“Steve,” said Lasseter, “I’ve got to be honest, I can’t afford a new car right now. We just bought this house and it’s far more than we can afford. I just can’t do it now.”

“I think what he was thinking,” Lasseter told me, “was, ‘Oh my God, I bet the farm on this guy, and he’s driving that crap car … if a truck hits him—dink!—he’ll be dead.’ ”

“Okay,” Steve said, “we’ll figure something out.”

When Lasseter got his next paycheck, it contained a small bonus. “You have to use this to buy a new car,” Steve told him. “It has to be safe, and I have to approve it.” John and Nancy picked out a Volvo, and Steve approved.

Lasseter is one of the world’s great storytellers, and Steve loved this side of him. The director approached the construction of movies with the same kind of craftsmanship that Steve applied when building a new piece of hardware. Both men loved the fit and finish. Once, during the production of A Bug’s Life, John and Andrew Stanton told me about the research involved in creating the “bug’s-eye view” of the world. After fitting arthroscopic lenses to video cameras, the team went to all different kinds of landscapes and pushed the snakelike lenses along the ground to see what the world looked like from an ant’s perspective. One thing they realized was that most grass is translucent, casting a greenish hue as the light comes through. Since you can emphasize whatever you want with animation, Stanton and his crew gave their bug’s world an exaggerated glow.

This kind of attention to detail fascinated Steve. He loved the narrative and visual mosaics that Lasseter was able to assemble for each Pixar movie, and over the years he came to admire the way the animators outdid themselves with each and every film. He and Lasseter paired a child’s curiosity with an obsessive attention to detail. At Pixar, Steve was seeing how the two could be combined into the slow, successful, and patient development of a work of art that would live long beyond its creators.

A few weeks before Pixar’s IPO, Steve took Lasseter to an early dinner at one of his favorite Japanese restaurants, Kyo-ya, in San Francisco’s Palace Hotel. “Afterwards, we were standing outside out on the curb, talking for the longest time,” remembers Lasseter. “We had to have been there at least an hour, just talking about stuff. I was telling him I was nervous, that I was kind of scared of the IPO. I wished that we could wait for the second movie. And he did that thing, where he kind of looks off, and he said, ‘You know, when we make a computer at Apple, what’s its life span? About three years? At five years, it’s a doorstop. But if you do your job right, what you create can last forever.’ ”

BY LATE 1994, Steve stopped shopping the company around. He didn’t want to give up control of what was clearly going to become a very interesting enterprise with the release of Toy Story. But he didn’t really understand just how big things could get until he attended a press conference for Disney’s new animated film, Pocahontas, in New York City on February 1, 1995. It wasn’t just any old press conference; it was held in a huge tent in Central Park, where Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Disney CEO Michael Eisner announced that the June 10 premiere of Pocahontas would occur right there—in the park, free, for up to one hundred thousand people. And the premiere was just the appetizer—Disney’s marketing campaign for the hand-drawn Pocahontas would add up to more than $100 million.

Steve eyes grew really big. He appreciated a masterful product launch, and his own introductions paled against this one. That’s when he got serious about cooking up an audacious plan for an initial public offering of Pixar stock. His goal was to raise enough money for the company to fund its own movie productions, thus enabling it to become a full partner to Disney, rather than a mere contractor.

Making the decision about the details for an IPO, of course, was a task for Steve to handle rather than Catmull or Lasseter. He recently had hired a new CFO by the name of Lawrence Levy, a sharp Silicon Valley attorney with a background in patent law. Right away, he and Levy spent weeks studying the ins and outs of film finance and accounting to get a better sense of how studios really make their money. As part of their “homework” they flew down to Hollywood to quiz other executives at other studios about movie budgets and distribution deals. They immediately learned that Pixar was, at least at that point, a long shot for a successful IPO. Its financial performance to date was pretty dismal—it had accumulated losses of $50 million over the years, while generating little revenue. Its potential revenue stream seemed limited and risky. Pixar was largely dependent on one company, Disney, which was the sole licensee of CAPS technology and which would return to Pixar a mere 12.5 percent of box-office revenues of any movies they might make and market together. Moreover, Pixar seemed to move at a snail’s pace, having already spent nearly four years on a movie that still wasn’t finished. The movie business itself was notoriously unpredictable. And finally, the company relied on the creative ideas of a very few people, like Lasseter and Stanton, who had good reputations but no significant track record.

Steve had his own misgivings about Toy Story’s commercial potential, mainly based upon what he was hearing from Disney’s marketers. “Disney came to do a big presentation to us about the marketing,” remembers Lasseter. “They told us they had a big promotional plan with Sears. Steve looks around the room and goes, ‘Has anybody in this room been into a Sears lately? Anybody.’ No one raises a hand. ‘Then why are we making a deal with Sears? Why are we not going for products we like? Can’t we be doing a deal with Rolex? Sony high-end audio equipment?’ And their answer was basically, ‘Um, um, this is what we do!’ He poked holes in every one of their ideas. He was just so logical. Why associate ourselves with products we can’t stand?” (In the end, the most prominent sponsor would turn out to be Burger King.)

As long as Pixar had not filed with the SEC for an IPO, Steve was free to do what he could to drum up excitement about Pixar in the business press. Still, I was surprised one Saturday morning in May when the phone rang in my home and it was Steve. He asked if I wanted to come over, but this time with Greta and Fernanda, my two daughters, who were then just ten and nine years old. “I’m watching Reed this morning,” he told me, “and I’ve got something cool to show them.”

When we arrived, three-year-old Reed Jobs greeted us at the kitchen door, wrapped in blue and red silk scarves and screeching, “I’m a witch!!!” Reed fluttered around while Steve got the kids some juice and made bowls of popcorn. Then he and I followed the three kids into the den, where Steve popped a VHS cassette into the player. After a bunch of crude storyboards, all of a sudden a full-color early version of Toy Story burst onto the screen and a sound track kicked in. I had seen storyboards lining the walls at Pixar, but no actual animation at that point. It was truly spectacular and completely unlike anything I’d seen on a screen before. The three kids sat rapt on the floor in front of the TV. They watched the whole thing, even though only about half of it was fully completed, with the rest filled in by line drawings or semi-complete renderings.

When it was over, Steve told me that the Pixar board of directors hadn’t even seen this much of the movie. I took that with a grain of salt. (Lasseter later told me that Steve showed it to everyone: “He was impossible!” Steve’s friend Larry Ellison, the billionaire founder of Oracle, said he saw eleven different versions.) Steve quickly turned from me to the kids. He was busy conducting market research, Steve Jobs–style. “Whaddya think?” he asked the girls. “Is it as good as Pocahontas?” Greta and Fernanda nodded vigorously. “Well, then, is it as good as The Lion King?” Fernanda pondered for a beat, then replied, “I won’t be able to make up my mind until I see Toy Story five or six more times.”