Edwin H. Land

We are trying to do it too.

Yeah, I think what you're, you're getting at is there's this guy named Edwin Land, uh, he's the founder of Polaroid.

I discovered him because, um, he was Steve Jobs' hero, and Steve Jobs was talking about-

Oh, yes.

Yeah.

I've talked to-- I talked to him about it on Founder's episodes over and over again.

I should get a framed picture of Edwin Land and, like, put him in the studio or something.

But, uh, he was the one that invented what-- the idea that Steve Jobs used, where he's like, "I wanna build a company at the intersection of technology and liberal arts." And the reason he just came to mind is when you brought up taste.

So why wouldn't we learn about them? Why wouldn't we? You know, and if you find an idea that they used in the past to make it successful, because history kind of repeats itself, or at least human nature does.

If you find something that was a really good idea back then, Steve Jobs did the same thing with Edwin Land.

Edwin Land started the company Polaroid, and Steve Jobs took that idea from like the '60s.

He met Edwin Land probably maybe in the '70s.

I think it was '60s or '70s.

And he met Edwin Land.

He took the idea for Polaroid, and Polaroid had kinda gone downhill.

He took that same idea, and he kind of revamped it or took the same framework and used it for Apple.

The men doing the staring were Richard Bissell, the CIA officer who had built and run the entire U-2 operation with a management style best described as brilliant, impatient and allergic to committees.

and Edwin Land, the man who invented instant photography, and then, in his spare time, chaired the scientific panel that told the president what was technically possible.

Land was the reason the U-2 existed in the first place.

He had a habit of walking into rooms full of career officers and telling them their entire plan was too timid, which is a great way to make enemies and an even better way to get things built.

As a way of not being noticed, it was the equivalent of wearing a mirror suit to a laser tag tournament.

The second attempt tried to fix the performance side by reaching for exotic propulsion, adding ramjets to the mix, and it ran into the reviewing panel, which is where a lot of good ideas went to be quietly euthanized.

The panel was chaired by Edwin Land and stocked with people like the physicist Edward Purcell, a Nobel laureate who understood radar physics at a level most of the aviation industry did not, and their function was to sit in a room and tell brilliant engineers that their brilliant work was not good enough.

Reaching for unproven engines to make the numbers work was exactly the kind of compromise that sounds clever in a briefing and turns into a five-year delay in real life.

And innovation is actually taking two or more things that were already well known and putting them together in a new way.

So there's this common thread between founders where Steve Jobs built on Edwin Land, right? Edwin Land was the founder of Polaroid or Kodiak, one of those companies.

And Steve Jobs built on that company and made the iPhone, right? Um, he, he took those principles and made it into that.

Um, Elon Musk pulled from Kevin Kelly.

And Justin is a phenomenal performance and leadership advisor, done a lot with athletes, coaches, executives across a whole range of different sports, not only different levels, but especially kind of at the pro level.

And the story is wrapped around a gentleman by the name of Edwin Land.

He's an inventor and the eventual co-founder of the Polaroid.

So in 1943, Land was vacationing in Santa Fe with his family.

No one knows where it is.

So Edwin Land, old Ed, he's out with his daughter, she's three, and he's taking pictures of her 'cause she's three.

Well, his three-year-old daughter just complained, "Why is it taking so long?" Well, I gotta take it to development.

Well- Mm-hmm.