What I learned from rereading Instant: The Story of Polaroid by Christopher Bonanos.
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.