#264 The Story of Edwin Land and Polaroid

**David Senra** (0:00)
I want to tell you about a one time only limited event that I don't think you're going to want to miss. I am doing a live show with Patrick O'Shaughnessy from the Invest Like the Best podcast in New York City on October 19th. Patrick has interviewed over 300 of the world's best investors and founders for his podcast. I've read over 300 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs for my podcast. We'll be talking about what we learned from seven years of podcasting, sharing our favorite ideas and stories and doing a live Q&A. There will also be special event-only swag. If you live in New York City, I think it's a no-brainer. But if not, I think it's a great excuse to fly in. I've already heard from a bunch of people that bought tickets. They're flying in from other cities. Some people are flying in from other countries. That's setting the bar really high, so I will have at least four shots of espresso or four energy drinks before or during the show so we can make it a night that you'll never forget. If you're interested in attending this unique live event, I will leave a link down below. I highly recommend you get your tickets today, and I hope I get to see you in New York on October 19th.
Polaroid followed a path that has since become familiar in Silicon Valley. Tech genius founder has a fantastic idea and finds like-minded colleagues to develop it. They pull a ridiculous number of all-nighters to do so, with as much passion for the problem-solving as for the product.
Venture capital and smart marketing follows. Everyone gets rich, but not for the sake of getting rich.
The possibilities seem limitless.
The most obvious parallel is to Apple. Both companies specialized in relentless, obsessive refinement of their technologies. Both were established close to great research universities to attract talent.
Both fetishized superior, elegant, covetable product design. And both companies exploded in size and wealth under an in-house visionary genius.
At Apple, that was Steve Jobs. At Polaroid, it was Edwin Land.
Just as all Apple stories lead back to Jobs, Polaroid lore always focuses on Land. In his time, he 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.
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.
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, manifesting 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 Bonanos.
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. 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 a thousand pages or rereading almost a thousand pages of Edwin Land is very simple. If Steve Jobs studied Edwin Land, I think every other founder should as well. And the book I hold in my hand does a really great job, maybe the best out of every book that I've read on Edwin Land so far, comparing and contrasting and really showing how much, in many ways, Edwin Land was Steve Jobs before Steve Jobs. So I 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 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've also started to reread the book, Becoming Steve Jobs, The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader.