But what was fascinating is like when you read that that book what blew my mind is that one of Evan Spiegel's the founder of Snapchat his hero was Edwin Land and that blew my mind because like how the hell at that point he's like 21 years old 22 how the hell does somebody that young even know who Edwin Land was so I want to pull out two quotes from that book it says Evan wanted to build Snapchat as an art and technology company

Starting point is 00:42:23 modeled after two of his heroes Edwin Land 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, a unique way, I don't mean that as a pejorative by any means, to describe company because you know everybody's like it's a social network or it's whatever it's an app he's like we're a camera company it's exactly what Polaroid was so in any case to tie that together like this desire this human desire most of the people that were taking naughty photos to use it to use the author's language with the first

Starting point is 00:43:01 Polaroid camera are dead and yet that was exactly the use case of the early days in Snapchat. History doesn't repeat. Human nature does. Okay. So the next thing I want to talk to you about, this is my note. How is this even possible? How could he see the future so clearly? So this also speaks to the benefit of the, like, think about the innate knowledge that Edwin Land accumulated over his entire life, thinking about light and all the different, like things you could do with it, the effects it has from 17 until 72 or whatever the number is, and all the different applications, like all the different experience

Starting point is 00:43:32 and all the learnings from that experience goes into Edwin Land's brain. It's basically what I'm trying to say in an unclear way, right? And so as a result of this, he's built up this very unique set of knowledge that probably nobody else on the planet had. And it also gives you an idea of like where things may be going. So in 1970, he is going to predict what sounds a hell of a lot like a smartphone. In 1970, Edwin Land stood before a movie crew in an empty factory outside Boston and without a script described the deep future of photography. We are still a long way from the camera that would be, oh, like the telephone,

Starting point is 00:44:11 something you use all day long. A camera which you would use not on the occasion for parties only, or for trips only, or when your grandchildren come to see you, but a camera that you would use as often as your pencil or your eyeglasses. It's going to be something that's always with you, he said, and it would be effortless. Point, shoot, see. The gesture would be as simple as, and here he demonstrated it, reaching into his coat, taking a wallet out of your breast pocket, holding it up, and pressing a button. This is a punchline. His future is our present, and what he's describing pretty nearly is a smartphone. In 1970, however, the only place you'd see such a thing

Starting point is 00:44:47 was in a rerun of Star Trek. Now I want to get to the part where I mentioned earlier and the note here is like how your product is today is probably not the ideal way you want it to be. That is normal. It took Land 30 years to get there. So I think the implication of the story of Edwin Land is like don't quit.

Starting point is 00:45:07 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 1944, Land had told Bill McCoon, who was like his second in command, they had like a weird relationship and they're going to wind up having a fight that leaves, that makes Land leave the company. But told bill mccoon what he really wanted to build and it was nothing but grace mccoon never forgot the conversation i remember very well he said you know i can imagine a camera that is simple and easy to use you simply look through the viewfinder and you push the shutter and out comes a finished dry photograph in full color 20 odd years later it seemed both wildly advanced and within reach because the first

Starting point is 00:45:46 Polaroid cameras did that, right? But they didn't do it in color. So it was like they did sepia and then black and white. And I may have the order reversed, but there was no, what he was talking about was like, yeah, I had this idea. I saw it in 1943 and I got all of it down except what took until 1972 to get. He's talking about not only the size of the camera, but also the fact that the print would be in color. And here's what's fascinating is because we're going to see another parallel between Polaroid and Sony. Land knew exactly how petite and how neat he wanted this camera to be.

Starting point is 00:46:17 He went to one of his top engineers with a wooden box. It measured about 3.5 by 6.5 inches. The camera should be this size land told him and the photographer will hold it vertical in front of his eyes and then click the shutter why that size why did land want that size it was so it would fit in your coat pocket so then you would carry it with you often and easily and this isn't ever stated i don't i don't think land made many decisions for financial reason but the the reason if you think about like why is that and so important that you carry with you so therefore the more you carry it with you the more you would use it well most of their

Starting point is 00:46:54 their profits came from high margin film so if we make the camera smaller they get more likely to carry with you if you're more likely to carry with you you'll take more pictures and if you take more pictures you'll spend more money on film now the reason I say there's a parallel with Sony here is because Land is not the first person to try to fit the product that they're making into a pocket. It kind of gets there. You need like a big pocket for Land's camera. But it was hilarious. Like in the story of Sony, they have this idea. They're like, hey, we're going to make a Sony that is.

Starting point is 00:47:21 We're going to make a small radio powered, excuse me a small a small radio powered by batteries and our goal like the the kio 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 little larger than, it's just funny that they did this back in the day. Cause again, there's, there is an element of showmanship to great entrepreneurship, isn't there? So it says it was a bit, I'm reading from made in Japan right now. It was a bit bigger than a standard men's pocket. And that gave us a

Starting point is 00:47:58 problem. We liked the idea of being able to demonstrate how simple it would be to drop into a shirt pocket. So we came up with a simple solution. We had some shirts made for our salesmen with slightly larger than normal pockets, just big enough to slip their radio into. And the note I left myself when I read that book probably 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

Starting point is 00:48:25 the way to think about land a bit the best 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 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 told you over and over again, probably, I don't know, 15 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

Starting point is 00:49:01 exact same thing here. Lan went so far as to claim that the SX-70, which is like his, the best product he ever made, right? Had the power to heal all the rifts in contemporary life. Here is what he had to say in 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

Starting point is 00:49:46 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.

Starting point is 00:50:36 Soon after the full rollout of the SX-70, this is the color version, right? Elko Wolf got a call asking him to come to Land's office. You're Dutch, right? Land asked. We need 10,000 of these and handed him a tulip of a variety called Keys Nielis. And it was important because it's a kind of tulip that has a very vibrant yellow and red. And those the vibrant yellow and red is the colors that look the best on the film that comes out of the Essex 70s. 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

Starting point is 00:51:12 deadline. Then he had to strike a further deal with KLM Royal Dutch Airlines to air express the tulips from the city and it's called Schiphol, I guess, to Boston, where they could be rushed to the meeting. All the resulting photos of flowers were, of course, lovely. It was another unforgettable Landian demonstration, this 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

Starting point is 00:51:54 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 development of this thing called Polar Vision. 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 Akio Morita tells him, it's like, this is a bad idea. You're too late. He obviously knows because there's camcorders, there's Betamax, there's VHS, there's all this other technology that's popping up that is just superior to what Land had spent decade after decade and hundreds of

Starting point is 00:52:37 millions of dollars. He was just too late. That's basically what Akio told him. And I just want to pull out, 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, Land had pushed his company to produce new products at the very edge of what the market might bear. Every big bet from the sheet polarizer through the SX-70 had required a leap of faith, a trust that the genius in charge was right.

Starting point is 00:53:00 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, Akio Morita, the founder and chairman of Sony and a good friend of Land's, in many ways his Japanese counterpart, paid a call to Land in Cambridge and a demonstration was arranged. So after the demonstration, Land asked Morita, well, what do you think of that? Morita responded, ah, well, you could sell 50,000 of anything.

Starting point is 00:53:28 It's an unbelievable scientific development, but you're too late. He was right. The number of buyers couldn't begin to cover the development costs. The ledger showed a $68 million write-down. I've seen other estimates that the number is 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 not backed up by a perfect sense of what people wanted. And so the two notes I had was Akira Morita knew Polar Vision was too late. The other was eventual failure is inevitable. No one stays on

Starting point is 00:54:02 top forever. And that is something I learned from Grandpa Charlie Munger. And so think about how many businesses and founders Charlie has analyzed over his extremely long career. And I think it adds weight to what he says here. Over the very long term, history shows that the chances of any business surviving in a manner agreeable to a company's owners are slim at best. So I read that a long time ago. That comes from the book, The Tao 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 Land is one of the greatest entrepreneurs

Starting point is 00:54:48 to ever do it. But if you live long enough, failure is inevitable. And so as a result of the failure of Polar Vision, there's a reorganization. Land still is there, but the president is now Bill McCune. And so this is where Land and Polaroid break up. In 1978, Polaroid had more than 20,000 employees. By 1991, it had 5,000. A decade later, Polaroid was bankrupt. Was the problem simply that Polaroid did not work without Edwin Land? Ken Olson, the chairman of Digital Equipment Corporation and a longtime Polaroid board member,

Starting point is 00:55:24 said that Land was teaching him how not to do succession. Other executives who had hoped to inherit Land's chair had eventually gave up and left. Polaroid's general manager bolted in 1975. His departure shook up Wall Street analysts even further, and Bill McCoon was able to use that as leverage, demanding the company's presidency. Both men knew that a second high-profile departure would give the impression of a company that was in chaos. McCoon had a strange relationship with Land after taking over.

Starting point is 00:55:54 Although Land was still chairman and director of researcher, he had to get approval for his projects, sort of, and the resultant friction was unsustainable. The final break came a few years later. Land had wanted to make a small camera, 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.

Starting point is 00:56:17 He approached McCoon, who didn't want to do it. Land countered, saying either you fund this or I quit. McCoon said no, and that was that. Though he retained a lab for a couple of years, that arrangement would end soon enough. After 45 years, Edwin Land was leaving Polaroid. The founder cut all of his ties and sold all of his stock. He didn't say it out loud, but the sentiment was pretty clear. If I can't play this game my way,

Starting point is 00:56:48 I'm not sticking around. In retirement, he kept doing what he loved without distraction. To feed his admitted addiction of an experiment a day, Land financed the creation of a research institution called the Rowland Institute of Science. The Rowland kept him busy and content, even as age-related health problems began to accroach upon him.

Starting point is 00:57:12 On March 1, 1991, Land died at the age of 81. 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 264 books down, 1,000 to go. And I'll talk to you again soon. There's a great line in one of Edwin Land's biographies where it said, Land represented a generation of scientists that you would encounter if you were a young researcher

Starting point is 00:57:49 in the late 1940s. These older generation scientists blew their own glass, did their own machining, made their own parts. They knew everything and they were independent. Edwin Land would insist on making the machines that make his machine. In other words, making the machines that make his products. My version of this is Founder's Notes.

Starting point is 00:58:08 So for years, since 2018, I've been putting all of my notes and highlights and now transcripts for every single book that I've read or every single episode that I've made into this giant searchable database. And I did this because as I was reading hundreds and hundreds of these biographies, I realized there's no way I'm going to be able to keep all this in my head. And I need to be able to search and pull it up on demand when I need it. So anytime you hear me referencing, like you just heard, a past episode, a past founder, a past book, that is me searching through Founders Notes. This is, I need to be very clear about this. I built this tool for myself and used it for years before I made it publicly available to other people. And so if you go to foundersnotes.com and you sign up, the tool that you see is exactly what I see. I don't have a separate version. And then originally I thought I'd be the only person in the world that

Starting point is 00:58:55 would ever see this. But what I realized is by having all this information in one giant database and allows you to search it, and actually there's a bunch of different ways you can go through this, but allowing you to search it, what I realized is it gives you the superpower of being able to tap into the collective knowledge of history-based entrepreneurs on demand when you need it. Like I said at the beginning of this podcast, I think of Founders Podcast as a tool, but the podcast is pushed to you. Founders Notes gives you the control to pull out the information when you need it. And so there's several different features. And I'll just explain to you real quick how I use each one. The very first one, the one I use the most says search highlights. That is very standard.

Starting point is 00:59:32 It's a keyword search. Any term, idea, person, book, anything that comes to mind that I want more information about, I type into the search highlight box. It'll pull and search all of the notes and highlights, all the transcripts, and any time that keyword is mentioned. Another way to search is by using the AI assistant that lives in Founders Notes that I call Sage. And so you ask Sage a question and then it'll do all the reading and condensing for you.

Starting point is 00:59:57 So I'm going to just list off a couple of the saved, the last few saved chats that I've used Sage for. So let me just give you some examples of some of the searches that I've used Sage for. So let me just give you some examples of some of the searches that I've used Sage for recently. I'll just read about five of them to you right now. How did Edwin Land find new employees to hire? Were there any unusual sources to find talent? Second one, if Charlie Munger had a top 10 rules for life, what do you think those rules would be? Number three, another one I asked, if Edwin Land was alive today, what industry do you think he'd be working in? Number four, what are the most important things to know about Ed Thorpe? I use that search all the time. So, you know, what are the most important things to know about? Enter any founder that I've covered or made a podcast on. It's very, very helpful for me. And then finally, usually in bullet point form or a numbered list,

Starting point is 01:00:46 which is how I love to organize information. And so just in a few minutes, you get a great overview. And then of course you can see the sources and you can go actually read every single thing that Sage read, which, you know, would be probably 10 times, 15 times longer, maybe 20 times longer than the concise summary gives you. Another feature that Founders Notes has is called the highlight feed. This will give you random highlights, just completely random order. I use this all the time as a prompt for my own thinking. And so I'll click on it right now, gives me random highlight from this biography of Michael Jordan, a highlight from this biography of Oprah, a highlight from Poor Charlie's Almanac, a highlight from Ted Turner's autobiography, a highlight from Ed Catmull, the founder of Pixar's

Starting point is 01:01:23 autobiography, a highlight from one of Winston Churchill's biographies, a highlight from Ed Catmull, the founder of Pixar's autobiography, a highlight from one of Winston Churchill's biographies, a founder from the biography of Bugatti. And it's this never-ending feed that you can just read and scroll through. And again, I use it really as a prompt for thinking. And then, of course, you can search by book. So let's say, hey, I don't really know. There's nothing I really want to search for. You can go and review and see all my highlights for specific books.

Starting point is 01:01:45 You can also see all the transcripts for all my episodes and be able to read and search through them. And all this taken together, I would argue it's the most valuable database in the world when it comes to learning from history-based entrepreneurs. And it's something I'm going to constantly, I can't make the podcast without it.

Starting point is 01:01:57 So I have to update it all the time because I can't do my work without it. It is the machine that makes the machine. If you are also obsessed with learning from history like I am, I'd highly recommend going to foundersnotes.com and signing up today. That is foundersnotes, with an S,.com, just like the podcast.

Starting point is 01:02:13 Thank you very much for your support. Thank you very much for listening, and I'll talk to you again soon.

Founders - Steve Jobs and Edwin Land

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