Steven Sasson

The story begins in 1974 with a young engineer working at Kodak.

His name was Steve Sasson.

One day Steve's boss gave him a new kind of chip and a camera and asked him to do something with the both of them.

It was really just to keep Steve busy at the time.

Exactly.

So his name was Steve Sasson and his prototype.

never saw the light of day.

And it was like six years later in 1981, their head of market intelligence basically ran like the idea that, okay, this is going to be an issue.

Nobody walked into and offered these companies anything.

They already had it, right? In 1975, an engineer at Kodak named Steve Sasson built the first digital camera.

It was the size of a toaster.

It took 23 seconds to save one black and white picture in a cassette tape.

So if you go on a little story with me and think back to Rochester, New York in 1975.

There's this young engineer named Steve Sasson, and he's working at Kodak.

And he has just built something extraordinary, the world's first digital camera.

Extraordinary.

And all of this intellectual property is Kodak's because Steve Sasson works at Kodak.

So he goes into the boardroom to present this new fandangled digital camera to the executives.

And this is an actual quote.

Yep.

And the, the guy who ran GE, Jack Welch, um, was regarded as the best CEO of the 20th century.

So he, you know, every- when he retired, everyone was like, "Oh, Jack Welch, teach us.

How do you be great like you?" Um, and he wrote a book, and the title of the book was Winning.

It's like, oh, Jack Welch.

Actually, I had a chance to meet him a couple of times.

Tremendous guy.

And but the reason it mattered so much when he wrote this book, which was really kind of looking at GE in, you know, the, the '80s and, and '90s, was because the way GE succeeded under him was every business unit was charged with being number one or number two in their industry, and they really needed to win.

And I saw something interesting.

One of the designers and engineers for Kodak in 1975, this is hard to believe, 1975, Steve Sasson developed the self-contained digital camera.

Can you imagine? 1975.

And in the 90s, when I'm talking about, they were still developing film, Tyler.

It's 1975.

This young engineer, Steve Sasson, he walks into a boardroom at Eastman Kodak and he presents the very first digital camera.

Which he invented.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Well, I tell you, that's a funny story because Steve Sasson is the guy that invented the camera that you click the button and the film came out right away.

He went into the boardroom of Kodak and said, you guys, I just, and it was the size of like a small microwave.

So it was like this monster thing, right? But we talk about this in blind spots a lot.