The company also sold a professional software application called RenderMan, which allowed computer graphics artists to apply textures and colors to the surfaces of computer-generated 3-D objects onscreen with a level of sharpness and resolution that could be blended into conventional film images. As with everything Pixar did, it was top-of-the-line software. Steven Spielberg’s techies used RenderMan (on Silicon Graphics workstations) to create the scaly skin and ivory teeth of Jurassic Park’s frightening dinosaurs. RenderMan played a key role in the budding field of 3-D computer graphics imaging, helping to enhance movies like The Abyss, Terminator II, and Alien III, along with Disney’s Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and The Lion King. Pixar even released a version that would run on Macintosh computers. But as cool as the software was, it never came close to making Pixar self-sustainable.
BY 1990, THERE seemed very little reason for Pixar to continue to exist as a business. Steve Jobs was anything but a tycoon. The stock he sold after leaving Apple had been worth $70 million, and he had made some successful investments. But after several years of funding Pixar and NeXT, only a fraction of that fortune remained. Pixar’s revenues were stagnant, and Steve was writing one check after another to keep the thing afloat. The world’s most famous computer entrepreneur was in danger of drifting into the middling obscurity that has enveloped so many other one-hit wonders of the technology world. Shutting down this expensive side project would have made enormous sense. And yet Steve persisted.
He had idiosyncratic reasons for doing so. The easiest to understand is that he desperately did not want to admit to having failed. After his ignominious departure from Apple, and in the absence of a tangible success at NeXT, Steve was basically keeping his reputation alive with announcements of milestones that weren’t really milestones. The first kind were the “just around the corner” proclamations, alerting the world to the imminent arrival of something sure to be insanely great, like NeXT’s first NeXTcube computer. The second were the “seal of approval” kind, announcing the endorsement of a significant backer, the purchase of a computer or some software by a notable company, or, in the case of Pixar, an award for graphics excellence.
But announcements alone couldn’t stave off reality forever, and the Steve Jobs story was starting to shift from his past successes to his present failures. Closing Pixar would have only accelerated that story. At a moment when his business life was in worse shape than ever, Steve simply couldn’t risk making things worse by shuttering Pixar. “Steve once told us he had nothing to prove when he started NeXT,” Catmull recalls. “Now I don’t believe that for a second. We knew he had everything to prove with NeXT. We were the only other gamble he took, and he said we turned out to be such a handful to begin with, that he stopped taking any other gambles beyond those.”
Steve’s main reason for keeping Pixar alive was that he still believed in this little band of geniuses and their leaders. The business seemed to be going nowhere, but Steve still deeply respected Catmull and Lasseter. He had great admiration for Catmull’s business and management expertise. And Lasseter? Well, Lasseter was one of those rare geniuses who can always make life seem grander and full of possibilities.
“Steve dealt mostly with Ed,” Lasseter remembers, “because they did the business stuff, and I was just the animator in another building. My first real interaction with Steve was SIGGRAPH in 1986. It was in Dallas, at the beginning of August, and hotter than can be. The film show at SIGGRAPH was like a rock concert. People started lining up six hours in advance. And you do not cut those lines because people get really mad. But Steve and his girlfriend come up, and he says, ‘Hey, John, do we really have to stand in line?’ So I talk my way through to the guard, and basically made up something about why I had to get Steve Jobs and his girlfriend in before anyone else. The guard let us through, just before the flood of people.
“Before this moment, Steve’s tangible moments of success were things like showing up at a school and seeing a whole lab filled with his computers. This was different. It had the feel of a big rock concert, an arena rock concert.
“The show goes on, and people are going nuts over, like, crystal balls bouncing on the screen. It was all tech stuff. Nothing with a story. And then all of a sudden, our little Luxo Jr. comes up. You know, the little hopping lamp. It’s only a minute and a half long, but even before the thing is over, people are cheering. That moment is remembered as significant in computer graphics history because it was the first time a 3-D computer-animated film entertained audiences with its story and characters, not the mere fact of being made with a computer. It got a standing ovation before it was done. The crowd knew they had seen something brand new.
“And Steve turned to me with these big eyes,” Lasseter continues, his own eyes bulging, “like, ‘This is great! Wow! I like this!’ Getting that immediate response from an audience was something he had never experienced. The bug had bitten him, and he was like, ‘I love this.’ It bonded us. And then, that I had the balls to cut in front of this line of six thousand people who would skin you alive! It changed our relationship from that moment on.”
“Luxo Jr. was the breakthrough,” Steve told me many years later. If Steve ever was starstruck, it was by Lasseter, whose artistry seemed to be irrefutable evidence of what Steve believed to be the most important attribute of computers: that they were tools that could unleash and enhance human creativity. Despite his boyish ways (his office is stuffed with so many toys it could double as a Pixar museum, and his wardrobe consists exclusively of blue jeans and hundreds of loud, Hawaiian-style print shirts), Lasseter was a confident grown-up, and not persnickety in any way. While he never looked to Steve for creative advice on his short features, he calmly listened to his boss’s opinions, before going ahead with his own plans anyway. But he made compromises when needed, too, rather than insisting on perfection: when he couldn’t prepare a polished version of a short called Tin Toy in time for SIGGRAPH, he simply showed what he could and filled in the rest with line drawings.
Lasseter lived in constant fear that Steve would shutter his little animation group. Even as he kept writing checks to fund Pixar, Steve regularly slashed budgets and froze salaries: “I think I made the same salary from ’84 to ’89,” Lasseter remembers. “And I thought for sure that they’d get rid of Animation. At one point they were contemplating a layoff in Hardware, I think, and there were lots of complaints like, ‘What about Animation? They don’t do anything to bring in the money.’ So I asked the head of Software, a guy named Mickey Mantle, like the baseball player, ‘When’s the shoe gonna drop, really? When will they just close Animation?’ And he said, ‘John, they never will.’
“ ‘What do you mean?’ I asked him,” continues Lasseter. “And Mickey said, ‘Computer hardware and software companies, they go through layoffs and it’s business. It’s the ups and downs of the business. But when people think of Pixar, it’s not our computers or our software. They think of those little short films you’ve made. That’s the identity of Pixar to the rest of the world. So if Pixar were to stop making those films and lay everybody off in Animation, that would signal to the entire world that Pixar is done. That,’ he said, ‘is why they’re not gonna close Animation.’ ”
It didn’t hurt, of course, that Lasseter’s team was earning greater and greater awards. When Lasseter had gone to Steve to get approval for the budget on the short called Tin Toy, Steve’s response had been “Just make it great.” The one-and-a-half-minute-long piece, featuring a wind-up mechanical tin drummer who lives in fear of a slobbering infant who likes to throw toys around, turned out to be great indeed: at the Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles on March 29, 1989, Tin Toy won the Oscar for Best Short Animated Film. Shortly afterward, Steve took everyone who had worked on Tin Toy to dinner at Greens, a famous vegetarian restaurant in San Francisco.
“He was so proud,” Lasseter said. “I remember grabbing the Oscar and putting it right in front of him. ‘You asked me to make it great,’ I told him. ‘The
re you go.’ That was the dinner where Nancy and I met Laurene—she and Steve had started dating a few months earlier. We just loved being with the two of them that night, because Steve was so clearly in love. He had his arm around Laurene all night and … he was so happy, so giddily happy, so full of that feeling like everything is champagne bubbles in your life, just effervescent. He was so excited. He had won an Oscar, and here was this marvelous woman.”
LOOKING BACK, 1989 stands out as the year when the confusion of Steve’s mad, youthful rush started to clear, even though his business problems wouldn’t evaporate anytime soon. Having Pixar win that Oscar was something legitimate he could brag about in his work life. But the main bounce came from meeting his wife-to-be. Steve first saw Laurene during a lecture he gave at the Stanford Business School, where she was getting her MBA. “She was right there in the front row in the lecture hall, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of her,” he told me not long afterward. “I kept losing my train of thought, and started feeling a little giddy.” He tracked her down in the parking lot, and asked her to dinner. They went out that very night. And with the exception of Steve’s rare business trips, they were together pretty much every day of the rest of his life.
They were a good match from the start. Laurene’s father had died when she was quite young. Like Steve, she was raised in the middle class, in her case in the town of West Milford, New Jersey, where, like Steve, she learned to fend for herself. Laurene got herself into first-rate schools: the University of Pennsylvania, and later, Stanford’s B-school. She was intelligent and well-spoken and very athletic; an avid reader with eclectic interests in literature and the arts, nutrition, politics, and philosophy; and unlike Steve, she followed professional sports. After college she had tried the world of high finance in Manhattan, but it didn’t interest her enough; she left Goldman Sachs after a couple of years and entered business school as a way of figuring out what she would do next.
Steve had had serious relationships with several girlfriends by then, including the singer Joan Baez and Chrisann Brennan. But Laurene, who was willowy with a California girl’s blond hair and piercing eyes, had a depth of character that touched him in a whole new way. Some of the women he had dated came to seem needy over time; Laurene wasn’t that way. She brought as much self-sufficiency to the relationship as he did. And she wasn’t interested in his wealth, or in the kind of dazzling social life that was available to him if he wanted it. They both accepted the value of hard work, which made it easier for Laurene to handle Steve’s long hours. And their middle-class connection would become increasingly important: when they eventually had a family, Steve and Laurene would do everything in their power to raise their kids with as normal values as they could, despite their growing wealth.
Their relationship burned intensely from the beginning, as you might expect from the pairing of two such strong-willed individuals. But eventually Steve got over his bachelor’s anxiety and proposed to Laurene on New Year’s Day of 1990, clutching “a fistful of freshly picked wildflowers,” as she would say at his memorial service, just twenty-one years later. She took Steve seriously, that morning and in the years to come, when she learned about Buddhism, reading the books that influenced Steve as a young spiritual seeker. Indeed, Kobun Chino Otogawa, the Zen Buddhist monk who served as Steve’s guru for many years, would preside at their wedding. They got married at the Ahwahnee lodge, in Yosemite National Park, on March 18, 1991. She was pregnant with their first child, Reed, who was born that September.
IT TURNED OUT that Mickey Mantle was right: Lasseter didn’t have to worry about his own division. Steve was indeed, to use Lasseter’s word, “bit.” So when Steve decided to cut his losses at Pixar, he didn’t abandon the company completely. Instead, he unloaded the company’s hardware division for $2 million, and decided to focus on software and animation instead. By early 1991, Steve had cut the staff from 120 people down to 42—laying off all those sales folks he had insisted on hiring, and retrenching back to almost exactly the number of people who were working there when he first acquired the outfit in 1986.
It was a wrenching, difficult period. Steve’s continued funding came at a price, as he bought back employees’ restricted stock grants for very little money, robbing the employees who were left of their primary long-term financial incentive. Steve later tried to paint this period as a glorious turning point, a moment where passion won out over the dreary reality of Pixar’s dismal computer sales. “I got everybody together,” he told me, “and I said, ‘At our heart, we really are a content company. Let’s transition out of everything else. Let’s go for it. This is why I bought into Pixar. This is why most of you are here. Let’s go for it. It’s a higher-risk strategy, but the rewards are gonna be much higher, and it’s where our hearts are.’ ” The pep talk did occur, but while some employees felt inspired, most saw that his words glossed over the reality of what had happened, and what was required to turn the company around. Catmull, who like Lasseter was stripped of most of his equity stake in the company, told me that this period was anything but exhilarating: “It was one of the hardest things in my life.” By this time, Steve had invested close to $50 million in Pixar.
Slashed by two-thirds, the company was now dependent on three sources of revenue: the CAPS image management system it licensed to Disney; RenderMan, which was now offered in a new version that would allow Macs to create 3-D images; and advertising, a new revenue stream that the animation team had introduced. Pixar was able to sign up a few clients on Madison Avenue, like Listerine, Trident, Tropicana, and Volkswagen. As dreamed up by Lasseter and other animators like Andrew Stanton (who would eventually direct A Bug’s Life), Pixar’s ads for these clients were kooky and lively. They showed off the company’s unique ability to anthropomorphize objects like a dancing stick of gum or a bouncing orange, and they forced the animators to adhere to budgets and deadlines, “a discipline that we needed to develop,” says Catmull. Combined with Lasseter’s increasingly sophisticated short films, they showed that the company was getting closer to having the technical and storytelling chops to realize its dream of producing a full-length film. But Pixar still had nowhere near the revenue it needed to sustain itself.
And then, just around this time, Peter Schneider, the president of Walt Disney Features Animation, came calling on John Lasseter. For the third time in three years, he tried to hire Lasseter away from Pixar. Lasseter wouldn’t go. “I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area,” he remembers. “I was inventing new stuff. I figured I’d just stay on here. I’d had a pretty miserable experience at Disney.” He told Schneider that there was only one way that he’d consider working with Disney—the studio would have to make a movie with Pixar.
The Evolution of a CEO
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1979. The two had founded Apple four years earlier, and the company was growing like crazy. But the best years of their collaboration were already over. Ted Thai/Polaris
A 1979 gathering of the Seva Foundation, which Steve backed with a $5,000 donation. His close friend Larry Brilliant is at the center with his baby boy, Joseph; Brilliant’s wife, Girija, is to the right, arms crossed and leaning back. Dr. Venkataswamy, the Indian opthamologist whose anti-blindness operations were funded by the group, stands to the left of Wavy Gravy, sitting and wearing the propeller hat. Ram Dass, author of the bestseller Be Here Now, is squatting at the far left. Courtesy of the Seva Foundation
Lee Clow, here with Steve at an advertising industry awards show that honored their triumphant “1984” Super Bowl ad introducing the Mac, was one of Steve’s closest colleagues. Steve thought ChiatDay’s creative leader was a true genius. Courtesy of Lee Clow
Regis McKenna was Steve’s most important early mentor. The marketing wizard helped craft Apple’s indelible image. © Roger Ressmeyer/Corbis
The renegades who left Apple to start NeXT Computer: (back row) Rich Page, Steve, and George Crow; (front row) Dan’l Lewin, Bud Tribble, and Susan Barnes. “I definitely thought abou
t the risk of going to work for him and leaving my job at Apple,” says Lewin. “But I worried that if I didn’t go to NeXT, I would have always said, ‘Dammit, I should have gone along for the ride.’ ” © Ed Kashi/VII/Corbis
Avie Tevanian joined NeXT out of Carnegie Mellon University and worked for Steve for sixteen years, there and at Apple. At a party honoring him for his promotion to Chief Software Technical Officer in 2003, he was given a set of framed CDs of various pieces of software he had masterminded. Three years later, he left Apple. Courtesy of Wen-Yu Chang
Jon Rubinstein, known as “Ruby,” also worked for Steve at NeXT and at Apple, overseeing hardware design and manufacture. Ruby was instrumental in helping Apple develop a faster metabolism for coming up with great new devices year after year. He and Steve celebrated at his 2001 wedding, which took place just ten days before the introduction of the iPod. Courtesy of Jon Rubinstein
Just a week before Steve’s death, Eddy Cue helped introduce the iPhone 4S at an event on the Apple campus. “What I loved about working for Steve,” says Cue, “is that you learned that you could accomplish the impossible. Again and again.” Courtesy of Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
Katie Cotton, Apple’s longtime head of communications, coordinated the strategy of making Steve available to only a few select outlets and writers. Courtesy of Brent Schlender
In 2007, Steve visited a class taught by Andy Grove at Stanford University. Grove, the former CEO of Intel, was an important behind-the-scenes advisor. When Steve called in 1997 to ask if he should take the job as interim CEO of Apple, Grove growled, “Steve, I don’t give a shit about Apple.” Courtesy of Denise Amantea
Becoming Steve Jobs Page 16