#40 Insisting On The Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land and Instant: The Story of Polaroid

What I learned from reading Insisting On The Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land and Instant: The Story of Polaroid --- If you dream of something worth doing and then simply go to work on it, and don’t think anything of personalities, or emotional conflicts, or of money, or of family distractions; if you just think of, detail by detail, what you have to do next, it is a wonderful dream. [0:01] Edwin Land was a pioneer whose inventions were dismissed, and yet he created a great company by dint of pure stubbornness. [2:33] He [Steve Jobs] didn't yet have the skills to build a great company, but he admired those who had pulled it off and he would go to great lengths to meet them and learn from them. [3:03] Steve admired many things about Land: his obsessive commitment to creating products of style, practicality, and great consumer appeal. His reliance on gut instinct rather than consumer research and the restless obsession and invention he brought to the company he founded. [4:07] Recounting his life is a meditation on the nature of innovation. [5:15] We use bull’s eye empiricism. We try everything but we try the right things first. [6:06] Land clearly did not wish to waste his powers on me too innovations [6:34] Don’t do anything that someone else can do. Don’t undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible. [6:55] He held that the business of business was something different, making things that people didn’t know they wanted until they were available. [7:26] He thought and acted on a large stage. [8:34] Over and over he talked about his obsessions: autonomy, learning, education, vision, perception, the mind, and the mining of exhausted veins of knowledge for new gold. [9:14] Land on the problem with formal education: A student would get a message that a secret dream of greatness is a pipe dream. That it would be a long time before he makes a significant contribution, if ever. [13:18] From this day forward, until the day you are buried, do two things each day. First master a difficult old insight and second, add some new piece of knowledge to the world. [17:12] Edwin Land on perseverance: I was totally stubborn about being blocked. Nothing or nobody could stop me from carrying through the execution of the experiments. [18:04] Edwin Land on the difference between individuals and groups: Intelligent men in groups are —as a rule—stupid. [18:15] There's a rule they don't teach you at Harvard business school. It is, if anything is worth doing it's worth doing to excess. [20:02] Steve Jobs expressed his deep admiration for Edwin Land, calling him "a national treasure". [23:33] Steve Jobs: 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. [24:27] A shareholder asked Land about his goals when he had been a great student: I wanted to become the world’s greatest novelist and I wanted to become the world’s greatest scientist. [35:40] Inventors sometime experience a fevered paranoia just after they had a great idea. It seems so clear and burns so bright that they are sure someone else will come up with the same thing at any moment. [41:56] Land had suggested that Polaroid might be able to sell 50,000 cameras per year, far more than anyone else imagined possible. It turned out that even the visionary had low balled himself. By the time the product was retired in 1953, 900,000 units had been sold. [46:27] My point is that we created an environment where a man was expected to sit and think for two years. Not was allowed to, but was expected to. [49:25] 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. [51:53] If the product was right, not just economically, but also morally and emotionally, the selling would take care of itself. Marketing is what you do if your product's no good. [59:45] Walt Disney: We are innovating. I’ll let you know the cost when we are done. [1:00:28] Kodak got him all wrong. Kodak terribly miscalculated his personality. One of the reasons he put his heart and soul into the lawsuit was that he was outraged. Land said: We took nothing from anybody. We gave a great deal to the world. The only thing keeping us alive is our brilliance. The only thing that keeps our brilliance alive is our patents. [1:04:36] ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Senra?

  If you dream of something worth doing and then simply go to work on it and don't think anything of personalities or emotional conflicts or of money or of family distractions, if you just think of detail by detail what you have to do next, it is a wonderful dream, even though the end is a long way off. For there are about 5,000 steps to be taken before we realize it. Start taking the first 10 and stay making 20 after it. It is amazing how quickly you get through those first 5,000 steps. Rather, I should say, through the 4,990. The last 10 steps, you never seem to work out, but you keep on coming nearer to giving

• 0:43David Senra?

  the world something well worth having. That is from the introduction of one of the books I want to talk to you about today. So that's from Insisting on the Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land, the inventor of instant photography. So today's going to be a little different. Usually, every founder's podcast is just about a biography or an autobiography of somebody that's built a company before. When I started, I knew for a long time that I was eventually going to circle back around and do a podcast on Edwin Land. For those of you that have never heard his name before, I discovered Edwin Land through

• 1:26David Senra?

  reading extensively about Steve Jobs. In almost, well, no, in every book I've read so far about Steve Jobs, Edwin Land is mentioned a lot. And the reason being, once you start studying the life of Edwin Land is he was, if you could only pick one person, and there was many that people that Steve Jobs worked, uh, learned from, if you could only pick one person that was Steve Jobs' hero, it'd be Edwin Land. And over the course of this podcast, we're going to learn a lot about why that is. And you're going to see a lot of similarities between the two. Steve clearly learned from him. So I was thinking about how best to tell Edwin Land's story, so I'm going to use a lot of information from this book, Insisting on the Impossible. I also read Instant

• 2:10David Senra?

  The story of Polaroid, which of course, Polaroid and Edwin Land, any story about Polaroid is incomplete without Edwin Land because they were very much the same thing. And then I'm also going to pull out some Edwin Land stories from Becoming Steve Jobs, which I did a podcast on last year, and then The Biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. Let's go ahead and jump into the books. I'm going to come back to insisting on the impossible. What I want to start, so you get a good understanding of Edwin Land, is I'm, right now, I'm going to work from the book Becoming Steve Jobs, The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader, which is one of the best books I've ever read on Steve Jobs.

• 2:51David Senra?

  But there's this one sentence that, well, okay, let me just read it. It says, Edwin Land was a pioneer whose inventions were dismissed, and yet he created a great company by dint of pure stubbornness. And now, after reading two books of Edwin Land, I think that's one of the best one-sentence descriptions of him that I've seen. And so, a few pages before that, there's a paragraph, a few paragraphs, that kind of set up why we should study Edwin Land as well. And it says, "When Steve looked to his elders at Apple for guidance, he also sought it out elsewhere. He didn't yet have the skills to build a great company, but he admired those who had pulled it off, and he would go to great lengths to meet them

• 3:34David Senra?

  and learn from them." This is almost like an advertisement for why people should listen to Founders Podcasts. "None of these guys were really in it for the money, he told me. David Packard, for example, left all his money to his foundation. He may have died the richest guy in the cemetery, but he wasn't in it for the money. Bob Noyce, co-founder of Intel, is another. I'm old enough to have been able to get to know these guys, and I met Andy Grove, CEO of Intel, when I was 21. I called him up and told him I had heard he was really good at operations, and asked him if I could take him out to lunch. I did that with Jerry Sanders, founder of Advanced Micro Devices, and with Charlie Spork," I think that's how you pronounce his last name, "founder of National Semiconductor, and others. Basically, I got to know these guys who were all company builders, and that particular sense-

• 4:20David Senra?

  of Silicon Valley at that time made a very big impression of me. Some were heroes whom he only met once or twice, like Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid. Steve admired many things about Land, among them, his obsessive commitment to creating products of style, practicality, and great consumer appeal. His reliance on gut instinct rather than consumer research, does that sound familiar? And the restless obsession in invention he brought to the company he founded. What's amazing to me is many of the things we're going to learn today about Edwin Land, you could scratch out the word Edwin Land and put in Steve Jobs and it would still be 100% accurate.

• 5:03David Senra?

  So now I want to go back to insisting on the impossible. And let's learn a little bit more about how Edwin Land works, or worked, rather. Edwin Land's mind was an engine of many cylinders. Much of the time, the cylinders appeared to be moving independently, but often they drove together towards the solution of intellectual and practical problems for the hours or days or weeks or months required. He was an artist at making the impossible seem possible, and very often, he was right. Recounting his life is a meditation on the nature of innovation.

• 5:43David Senra?

  He attracted an impressive variety of talented people to his enterprises, including several remarkable women researchers, and gave them great responsibility and challenges. I don't know if I include in the podcast, but Edwin Land was very much ahead of his time in this regard. He hired women. He was one of the first people to, first companies come out and support affirmative action. Remember, Edwin Land started the experiments that led to Polaroid in the 1920s. So this was not par for the course of time. His colleagues enjoyed his sense of humor and admired his skill at guessing which of many possible roads to follow, and his cleverness in devising shortcuts to get the necessary information without waiting for the best tools and materials.

• 6:28David Senra?

  He said he believed In Bull's Eyes Empiricism. This is a direct quote from him. "We try everything, but we try the right thing first." "He would go at a problem until it was solved as far as he was concerned, and then he'd turn it over to others, whose attention he had enlisted, and who sometimes worked on it for the rest of their careers." Land clearly, this is so important, and again, gonna echo Jobs. "Land clearly did not wish to waste his powers on me-too innovations. If you are able to state a problem, any problem, and if it's important enough, then the problem can be solved."

• 7:12David Senra?

  There's a quote that I came across while doing research for this podcast. And it says, "Don't do anything that someone else can do." And that's by Edwin Land. And it really, for some reason, stuck out of my mind, and now I'm trying to use it as, like, can I make, can I use that sentence as a way to judge my own decision-making on what I want to work on and what I don't want to work on? Land defied the doctrine that marketing is everything. Marketing was based on asking people what they wanted or had bought already. He held that the business of business was something different.

• 7:53David Senra?

  Making things that people didn't know they wanted until they were available. His approach to innovation was consistent. Defining a need and the shortest path to a practical answer. Following the iron law of the age of innovation, he unhesitatingly insisted on repeated cycles of new technologies, two of which cost several hundred million dollars each. This commitment to constantly, to research and development is something that actually cost him his company later on in his life. He definitely shared Jobs. His thinking that he's not in it for the money. He's in it to make the best products possible, and if he makes the best products possible, then of course, money will be a byproduct of that.

• 8:38David Senra?

  Edwin Land's lasting importance may be that he embodied, with unusual force, remember that sentence that we started with? That he basically created a company from the dint of stubbornness.

• 8:50David Senra?

  Edwin Land's lasting importance made that he embodied with unusual force the spirit of innovation that had dominated the last several centuries. He thought and acted on a large stage. He is an example of smart, effective work. Work that gives the world, and this is a quote that he loved to say, "The world something well worth having." I came across this part about education, his opinions on education. And really what it is, is the note I left myself, it says, "Edwin Land on what college should be." And so this takes place over several pages, but I think it's worth us highlighting and talking about. "In public appearances spanning half a century, Edwin Land spoke an autobiography, disjointed and selective, but revealing.

• 9:35David Senra?

  Over and over, he talked about his obsessions: autonomy, learning, education, vision, perception, the mind, and the mining of exhausted veins of knowledge for new gold. His onstage comments, particularly about education, interpreted his own experience. Land was not yet 50, but his system of instant photography unveiled 10 years before was finding an ever-expanding market. His shares in Polaroid Corporation, which had developed and completely controlled the new field, were soaring in value towards the hundreds of millions of dollars. His astonishing new observation of human color vision were beginning to attract interest and controversy.

• 10:18David Senra?

  The still-secret U-2 spy plane system that Land had spurred was delivering clear-cut evidence of the real state of Soviet military power." So what they're talking about there is he was such a famous inventor that during World War II and in the Cold War, the government constantly relied on his laboratory and his research for developing military weapons.

• 10:41David Senra?

  In the little theater on the campus of MIT, Land joyfully entered into combat about the right form of college experience. He was certain that a cut and dried education spent too much time on blackboard problems and on the past. And the reason I'm including this is because, like I always say on the podcast, history doesn't repeat, human nature does. And it's interesting, he's making these comments in 1957. And I think they're even more true today. And again, when he's making the comments, it's not clear the solution, other than radical change, which we know that usually doesn't happen with all of humanity.

• 11:24David Senra?

  But I think the internet has now, you know, I always say like reason number 6 million that we're lucky to be alive in the age of the internet, because we actually do have very viable, real, alternative paths to learning than just centralized institutions. So I love this. So he's going to get into this. He says, "Students did not spend enough time on the urgent problems of the present, where the answers were not known, where experiments were required. By asking questions and performing experiments, the students could strive for the original contributions of effective and fulfilled people." Although MIT was courting Land's patronage, meaning they wanted him to donate money, he attacked its systems of education. So this is what you need to know about Land.

• 12:08David Senra?

  He's giving this speech attacking MIT, at MIT, and it's not just MIT, but several other institutions. He sees this as a much broader problem. So this kind of tells you, like he was very, like most of the people we cover on the podcast, he was a misfit, a rebel. Drawing from his life, Land said that education must produce people who, no matter how tightly they conform to the innumerable commands of society, would find one domain where they would make a revolution. Students should go as rapidly as possible through all the intellectual accumulations of the past to reach quickly the domain where they would have their own work to do. Lectures must be streamlined.

• 12:51David Senra?

  Why not use movies to can a professor's best lectures? I love this idea. The professors would be captured at the moment when they are most excited about a new way of saying something, or at the moment where they have just found something new. And this is such an important point right here. They would waste less time redoing their lectures. With the movie, students could view the lectures as many times as they needed and also at their leisure. So that's a kind of a description of what on-demand audio and video has given us with the invention of the internet now. I'm recording this podcast on a Thursday night. You're definitely listening to it at a different time. And you could be listening to this years after I record these words.

• 13:33David Senra?

  And some people have written in, they listen to the podcast over and over again. So I think that's, I don't know, I just love this. So he keeps going on. "An MIT education," Lanfeer was fundamentally discouraging. Now, think about this. They invited him to speak to their students. They want his money, because obviously he's very successful. He's a Harvard dropout. He never finished any college. I don't think, I think he might have went back. No, he didn't go back. That's silly. What am I talking about? He never went back. "A student would get a message that a secret dream of greatness is a pipe dream. There would be a long time before he makes significant contribution if ever." So he's obviously railing against that. "This process was a disaster.

• 14:16David Senra?

  He asked with passion," is a direct quote from him. "If this is preparation for life, where in the world will a person ever encounter this curious sequence of prepared talks and prepared questions, questions to which the answers are known?" That is so good. He was talking directly from his own experience. When he had arrived as a freshman at Harvard in the fall of 1926, he had encountered a lot of nice young men who didn't know the connection of anything to anything, and who would spend the next 10 years reading what had already been read. He wanted to get going on some research that would matter. He wanted to get going on what he thought of as greatness.

• 15:01David Senra?

  Greatness, Land argued, is a wonderful and special way of solving problems, which allow a worker in a field to add things that would not have been added had he not come along. That's basically him saying, another way of saying, "Don't do anything that other people can do." Let me read that again. "So greatness is a wonderful and special way of solving problems, which allows a worker in a field," this is the most important part, "to add things that would not have been added had he not come along." He said that this is not the same as genius, which consists of ideas that shorten the solution of problems by hundreds of years, or of suddenly saying, as Einstein did, "Mass is energy." And just last paragraph on this education before we move forward. "Land did not agree that tutelage should last longer

• 15:45David Senra?

  in a civilization as complex as the age of science." Remember, these words are spoken in 1950s. "Does it not mean, perhaps, the opposite, that we must skillfully make them mature sooner, that we must find ways of handling the intricacy of our culture? As professors in his audience grumbled audibly, he poured scorn on the constant testing and grading." And this is another direct quote from him. "When the professor says, 'Hand back what I said,' the professor is telling the student that what he, the professor, said is true. Now, the role of science is to be systematic, to be accurate, to be orderly. But it certainly is not to," oh, this is so good!

• 16:30David Senra?

  "But it is certainly not to imply that the aggregated, successful hypotheses of the past have the kind of truth that goes into a number system." What is he talking about there? Something that we've covered in multiple podcasts. First principles thinking. Not, "Hey, just regurgitate what I said. Assume that what I said is true, and then that all the knowledge out there is known." No, you need to go out and experiment. That you cannot implied and that there is this foundation of knowledge that humans have accumulated that is most certainly wrong, just like we look to past generations like, how could they possibly believe this? The future generations are certainly going to say the same thing about us.

• 17:10David Senra?

  And so his solution to this is constant experimentation, testing, is this knowledge actually true and not just accepted? Somebody should compile like a book of maxims by Land. So I guess I pull out a few for this podcast, but you'll see. So this is Edwin Land on entrepreneurship or how to engage in it. "The only safe procedure for you now that you have started is to make sure that from this day forward until the day you are buried, you do two things each day. First, master a difficult old insight and second, add some new piece of knowledge to the world each day."

• 17:52David Senra?

  Kind of reminds me of what when people ask Sam Walton how he built Walmart, he's like, "Well, I just got up, we just got after it and stayed after it." That's kind of his interpretation in his own way of saying, "Just improve something a little bit every day and then do that over a long period of time and you have a successful company." Okay, so this is Edwin Land on perseverance. "From then on, I was totally stubborn about being blocked. Nothing or nobody could stop me from carrying through the execution of the experiments." And he uses the word experiment because that's what he primarily saw himself as a scientist. He just happened to use, apply his science into making products that consumers wind

• 18:36David Senra?

  up loving. He's got some interesting thoughts on the difference between individuals and groups that I want to include too. He says, "Intelligent men in groups are as a rule stupid and the very intelligent men in the automobile industry were fantastically and simply stupid. Individually, you'll find no brighter people. I've sat with them. They are delightful, bright, alert, responsive, but you share the same idea and they share the same ideals we do. Helpless to do anything decent in the group, though." Okay, so this is something we study all the time. Innovation does not happen in large companies. And he says, "Most small companies," he's writing these words in 1945, by the way.

• 19:16David Senra?

  "Most small companies do not have the resources or the facilities to support scientific prospecting." Meaning, something that's not tied directly. They don't know yet how they're gonna make money on it. "Thus, the young man leaving the university with a proposal for a new kind of activity is frequently not able to find a matrix for the development of his ideas in any established industrial organization." Okay, uh, still moving ahead. Oh, this is a good point. When developing products, that indifference, not opposition, is your enemy. So he says, "The test of an invention is the power of an inventor." So, let's use, in place of the word inventor, let's use entrepreneur or founder for our purposes, okay?

• 19:58David Senra?

  "The test of an invention is the power of an entrepreneur," I just changed the word, "to push it through in the face of the staunch, not opposition, but indifference in society." So what he's saying is, it's your job as an entrepreneur to push it through the face of staunch indifference. Most people, when you, the worst reaction when you start, when you create a new product or service, is not that people hate it, that at least elicits some kind of response from them. It's that they don't even pay attention to it. Oh, and this is, uh, his own way of, of telling you what they don't teach you in business school. There's a rule they don't teach you at Harvard Business School. It is, "If anything is worth doing, it's worth doing to excess." That's one of his most famous quotes.

• 20:42David Senra?

  Anything, uh, another way I've seen it written is, "Anything worth doing is worth overdoing." This is on self-reliance. And this part reminded me a lot, if you, if you listen to the podcast I did on the book Space Barons, and I think the one I did on the Everything Store, on Jeff Bezos as well, talks about, um...

• 21:02David Senra?

  Jeff Bezos admiration for his grandfather because from the age of I think four to 16, he spent every summer because Jeff Bezos, for those of you don't know, his mom was like 17 years old when she had him and his dad, his real dad skipped out. So his grandparents had a huge role on his life and development. And one of the things that Jeff Bezos respected so much about his grandfather was that he did everything himself. And his grandfather was coming of age, very similar around the time Edwin Land was. So it said, "Land represented a generation of scientists that Olson encountered as a young researcher in the late 1940s. These older generation scientists blew their own glass, did their own machining, made their

• 21:44David Senra?

  own parts. They knew everything and were independent and created radar and the atomic bomb and all the wonderful electronics. These self-reliant old timers came up against the fearful challenges of World War II and said, "You know, this war is not going too well. What problem can we solve for them?" This whole idea of self-reliance, I think, is maybe the best description of what makes successful company builders successful is, I think the best two-word description is relentlessly resourceful is the way I've heard it heard it put. And I think that paragraph right there just talks about that, that, "Hey, I have a problem. Let me find a solution and I don't need to go and sit around and

• 22:29David Senra?

  wait for other people. I'm going to find out how to do it and I'm going to do it." Those are the end of the aphorisms. Now, we're going to go into what Polaroid was all about. It says, "The most obvious parallel to Polaroid is to Apple Computer. Both companies specialized in relentless, obsessive refinement in their technologies. Both fetishized superior, elegant, covetable product design. And both companies exploded in size and wealth under an in-house visionary. Just as Apple's stories almost always lead back to jobs, Polaroid lore always seems to focus on land." In his time, he was as public a figure as Jobs was.

• 23:11David Senra?

  Land and his company were, for more than four decades, indivisible. When he introduced the SX70 system in 1972, that's the photo with the little white wide, with the wide white border that most of us think is the classic Polaroid picture. Land appeared on the covers of both Time and Life magazines. At Polaroid's annual shareholder meetings, Land often got up on stage, deploying every bit of his considerable magnetism and put the company's next big thing through its paces, sometimes backed by a slideshow to fill in the details, other times with live music between segments. A generation later, Jobs did the same thing.

• 23:53David Senra?

  Both men were college dropouts, both became as rich as anyone could ever wish to be, and both insisted that their inventions would change the fundamental nature of human interaction. Jobs more than once expressed his deep admiration for Edwin Land. In an interview in Playboy, he called him "a national treasure." After Land, late in his career, was semi-coaxed into retirement by Polaroid's board, Jobs called the decision "one of the dumbest things I've ever heard of." In fact, the two men met three times when Apple was on the rise, and according to Jobs' then-boss John Sculley, the two inventors described to each other "a singular experience."

• 24:35David Senra?

  And this, I love this paragraph, "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." And this paragraph happens to be from Jobs's biography by Isaacson. This is Steve Jobs talking now. "I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics," he said. "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." Scully thought back to a friendly trip they had taken a year early to Cambridge,

• 25:19David Senra?

  Massachusetts to visit Jobs' hero, Edwin Land. He had been dethroned from the company he created, Polaroid, and Jobs had said to Scully in disgust, "All he did was blow a lousy few million and he took his company away from him." Now, Scully reflected he was taking Jobs' company away from him. It's so strange that they're separated by 30 years or so, and their stories are so eerily similar. Later on, skipping ahead a little bit more, Ellison may have been baffled when Jobs insisted that he was not motivated by money. That's it, Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle. But it was partly true. He had neither Ellison's conspicuous consumption needs, nor Bill Gates' philanthropic impulses, nor the competitive urge to see how high on the Forbes list he

• 26:04David Senra?

  could get. Instead, his ego needs and personal drives led him to seek fulfillment by creating a legacy that would awe people. A dual legacy, building innovative products and building a lasting company. He wanted to be in the pantheon with people like Edwin Land, Bill Hewitt, David Packard. And then, before we get back into the books on Edwin Land, this comes at the very end, right before, I think this, I think this, this quote comes about a year before Steve Jobs dies. "So, over the course of our conversations, there was many times when he reflected on what he hoped his legacy would be. Here are those thoughts in his own words. My passion had been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products.

• 26:47David Senra?

  Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that's what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits, were the motivation." Scully flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It is a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything. The people you hire, who gets promoted, and what you discuss in meetings. Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach." Again, this is Steve talking, could easily be Edwin talking. "Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do."

• 27:28David Senra?

  I think Henry Ford said, "If I asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse." People, this is such an important insight, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. Think about last week in the Walt Disney number two podcast where Disney was having, he was unsuccessful going around and selling

• 27:52David Senra?

  the cartoon for Mickey Mouse and how silly that sounds in retrospect because as I said in the podcast, I think I don't, I can't think of another fictional character that's probably generated more money ever than Mickey Mouse. And he got some advice from a guy that owned a theater. He's like, "Hey, let me show your cartoon in my theater in New York." It's gonna, it's a fantastic cartoon. It's gonna get great reviews. People are gonna be in line and then

• 28:17David Senra?

  they'll come to you. He's basically, he said something along the lines like people, uh, these guys don't know what, uh, what they want until the public tells them. These are very much the same people that in now in consumer form that Steve Jobs is talking about here where it says, "People don't know what they want until you show it to them." "That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page." Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There's something magical about that place. "The reason Apple resonates with people is that there's a deep current of humanity in our innovation." Okay. So now I'm going back to the book on Polaroid and

• 29:02David Senra?

  this, the note I left myself is, "You're spending too much on R and D." "During some stretches, Polaroid operated almost like a scientific think tank that happened to regularly pop out a profitable consumer product." "Land was frequently criticized by Wall Street analysts for spending a little too much on his R and D operation and too little on practical matters." "That was Land's philosophy. Do some interesting science that is all your own and if it is, in his words, manifest, this is a direct quote from Land, "manifestly important and nearly impossible." That's the end of the quote, "it will be fulfilling and maybe even a way to get rich."

• 29:44David Senra?

  "In his lifetime, Land had received 535 United States patents." Oh, this is interesting. Something, uh, I always wonder about aloud on the podcast is, This idea of like, there's different motivations for why people become entrepreneurs. You know, some people for money, for like fame, because are for control. But this is very much, for Edwin Land, it's very much an issue of control. So he says, this is a great anecdote from his childhood. "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 tell me what to do ever again.'"

• 30:29David Senra?

  You could write that off as youthful mulishness. And that word means of or like a mule, as being very stubborn, obstinate, or intractable. I don't think I've ever come across that word before. You could write that off as youthful, let's just say stubbornness. Except that it turned out to be true. Land's control over his company was nearly absolute, absolute, sorry. And he exercised it to a degree that was compelling and sometimes exhausting. We're going to get into more of that, where they call, later on, they call Polaroid a one-man company. So let's go back in time, we're gonna, I mentioned earlier, I want to tell you a little about his first business.

• 31:09David Senra?

  Or, excuse me, the note I left myself is his first invention turns into his first business. "His first patent for the sheet polarizer was dated April 26, 1929. I think he was around 27 years old at the time. And he knew how he was going to try to commercialize it. As he recounted it in later years, he had been walking in Times Square one night and was repeatedly blinded by oncoming car lights. Soon enough, he figured out a solution. Put polarizers with horizontal slits across each headlight, and polarizers with vertical slits over each car's windshield. For drivers so equipped, oncoming headlights would be nearly blacked out, while their own would continue to illuminate the road normally.

• 31:53David Senra?

  It's a pretty great idea, and nobody has offered a better solution, even 80 years later."

• 32:00David Senra?

  In 1932, Land became a permanent Harvard dropout, and Land Wheelwright Laboratories was in business. So what happened is, he makes this invention, he meets this guy, Wheelwright. Wheelwright comes from a very wealthy family, and they have all these contacts, banking and whatnot. And they set up a partnership, and they start going out and selling all these different polarizing solutions that Land invents. And this partnership doesn't last very long, and we'll get to that in a minute. So it says, this is what I mentioned earlier, though, that it's extremely important to understand, like, why are you doing what you're doing?

• 32:43David Senra?

  And Land was very mission-driven. So it says, "In 1932," okay, I actually just read that part. So, "A chalk," this is now happening in Land Wheelwright Laboratories, which is the name of the business that eventually becomes Polarite. "A chalkboard in their little lab read, 'Every night, fifty people will die from highway glare.' Land wanted to make sure everyone there understood that they were all on a mission, manifestly important." And this is Land's advice on work, which is a variation of the quote that I read at the very opening of the podcast. And it says, "If you dream of something worth doing, and then simply go work on it,

• 33:28David Senra?

  and don't think of anything of personalities or emotional conflicts or of money or of family distractions. If you think of it detail by detail, what you have to do next, it is a wonderful dream." So it kind of changes the quote and adds that other sentence in the end there. But I think they're both valuable in knowing. So let's learn a little bit about his personality here. Uh, let's see, he says, okay. So he calls up employees randomly. And he says, "These calls rarely begin with small talk. He'd say, 'Tell me something interesting,' and you think and say something, and then there would be a two-minute pause, long, long times, when he was thinking. And eventually, he'd come back into the conversation."

• 34:12David Senra?

  So when I read that, I scribbled on a little note. Because two weeks ago, I just talked about these pauses remind me of the description of Elon Musk in Space Barons, when he's trying to figure out later if he's going to sue NASA again. And he's in the back of a car and he sits there quietly with his employees, ask him, "What should we do?" And he just sits there, goes into his own mind for eight minutes, and then makes a decision and walks out the car. Going back, "You've never felt the need to keep a conversation moving. He just had a tremendously confident way of talking. You had to be patient. He was demanding, very demanding. But he was so brilliant that it was remarkable." And now, this is Edwin Land on how to close a deal.

• 34:53David Senra?

  "As it turned out, he was strikingly good at explaining his work to people and powerfully persuasive. Even the simple act of rotating one polarizer over another, whereupon two nearly clear sheets gradually turned black, had and still has the quality of a small magic trick." This is a great right here. "When Land pitched polarizing sunglasses," think about that, like, that's such a common uh, it's such a common product now, in present day. So he's pitching it to, at the time. "When Land pitched polarizing sunglasses to American Optical, he didn't just show up with a few samples.

• 35:33David Senra?

  He rented a Boston hotel room facing the sun and checked in with a bowl of goldfish, which went on the window seal, refracting glare into the room. The American Optical executives arrived at the door, whereupon Land mock apologized for the glare, saying, 'You probably can't even see the fish,' and handed each man a filter," which would, of course, simulate what polarizing sunglasses do. And it says, "He closed the deal." This is a little bit about how he thought of himself earlier in life, and the scope of his ambition. "A transcript of the 1980 annual meeting includes this revealing exchange. A shareholder asked Land about his goals when he'd been a young student." And now, at this point, he's a very old man.

• 36:19David Senra?

  Two things, Lan replied crisply. I wanted to become the world's greatest novelist, and I wanted to become the world's greatest scientist. So definitely not lacking ambition nor self-confidence. And I mentioned earlier, you know what's interesting to me? So, this is about co-founder turning into a founder. I thought about this when I read this part. So, a lot of advice you see out there is, it's very hard to start a company. A lot of people, not everybody, but they recommend, you know, not doing it alone. Have a co-founder, not just for the talent, but more so of like when things get tough, like you can encourage each other and keep going.

• 37:03David Senra?

  But then I thought about, like, how many, let's just talk about the 40 or so founders that we've talked about so far in the podcast. Like, how many of them have co-founders that stuck around? So, they might have started a company with other people, but eventually, it is just one person. So, it's interesting advice. Maybe it's that advice to get to the point where it's like that your company's at a critical mass and it can continue to exist. But I can't think of anybody, like Walt Disney, let's go over the ones that we've done recently. Walt Disney had, his brother helped run the company, but he was very much the founder.

• 37:47David Senra?

  The week before that, we talked about Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. No co-founders there. Sam Zemurray, same thing. Nolan Bush, no. I don't think anybody else ran Chuck E. Cheese or Atari that I can think of. George Lucas, no. Ed Catmull's the closest one, because he has John Lasseter and Alvy Ray Smith and Steve Jobs. Levi Strauss, like, it just goes on and on. It's very interesting. I don't, I'm not going to read every single one. I mean, you know which podcasts I've done, but it's interesting to me.

• 38:19David Senra?

  How frequently there's a, it comes down to like a single person. I'm not saying that's right or wrong, I'm just observing like the difference between the, the advice you hear and then what it winds up in the end. So I don't know, maybe that's an issue, maybe it's not, but it says the Chrysler deal, meaning they're, they're selling the, the invention that Land patents was Willwright's last hurrah at Polaroid. Willwright got them the business. And it says in 1937, his family connections had helped the little company find Wall Street financing. All good, but it meant Willwright's role was growing obsolete. Land, this is what I mean about co-founder, co-founder.

• 39:00David Senra?

  Land was the chairman, president and director of research, plus the source of virtually every idea. Whereas Willwright was just vice president. Even his name had dropped off the door. That year, Land-Willwright Laboratories had been reincorporated and now is called the Polaroid Corporation. In 1940, Willwright left for a California vacation and essentially never returned. Land was now alone at the top with full control and he stays at the top for almost 40 years. Okay, so this is, so every, every company is usually built around a single great product.

• 39:42David Senra?

  And for Polaroid, the reason that it became what it is, what it is today is because of the Polaroid camera. And what I mean by the Polaroid camera, the one that you can take a picture and it print and a few, and within a minute or two, you have the picture in your hand. That was a unique invention that no one else could do but Land, going back to that, his, his word of advice that don't do anything other people can do. Okay, so let's find out, this is the founding story of the Polaroid camera. Again, just like with the founding story of like Mickey Mouse, we don't know how much of it's true, it's just repeated a lot, but it's still interesting to think about. In late 1943, Land joined his family on vacation in Santa Fe.

• 40:24David Senra?

  And, and on one mild day, he went out for a walk with his three-year-old daughter Jennifer, carrying his Rolleiflex, it's like this giant camera. I guess giant to us now, maybe not at the time. He claimed later that, that he wasn't much of a photographer in those days, but he did take pictures of his little girl. At the fireplace afterward, she asked him a simple question. Why can't I see the picture now? He spent the next several hours pacing the resort, leaving Jennifer with her mother, roughing out a way to make it work. It wouldn't do to have a tank of chemicals sloshing around on a camera, but maybe they could be contained in little pouches and then spread over a negative somehow. Then how would one print a positive?

• 41:07David Senra?

  Lay the two together, pressing them between rollers, somewhat like the Vectograph machine did? How would you configure both negative film and positive paper in the back of the camera? What would happen to the unexposed sliver of the film, which is usually washed out on the negative in a darkroom? Everything he learned in his previous work about filters, about making tiny crystals and thin films, about optics, even about manufacturing and outsources came into play. Before I continue, that's such an important lesson to learn. That sometimes, if you spend your time learning, there's going to be things that you're learning now that you don't actually know.

• 41:46David Senra?

  Like, he was learning all about these different subjects, and yet, because he had spent the time previously learning these things, he could use them as tools and invent the camera. But one could hypothetically think about, the camera may never have come to being if he didn't learn the things he didn't know he'd use in the future. If that makes any sense. So, that's kind of why I like this advice of, like, just have a lifelong love of learning and just let your passions dictate what you're interested in. And you never know how you might be able to combine those passions later on in life. Okay. It says, "Inventors sometime experienced a fevered paranoia just after they had a great

• 42:31David Senra?

  idea. It seems so clear and burns so bright that they are sure someone else will come up with the same thing any moment. His patent lawyer, Donald Brown, happened to be on vacation in Santa Fe himself. The two spent half the night getting everything written down." And I love this quote from Land here. Land much later joked that he roughed out the details in a few hours. Except for the ones that took from 1943 to 1972 to solve. Okay, so he invents the Polaroid camera, they build a prototype, testing it, they love it. And this is a quick little story about one of the most famous product demonstrations of all time, and it's the actual demonstration of the new Polaroid camera that takes place

• 43:15David Senra?

  between a roomful of reporters. And if you, if, there's a good chance if you Google Edwin Land now and look at the picture that came up, the picture you see is him looking at a picture of his face. And this is, that's from the product demonstration I'm about to tell you about now. Land began speaking and setting up his demonstration, gradually taking his place in front of the view camera. He fired the shutter with a cable release, taking a picture of his own face. Maybe history's first selfie? What he revealed was a perfect sepia portrait of himself. It may have been an accident that the 8x10 camera produced a photo almost, almost the same size of his actual face, but that only added to the eeriness.

• 43:59David Senra?

  There was Land sitting at a table in his striped tie, displaying a fresh, a fresh picture in which he sat at the same table, wearing the same striped tie. A gasp rippled around the room, and the New York Times reporter immediately demanded that he do it again. Land happily complied. The Polaroid team spent the rest of the evening shooting pictures of the dinner guests at the conference, and answered all their questions. Remember that amateur photography in 1947 had come along only a modest amount since Eastman's, this is, I think his name's George Eastman, he's the founder of Kodak, first film in 1888. I actually have a biography of him, so he, he might show up on a future founder's podcast.

• 44:44David Senra?

  Yes, the cameras were better and more versatile, and color was becoming widely available. But when it came time to process your pictures, however, you had two choices. Build yourself a darkroom, or get your film to a lab. And if you didn't live in a big city, this whole point is describing what a monumental...

• 45:04David Senra?

  Difference between like how big this product improvement was over what was available at the time and why, you know, it set the foundation to make Polaroid a billion dollar company. If you didn't live in a big city, you were probably mailing your film back to Kodak, same as in 1888. The leap to Polaroid was like replacing a messenger on horseback with your first telephone. There was nothing like this in the history of photography. Land insisted that this was simply the way things ought to be. As he said many years later, "Ask me a question." Okay, now suppose I say, "If you will come back in seven days, I will give you an answer. Are you impatient? Look, if the picture you get instantly is as beautiful

• 45:44David Senra?

  as the picture you get by waiting seven days, then it is absolute madness to say that there is virtue in waiting." So, this demonstration is printed in the press. Tons of people all over the country and all over the world see it. And this is how they first sold the Polaroid camera. Bringing up production took more than a year and a half. And the commercial debut was once again built around a powerful demonstration. On November 26, 1948, a sales team took 56 cameras, plus a demonstration, like meaning a sample, and a batch of film to Jordan Marsh, the big Boston department store. It was the day after Thanksgiving kicking off the holiday

• 46:25David Senra?

  sales season, and Polaroid's people expected that the stock might sell out by Christmas. All 56 cameras sold out that day. The salesmen ended up standing on the countertops because of the crush of the crowds. The same scene played out elsewhere. The night before the product introduction, this is such a great reminder for all of us about how unpredictable things can be. And how even people are very confident in what they're building can underestimate the impact that the product or service has. The night before the product introduction, Land had suggested that Polaroid might be able to sell 50,000 cameras per year, far more than anyone else imagined possible. It

• 47:08David Senra?

  turned out that even the visionary had lowballed himself. By the time the product was retired in 1953, 900,000 units had been sold. Okay, so the note I left myself on this next section is monopoly profits provide leeway. And it says, "People copy Google but don't have the monopolistic profits that allow the benefits of Google." So I've heard this discussed elsewhere. Have you ever heard of the term cargo cult? Let me read a little bit about it. And I would recommend reading the Wikipedia page. What's this cargo cult? "The name derives from the belief which began amongst," I don't know how to pronounce that, "in the late 19th and early 20th century," this is like an indigenous culture, I think,

• 47:52David Senra?

  "that various ritualistic acts, such as the building of an airplane runway, "will result in the appearance of material wealth, particularly highly desirable goods."

• 48:04David Senra?

  It's a very interesting story in general, but it kind of reminds me of this where the modern day version of cargo cult is when companies,

• 48:14David Senra?

  they look up to other companies like Google and they do, they basically copy everything they can see externally. So they'll, you know, they'll build a beautiful office and they'll have free food and all these different perks that Google has. And then very shortly after that, they'll go out of business and they miss the point, just like the people in the cargo cult, is that the re, you, Google can afford that because they have monopolistic profits on search. And that the monopolistic profits have to come first before you can do all the other stuff. And that doing all the other stuff is not what makes the company successful. It's that you actually have that equation reversed. And so let me give you an example of this, to tying back to what I said earlier about how he was very interested

• 48:58David Senra?

  in reinvesting in R and D. And it says, "The profit margin on a package of film was something like 60%." Now, this is a film that comes out of a Polaroid camera, right? "That meant there were lots of room in the budget to make things interesting, very similar to Google." They have massive profit margins, they print money, and as such, they can invest in these things, but you can't invest in them before you have that engine that produces monopolistic profits, or a lot of profits, whatever term you want to put on it. "If Land wanted to set up a lab to study the way in which the eye and brain perceive color, as he later did, he could afford to." In a speech he gave in 1965, Land pointed out that in the late 1940s, he had asked Howard Rogers to start thinking about how to produce color instant pictures.

• 49:43David Senra?

  For two solid years, Rogers just watched and considered. Then one day, he came to Land one day saying, "I'm ready to start now." As Land explained with pride, "My point is that we created an environment where a man was expected to sit and think for two years, not was allowed to, but was expected to." So Land would have never been able to create an environment like that without a wildly successful product. And the reason they had such high product margins is because, you know, he controlled the patents on it, because it was an entirely new invention, not just more Me Too products, which he's obviously very against.

• 50:25David Senra?

  And we're going to get to that towards the end of the podcast, because Polaroid, predictably, based on everything we've learned so far, just quickly after Land leaves, starts making Me Too products. He has an interesting idea here, and it's his dream of a thousand small corporations. And again, it just goes back to his constant dedication to research. He was very much willing to tear down and cannibalize his own products if it meant pushing the technology further. So he had a dream of a thousand small corporations. Land laid out his dream of a thousand small corporations, each grossing $20 million a year, each spending 5% of that amount on research every year. That would contribute $20 billion to the national income and employ 2 million people.

• 51:09David Senra?

  And year by year, this is him talking, "And year by year, our national scene would change in the way I think all Americans dream of. Each individual will be a member of a group small enough so that he feels a full participant in the purpose and activity of the group. His voice will be heard and his individuality recognized." Alright, so this is the point where I talked about earlier that Polaroid is a one-man company, and this is more, we're going to learn more about how he worked. It says, "Because Land was at the top of every invisible organizational chart, an anonymous former colleague once described his involvement to Business Week, and he says, 'Don't kid yourself. Polaroid is a one-man company.'"

• 51:51David Senra?

  Land circulated among offices, roving, probing, asking questions, pausing, pausing only to catnap in a barcalounger he kept in his cluttered office. Occasionally beleaguered employees hoped he would get obsessed with something far away from their purview, so they could avoid those late night phone calls. Uh, this is somebody that works at Polaroid named Nan Rudolph. Nan Rudolph recalls that Land sometimes popped into her lab and asked to sit in her, in her darkroom, just to hide out from questions and think.

• 52:22David Senra?

  He wasn't kidding some years later when he said, oh, this is maybe my favorite quote in all, in the entire book. "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." Um, moving ahead, there's some more Apple-esque ideas. He grasped that Polaroid could be positioned as an aspirational product and should be packaged and marketed that way. There's also similarities in their approach to marketing. Polaroid pictures could be beautiful because the materials were so good. Instant photos could draw people together because they were shared immediately and they were fun because you saw them right away.

• 53:09David Senra?

  Very much the way that they're advertised and marketed is, reminds me of a lot of the Apple campaigns and says, "If you're not taking color pictures with the new Polaroid color pack camera, there's something left out of your life," went one heart tugging TV ad showing a dad and his daughter out for the day in Central Park. Even better was a print advertisement that bore just one sentence. It showed a charming photo being peeled off its backing and read, "It's like opening a present."

• 53:34David Senra?

  Uh, going back in time a little bit, this is him inventing on demand, which I, I thought this anecdote was very interesting. And he, he had all kinds of ties because again, he became super famous at the time. After he'd invented a Polaroid camera, so, uh, the military relied heavily on him. Um, we're going to talk about how he invented. Several products for them during World War II and after and how he winds up on Richard Nixon's enemies list and his response to that, which I found humorous. The company produced millions of pairs of goggles for the army, including a model that could be variably darkened at the flick of the knob. So, a lot of these goggles that they're talking about there, pilots would wear them when they're

• 54:19David Senra?

  flying planes. It'd help them see better. Polaroid made optics for reconnaissance, bomb sites, and a system of so-called blind-flying filters that could darken a cockpit for a pilot, but not his copilot, for training and nighttime maneuvers. 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. An Air Force general had called to ask for advice about a problem with his gun sights. Land's reply, this is funny, "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.

• 55:04David Senra?

  The ring sight based on circular polarizers, something he invented overnight on demand. And it's funny, because they're saying he invented it overnight on demand, but like we were talking about earlier, it's really a culmination of a lifetime of learning that is just applied in different ways, that you don't know how you're going to apply it until the opportunity presents itself. So, I think that's a huge lesson for anybody creating a product or service. So, this is a little bit about how he wound up on Richard Nixon's enemies list. He advised several presidents, from Eisenhower through Nixon, on technology and effectively created the U-2 spy plane. This is something he's super famous for. I don't spend too much time in the podcast talking about it, because it's kind of outside of our scope, but it's good to know for background. Richard Nixon admired his scientific prowess.

• 55:49David Senra?

  Once asking an aide, "How do we get more Dr. Lands?" So, this is interesting. Everybody called him Dr. Land as like a compliment. He never had any degrees. They just called him Dr. Land. That was interesting to me. After he quit his advisory post during the Watergate scandal, Land ended up on Nixon's enemies list, and he told a friend that he was honored to have made the cut. I love that. Okay. So, Edwin Land predicts the future is the note I love myself. In 1970, Land stood before a movie crew in an empty factory outside Boston, and, without a script, described the deep future of photography. Remember, this is in 1970. "We are still a long way," he said, "from the camera that would be something that you use all day long.

• 56:34David Senra?

  A camera which you would not, which you would use not on the occasion of parties only, or of trips only, or of when your grandchildren came to see you. But a camera that you would use as often as your pencil or your eyeglasses. It is going to be something that is always with you," he said, "and it would be effortless. Point, shoot, see. Nothing mechanical would come between you and the image you wanted. 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. His future is our present." And what he's describing, pretty nearly, is a smartphone.

• 57:19David Senra?

  And then who's credited with making the modern form of the smartphone? Steve Jobs. See how this, all these ideas constantly tie together? It's so fascinating to me. Alright, so he talked about this idea a lot. Land, the perfectionist, estete, maybe that might be the word, wanted a self-contained system. It needed to be small enough to be carried everywhere, with no timing to screw up, no awkward trash, and certainly no double-pull tab system. As early as 1944, Land had told Bill McKeon what he really wanted to build, and it had nothing but grace. McKeon never, never forgot the conversation.

• 57:59David Senra?

  "I remember very well," he said, "you know, I can imagine a camera that is as simple and easy to use. You simply look through the viewfinder and compose your picture and push a button. And out comes the finished, dry photograph in full color." Or in our case, it just stays on our phone. And again, this is another example of him talking about this idea. Land wanted the camera to be petite and neat, and he knew exactly how petite and how neat. In 1965, 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 said, "and the photographer will hold it vertically

• 58:43David Senra?

  in front of his eye and click the shutter." "Why that size?" "It was to fit in a coat pocket so he would carry it with you often and easily." So, starting in 1944, again in 1965, and again in 1970, he's on record talking about this device that we now all carry and that you're probably listening to me speak on. Alright, so Edwin Land was a perfectionist, as you've probably gotten from that, you'll see the result of that. Sometimes Land's perfectionism worked to everyone's advantage. For example, he demanded that the camera be able to focus for an infinite distance all the way down to 10 inches, because so many photographers failed to get close enough to their subjects. Millions of Polaroid photos looked better as a result.

• 59:28David Senra?

  Oftentimes, his insistence on purity overshot everyone's needs, both charming and maddening his executives and engineers. For example, Land wanted the view through the lens to be absolutely natural. No lines etched on the viewfinder, no sense of anything between the photographer and subject. It was merely to frame your own view. Land said, "One should see one's subject as if just gazing at it seamlessly. One should not have the experience of looking through a machine." So, this idea of romantic utopianism was interesting to me, and I pulled this out from the book. It says, "They made an 11-minute movie, a Polaroid made about photography."

• 1:00:14David Senra?

  And it says, "In it, it reflects Land's view that if the product was right, not just economically, but also morally and emotionally, the selling would take care of itself." This is a quote from him. "Marketing is what you do if your product is no good." "Another time, when a shareholder questioned how much he was spending on product development, he was even more dismissive. 'The bottom line,' he said, 'is in heaven. Romantic utopianism lay at the very core of what would soon to be a billion-dollar business.'" That, this section tied into a section I found later on, and it's a disregard for expense and quality first. And then the note I left myself, because it's fresh in my mind, is, um, this quote was in the book last week that Bob Thomas wrote,

• 1:00:59David Senra?

  which was, uh, "We are innovating. I'll let you know the cost when we are done." And that's, uh, it's not, like, a summary of how Walt Disney refused to try to stick to a budget when he was creating. He's like, "I'm just gonna make the best product, and I'll tell you how much it costs when I'm done." Much to the chagrin of his, some of his shareholders and bankers. And so this is an example of Edwin Land, uh, doing the same thing. "When it comes to beautiful extravagances, everyone seems to remember the tulips. It was shortly before the 1973 annual meeting, soon after the full rollout of the SX70." That's the camera that's famous. "And this guy named Elko Wolf got a call asking him to come to Land's office. 'You're Dutch, right?' Land asked.

• 1:01:43David Senra?

  'We need 10,000 of these,' and handed him a tulip of a variety called Kiesneelis. It was vibrant yellow and red, the colors that looked best on the early SX70 film. The meeting was just a few weeks away, and Wolf had to immediately find a farmer who was willing to accelerate his crop to hit the deadline. Then he had to strike a further deal with KLM Royal Dutch Airlines to ship it by plane, the buds from..." Oh, man. Shilopole? Maybe it's a city, Shilopole? To Logan, where they would be rushed to the, 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.

• 1:02:27David Senra?

  Um, in addition to all the inventions, something else Edwin Land is well, well known for is something that happens towards the end of his life and it's the, this huge, uh, patent trial about all the inventions Land patented for, um, Polaroid were basically stolen by Kodak. And again, it's eerie how so much of Edwin Land's life reflects Steve Jobs. Because think about, well, I'll get there, but, um, uh, I don't want to step over it. So I'll get there in one second, but this section I had no doubt myself was Edwin Land or Steve Jobs. And he's talking about the competition. He says, "The Kodak cameras were big and dumpy with none of the coat pocket sleekness that Land had demanded of his engineers.

• 1:03:08David Senra?

  The cheaper model ejected photos with a hand crank, crank rather than a motor. The pictures themselves compared well with Polaroids, although they took a little too, they took a little longer to bloom and were more, and were more prone to fading. The cameras spit out their photos sluggishly, or as Land put it to his colleagues. Theirs evacuates while ours ejaculates." That sounds like something Steve Jobs come up. "The chairman's public statement was more upbeat. Land told stockholders that he was proud that Kodak's best shot had barely matched his company's achievement.

• 1:03:46David Senra?

  He sneered at the new camera's clunkiness, suggesting that one might best confine, confine its use to cocktail parties. They said that when young, when Land was a young man, he didn't litigate a patent case because he didn't want to testify in court. This tale probably refers to one of the early Polarizer lawsuits. So this is the only part I had to actually talk about. I give you the, the basic main points because this is a, a huge deal in, um, at the time. But there's an entire other book, uh, I think the title is called The Triumph of Genius and it's all about the battle, uh,

• 1:04:26David Senra?

  The battle over the patent trial between Kodak and Polaroid. I might include it in a future Founder's episode. But so for the scope of this podcast, I'm just, I'm pulling out the most important parts, but this is still what reminds me of Jobs. So it says, "When Land was a young man, he didn't litigate a patent case because he didn't want to testify in court. Didn't want to testify in court because he didn't want to take time away from research." Okay, so this tale probably refers to one of the earlier polarizer lawsuits. "Kodak may have heard the same story, and it does sound believable. Land was not the sort to relish being cross-examined. It is just plausible that Kodak said, 'He'll never sue us,' and plunged ahead," meaning they're going to violate his patents.

• 1:05:08David Senra?

  "If that was so, Kodak got him all wrong. Land may have been deadpan with his employees and chipper with his stockholders, but he was furious. To him, Kodak's system was a shoddy, inelegant pretender." The note I left myself, Jobs saying that he was going to go thermonuclear with Google over Android. "Kodak terribly miscalculated his personality. One of the reasons he put his heart and soul into the lawsuit was that he was outraged." Land said as much a few days after the suit was filed at his shareholders' meeting. "We took nothing from anybody. We gave a great deal to the world. The only thing keeping us alive is our brilliance.

• 1:05:51David Senra?

  The only thing that keeps our brilliance alive is our patents. In his view, it was ours, and now they wanted to take it away from us." So this is a little bit about the patent trial, and I'm going to give you a description of Land on the witness stand and then the result of the patent trial. "The showdown moment occurred with Edwin Land on the witness stand. He was in rare form, both charming and cantankerous, correcting Kodak's lawyers, outfoxing their arguments, making perfect analogies. Most of all, he challenged the attempts to pick apart the integrated system that was SX70. Land had always talked about it in holistic terms, where each individual system interlocked

• 1:06:36David Senra?

  with every other: optics, mechanisms, chemistry, film, manufacturing, everything down to the little space, called the trap, at the top of every instant photo, sized just right to catch the overflow drops of processing goo."

• 1:06:54David Senra?

  This is the result. Seven patents were upheld and October 12th, 1990, the judge issued his ruling. Polaroid was to get $909 million. It was the biggest patent infringement judgment ever. And now we're gonna learn what happens after he retires and his thoughts on his solution to the innovator's dilemma. They made some money, but none was game-changing success and their profusion masked a basic problem. Not one of them was a fresh invention. The world had already had floppy disks and videotapes. So what they're talking about there is they're just basically taking products that other companies had already created and made a version of their own.

• 1:07:36David Senra?

  The Landian motto, "Don't do anything that someone else can do", had made life difficult at times for his employees. But the alternative was to offer mildly differentiated versions of things people want and use already. Technology companies start falling behind even before they introduce a new product. So the next one must leapfrog its predecessors and supersede its competitors. Those companies have to be unafraid of cannibalizing a market they themselves have created to be stealing buyers from their old product lines with the new ones.

• 1:08:15David Senra?

  And we'll close on this, and this is the state of Polaroids in the 1980s when it's being run by this guy named Booth. And it says, "Whereas Land's Polaroid was built on his belief that every significant invention must come to a world that is not prepared for it, Booths asked the world what it wanted and then made it." Those are two sentences, but they're world apart. So if you want the full story, buy the, in this case, books. You can get the book and support this podcast at the same time by going to founderspodcast.com and buying the book there. If you do so, Amazon will give me a small percentage of the sale at no additional cost to you. So it's a great way to support the podcast and get a great book and a great story for you.

• 1:09:00David Senra?

  Thank you for all the support. Thank you for sharing the podcast on social media. Thank you for telling your friends about it. Thank you for leaving reviews. Thank you for subscribing. I'm very grateful. I appreciate it very much and I will talk to you next Monday.