Pixar

“He sold Pixar to Steve Jobs when it was a medical device company.”

“Once everyone's wearing Nikes, people stop wearing Nikes, so you're kind of I worked at Disney when it was a long time ago, it was very, very hot on the consumer product side, and, you know, we couldn't sell enough, and then five years later, you can't give it…”

“Sometimes creativity in Hollywood isn't all it's cracked up to be. The big studios have so many pressures. Some of our thinking back then is we have to protect Pixar from those, some of those kinds of pressures in order for it to continue to innovate and do or…”

“It is, because we never fought, but we didn't always agree. There was this healthy... Debate, I would call it. One pushing the other, always pushing the other you know.”

“At that time, just to render a single frame could take a day.”

“They come to you and say, we made a mistake in the story, right? You can't fix that. Like the next day. That's usually a five or ten million dollar mistake.”

“So the notion that you could build an independent, standalone animated feature film company was one that I basically fought every step of the way because it seemed impossible.”

“Imagine that I'm sitting in my office at the company I was at then, which was Electronics for Imaging, and I was sitting at my desk, and the phone rings, and I pick up the phone, and on the other end of the phone, I hear this voice that says, Hi, this is Steve…”

“They had committed to that in a 1991 contract that they went into with Disney. That was a little bit of a Hail Mary in a way, because otherwise Pixar was perilously close to going out of business. Disney came along and said that they would basically front the …”

“I think when Steve began to see that an IPO was possible for Pixar, he couldn't get there fast enough. Because that IPO was really the symbol of his comeback. He was rushing toward that faster than I was.”

“The plan that we've talked about, that we put in place, The last Pixar, 10 years. It took 10 years to execute, and we just sort of, you know, kept going steadfastly, went at it.”

“So the most important decision that we made at Pixel was basically to trust the creatives and not interfere with what they're doing.”

“If you did research at that time, which I did, you would have discovered they were really a graphics company. So Pixar had really set out to change the world of high-end computer graphics, and they made an imaging computer. They'd made some short films that ha…”

“Netscape and Pixar were the two hottest IPOs of that year in 1995, but Netscape went first.”

“The entire Pixar Rennell farm to make Toy Story, which doesn't look that high res today, but it's still amazing. But it was as it might be a third of one new iPhone.”

“We do, with folks from Pixar, DreamWorks, and these sorts of backgrounds. And so they literally, they're using Maya, a software suite that you would use to animate digital film and digital video games, but we've rigged up a version of Cosmo and Vector and all …”