Transcript
Introduction
David
"'Why do you want to work in a nutty place like this?' 'I don't.' 'Yes, you do. Otherwise, you wouldn't be here.' 'Well, why is Polaroid a nutty place?' 'To start with it's run by a man who has more brains than anyone has a right to, he doesn't believe anything until he's discovered it and proved it for himself. Because of that, he never looks at things the way you or I do. He has no room for small talk. He has no preconceived notions. He starts from the beginning with everything. That's why we have a camera that takes pictures and develops them right away.' 'Isn't that what a camera is supposed to do?' 'I don't know.' Of course it is. It's obvious, but Land was the first person to think about it that way. I've been a photographer all my life and I'm a smart guy, but I didn't think of it. It never occurred to me, let alone how to do it. That is a whole nother story."
That's an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Land's Polaroid, a company and the man who invented it written by Peter Wensberg. Peter actually worked at Polaroid directly with Land starting at 30. That excerpt was describing the job interview, the unconventional job interview that he had, and he wound up working at Polaroid for 24 years. I originally read this book for the first time, all the way back on Founders number 133. So I spent an insane amount of time reading this week. I read this book and I reread the almost 500 page biography of Edwin Land called Insisting on the Impossible. And then for the last two days, I've also spent time rereading it's this book called Instant: the Story of Polaroid. It is a history of the entire company. And the reason I'm doing all this as I've told you before one of my main goals is to convince as many entrepreneurs as I can to study Edwin Land. And there's many good reasons to do that. But the two that stick out to me the most, first is that he is Steve Jobs's hero. He influenced the career of Steve Jobs more than anybody else. For Steve's entire life, from the time he was in his twenties, when he's giving interviews and I have notes on, to all the five or six different biographies that I've read about Steve. From the time he was in his twenties until he was dying he talked about the importance that Edwin Land had on his career. I just want to read something from the Steve Jobs biography from Walter Isaacson, just to cover this real quick.