#40 Insisting On The Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land and Instant: The Story of 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. 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 the world something well worth having.
That is from the introduction of one of the books. I want to talk to you about today. That's from Insisting On The Impossible, The Life of Edwin Land, The Inventor of Instant Photography. Today is going to be a little different. Usually every Founders podcast is just about a biography or an autobiography of somebody that's built a company before.
When I start, 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 and learn from them. This is almost like an advertisement for why people should listen to Founders Podcast. 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, founder of National Semiconductor, and others. Basically, I got to know these guys who were all company builders, and that particular scent 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.