The short movies, some of which were no longer than thirty seconds, were screened at the annual computer imaging convention, SIGGRAPH, where they served as superb advertisements for the group. Brilliant pieces like The Adventures of Andre and Wally B. and Luxo Jr. made clear that Lucas’s group had startling technology; they also made clear that Lasseter had a rare gift for storytelling, anthropomorphizing everyday objects such as the Luxo Jr., the pint-sized articulating desk lamp that eventually made its way into the company’s onscreen logo.
Amply funded and consistently ignored, the group developed a close bond. Catmull ran the organization in a highly collegial, non-bureaucratic manner. When Lucas decided to sell the division, Catmull made every effort he could to find a buyer who would keep the group together. Lasseter was being heavily recruited by Disney’s Jeffrey Katzenberg, who had seen his short movies and come to regret letting such a talent get away. But the culture Catmull had created was so appealing that Lasseter, like most of the other employees, wanted to stay put.
AFTER STEVE COMPLETED the deal to buy what was now to be known as Pixar, he walked into a situation that was unlike any he would encounter again. At Apple he had been the brash novice, the founder who, for better and worse, established the corporate culture. At NeXT, too, Jobs was the center of attention, the hub and visionary of the company. But at Pixar, Steve couldn’t shape the culture. He wasn’t the founder, and even as owner, he could not change the company to reflect his image and sensibilities. It already had a culture. It already had a leader. Its cohesive and collaborative team knew exactly what it wanted to do. And Catmull was not about to let his young new owner mess things up.
Catmull knew about Jobs’s reputation as a difficult micromanager. In fact, he at first resisted having Lucas sell the group to Steve, despite having enjoyed a very pleasant visit at Steve’s Woodside house in the fall of 1985. After the purchase went through, he started observing Steve calmly, albeit warily. Having dealt with the idiosyncrasies of Schure and Lucas, he knew that managing a third sugar daddy was possible. He also knew it would have its own challenges. Over time, he became perhaps the keenest observer of Steve Jobs, developing an understanding of his boss that allowed him, in turn, to become one of Steve’s most valuable mentors.
He quickly homed in on both Steve’s potential and his immaturity. “He was smart. God, he was smart!” says Catmull. “You couldn’t prep for Steve, because he’s too smart. So I’d just go, ‘Here’s what the problem is,’ and I’d never tell him what to think.” He could see that Jobs had an innate comfort with the public demands of a big business. “When I would watch him in the room with powerful people, it was clear that there was an immediate match between them. They could talk and work things out in a way that was actually very different. Steve knew how to deal with powerful people.”
The flip side was a callowness and open disrespect that ignited suddenly. “Early on, Steve didn’t know how to deal with people who didn’t have power, almost as if he couldn’t ‘get’ them. When people would come into the room,” Catmull remembers, “Steve would quickly make an assessment as to whether or not they were a bozo. And that was not hidden from them. He would say outrageous things, as a way of taking the measure of the room. And the meanness was that if somebody didn’t measure up, then he wouldn’t hide it. He didn’t do it to me, but I witnessed it with other people. Clearly, that wasn’t appropriate behavior.”
Still, Catmull saw potential for change. “There were times where the reaction against Steve baffled him,” he says. “I remember him sometimes saying to me, ‘Why are they upset?’ What that said to me was that he didn’t intend to get that outcome. It was a lack of skill, as opposed to meanness.”
Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith, another cofounder, developed a strategy for keeping their new boss satisfied but mostly out of the picture. Perhaps the most important tactic was to keep Jobs at a physical distance. Pixar retained its small offices in San Rafael, a good hour-and-a-half drive away from NeXT headquarters in Silicon Valley. On most Monday mornings, Catmull, joined sometimes by Smith, would make the trek across the Golden Gate Bridge and down the Peninsula to update Jobs. The arrangement suited Steve fine, since he found the trip north annoyingly full of traffic. Catmull would always come primed with an agenda, but Steve would steer the meetings in whatever direction suited his fancy. He kept pushing Catmull to think of Pixar’s technology as rarefied hardware and software tools that could be commercialized and sold at a high price. One of the first things he convinced the team to do was to create what would be called the Pixar Image Computer, which wasn’t really a computer, but a special graphics processor that plugged into an engineering workstation. He even got involved with its design, insisting that it be a cube. Only this cube would be painted in a faux granite finish.
The Pixarians appreciated his enthusiasm, but Catmull and Smith would often leave the meetings thinking that Steve really didn’t understand their company. “Steve actually didn’t know anything about our business, and he didn’t even know how to run a small business,” Catmull reflects. “He knew something about running a consumer products company, but early on he actually had nothing of value to say [about Pixar], and a lot of his advice to us turns out to have been bad advice. Not that we knew any better.” They couldn’t share his optimism for consumer applications for their remarkable technology. Having worked on 3-D imaging for so long, they understood how hard it was, and accepted the fact that it occupied a highly specialized niche of the market. Furthermore, they didn’t share Steve’s goal. The one and only reason they sold software and hardware imaging tools was to stay in business until they could finally create a computer-animated film. Steve would claim later in his life that he had always believed that Pixar would eventually create great content, but that just wasn’t the case. His goal was to have Pixar become a successful computer company, ideally one that complemented NeXT.
Even the most sophisticated business strategist would have had a tough time turning Pixar into a self-supporting technology business. And in the late 1980s, Steve Jobs was a long way from being a sophisticated businessman. His ideas for Pixar truly were of little or no help at all. One example: Steve decided the company should expand its reach by going after the hospital market, which was awash in high-resolution images like X-rays. The company added a big sales staff to court the medical world, and even entered into a contract with the Dutch manufacturer Philips, which said it would use its own network to place the machines in hospitals. But the Pixar Image Computer cost an exorbitant $135,000—and even at that price required a connection to a high-end Sun workstation, which could cost another $35,000 or so. (NeXT wasn’t yet selling its workstations.) Pixar’s lead customer was Disney, which bought a slew of the machines as well as a Pixar software application called CAPS, which enabled the animation giant to manage the storage of its animators’ hand-drawn cels and track their progress. Disney was happy with the technology, but the high-end Pixar system was too expensive and too difficult to program for more practical, industrial uses.
Alvy Ray Smith, the Pixar cofounder who could be as brash as Steve, did little to hide his disdain for many of Steve’s wild ideas. Alvy Ray, a voluble guy from Mineral Wells, Texas, had forgotten more about computer graphics than Steve would ever know, and listening to Steve opine on this or that grand strategy wore on his patience. Inevitably, their relationship came to a crashing end. Like alpha boys on a playground, the two clashed over who had the right to use a whiteboard during a board meeting, leading to a ridiculous bout of name-calling. Though Steve tried to apologize to Smith, Smith had had enough. He quit shortly thereafter to start his own company and eventually wound up as a research fellow for Microsoft.