Kyle Harrison
concept

Pixar

Pixar

Pixar is the computer-animation studio that Disney acquired, and in this corpus it works as a case study in creative-company management, in Steve Jobs’s years outside Apple, and in the strategic logic of a “blend” acquisition. Its co-founder Ed Catmull is the main voice.

How it shows up

  • Origin and finance. Elizabeth Yin’s thread on the audiobook of Creativity, Inc., saved as Last Week I Listened to… (tweet), summarizes the path: Catmull’s computer-graphics studio, a Lucasfilm department that no banker or VC would buy, Steve Jobs paying Lucasfilm $5M and injecting $5M more to spin it out, a hardware business with no product-market fit, the Disney deal to make Toy Story, and an IPO timed to the film’s launch so Pixar would have more leverage with Disney.
  • The Braintrust and feedback. The same thread describes the Braintrust that critiques each film without offering solutions, feedback that is about the product and not the person, and how Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc. changed late. After the acquisition, Catmull found that Disney animators were not rewarded for taking risks or speaking up.
  • Post-mortems. What’s In a Post-Mortem? draws on Catmull’s 2007 Stanford talk “Keep Your Crisis Small,” in which Pixar put each film team through a rigorous post-mortem, especially after a success. See Post-Mortems.
  • Jobs’s wilderness years. Becoming Steve Jobs argues that the NeXT and Pixar years made him the operator of Apple’s second act, and Crafting Your Average argues that Pixar’s success can be read as Jobs playing the discovery role on the other side of the table, seeing what John Lasseter and Ed Catmull were building. The Founders has an early X.com engineer saying Jobs “made Pixar great because he was fired from Apple.”
  • The acquisition. The Ride of a Lifetime records Bob Iger telling his board “As Animation goes, so goes the company” while they weighed buying Pixar (quoted in 2022 in Books), and the meeting where Jobs, John Lasseter and Catmull talked about Pixar’s philosophy with no notes or decks. A short podcast note, Acquired 01.01 — Pixar, records that Pixar was a larger IPO than Netscape in 1995 and that “businesses are People, Processes, and Priorities.”
  • Utah lineage. Anxiously Engaged in a Good Cause lists Catmull among the technology founders who came out of the University of Utah’s computer graphics lab.
  • Craft references. Why Bother uses The Incredibles villain as an argument device; The Value Chain of Capital cites Andrew Stanton’s 2012 TED talk on storytelling; Out of Control quotes a Pixar production director on why computer animation still needs great stories.
  • Films queued. Coco and Inside Out 2 sit on the watch queue.

Where this appears

Books and books-to-read

Essays

Long-reads and tweets

Concepts

Watch queue

  • Coco
  • Inside Out 2

Referenced in