Steve Jobs and Edwin Land

**David Senra** (0:00)
So a few months ago, I spent about seven hours at 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. 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 stakes 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 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 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 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 who's obsessed with their cost control, 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 like workshop in 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. 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 the 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, 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 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 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 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 series of heroes, Thomas Edison being one, but this reminds me of Henry Ford, who have 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 the 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, I have these smart gifted, some of my smartest gifted students, I bet you 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 train them myself. I'm not going to outsource the training 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. 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. 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.