To Pixar and Beyond Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  PART I

  Why Would You Do That?

  Good Soldiers

  Planet Pixar

  Starving Artist

  My Big Break

  What’s an Entertainment Company?

  Few Options

  PART II

  Four Pillars

  IPO Dreaming

  On Board

  The Gatekeepers

  Speechless

  West Coast Swagger

  Hollywood Cred

  Two Numbers

  El Capitan

  PIXR

  PART III

  From the Heart

  Anatomy of a Deal

  Poker Time

  The Last 20 Percent

  A Little Credit

  Flickers

  Just Keep Swimming

  PART IV

  Finding My Deli

  A Hundred Years

  The Middle Way

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Footnotes

  Copyright © 2016 by Lawrence Levy

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Levy, Lawrence (Lawrence B.), author.

  Title: To Pixar and beyond : my unlikely journey with Steve Jobs to make entertainment history / Lawrence Levy.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016020541 (print) | LCCN 2016023332 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544734142 (hardback) | ISBN 9780544734197 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Levy, Lawrence (Lawrence B.) | Executives—United States—Biography. | Pixar (Firm)—History. | BISAC: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS/Management. | BUSINESS & ECONOMICS/Entrepreneurship.

  Classification: LCC PN1998.3.L4673 A32016 (print) | LCC PN1998.3.L4673 (ebook) | DDC 791.4302/3092—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016020541

  COVER DESIGN BY BRIAN MOORE

  eISBN 978-0-544-73419-7

  v1.1016

  For Hillary, Jason, Sarah, and Jenna

  Prologue

  “Hey, Steve, you up for a walk?” I asked over the phone.

  It was the fall of 2005. Steve Jobs and I had asked each other that question countless times over the past ten years. But this time was different. Steve had turned fifty earlier that year and the burden of cancer and surgery was taking its toll. For a while now we had kept our talks and walks light. Steve had enough on his hands at Apple. In the past year he had introduced a new line of iPods, including the brand-new iPod shuffle and iPod nano that continued to usher in a new era of music listening.

  Today, though, I had something specific on my mind. I was on Pixar’s board of directors, having previously served as Pixar’s chief financial officer and a member of its Office of the President. I had been considering this particular matter for a while, and I felt it was time to broach it. Steve had been feeling a little better lately. This was as good a moment as any.

  “Sure,” he said. “Come on over. I’m around.”

  We lived in Old Palo Alto, a neighborhood just a mile or two east of Stanford University in California’s Bay Area. Steve’s house was just a few minutes’ walk from mine. It sat on a corner lot, a beautiful, Tudor-style country cottage, brick walled, with a steep-sloped slate roof. I entered from the back gate and went through the kitchen door where, as was usual, an array of delicious-looking fruits and snacks sat on the long, rustic wood table. I said hello to the family chef, who was warm and welcoming, and made my way through the kitchen, down the hall, to Steve’s office.

  “Hi, Lawrence,” Steve said with a smile, as he looked up and saw me.

  “Still up for that walk?” I asked him. “We can sit if you like.”

  “Let’s go for it,” he said. “Be nice to get some fresh air.”

  Walking the streets of Palo Alto was a tonic for Steve. He loved the air, the architecture, the climate. The weather was clear and warm as we strolled down the flat streets lined with oak, magnolia, and ash trees, past the variety of architectures, from small ranch houses reminiscent of an earlier era to large remodeled estates that reflected Silicon Valley’s growth. After we caught up for a few minutes, I brought up what I wanted to discuss.

  “I’d like to talk about Pixar’s stock price,” I said.

  “What’s on your mind?” Steve asked.

  “I think Pixar’s at a crossroads,” I said. “Its valuation is too high to stay still. If we have any miss, any miss at all, even a small one, Pixar’s value could be cut in half overnight, and half of your wealth will go with it.” I paused and then added, “We’re flying too close to the sun.”

  We had enjoyed an incredible run: ten years of one blockbuster after another.

  “Either Pixar uses its sky-high valuation to diversify into other businesses,” I went on, “just like Disney did, or . . .”

  “Or we sell to Disney,” Steve finished my sentence.

  “Yes, or we sell to Disney, or anyone else that offers the same opportunity for diversifying and protecting Pixar as Disney does.”

  But we both knew no other company did.

  “Let me give it some thought,” Steve replied. “I hear what you’re saying.”

  A few months later, on January 25, 2006, Pixar and the Walt Disney Company announced that Disney would acquire Pixar for a price of $7.6 billion. At that time, Steve owned the majority of Pixar’s stock, making his share of Pixar worth several billion dollars. Ten years later, due to the precipitous rise in Disney’s value, those Disney shares almost quadrupled in value.

  When I first started talking to Steve about Pixar, a little more than ten years earlier in late 1994, the company had burned through almost $50 million of his money, with little to show for it. The value assigned to Pixar’s stockholders on its financial statements at that time was negative $50 million. Now, Steve’s investment in Pixar had made him one of the wealthiest individuals in the world.

  My tenure at Pixar lasted from my first conversations with Steve in 1994 until the sale to Disney in 2006. This opportunity was one of the great privileges of my life. Although much has been written about Pixar’s legendary creative and production processes, my side of the story looks at Pixar from a different angle. It is about the strategic and business imperatives that enabled Pixar to flourish.

  It is perhaps easy to look at Pixar’s film accomplishments and imagine that they emerged in a blaze of creative glory, that Pixar was created as a storytelling, artistic utopia. This wasn’t my experience of it. The making of Pixar was more akin to the high-pressure grinding of tectonic plates pushing up new mountains. One of those plates carried the intense pressures of innovation: the drive for artistic and creative excellence in storytelling and the invention of a new medium, computer animation, through which to express it. The other of those plates carried the real-world pressures of survival: raising money, selling movie tickets, increasing the pace of production. These two forces ground ceaselessly against each other, causing many quakes and aftershocks.

  This is the story of how the little company that made the world fall in love with toys, bugs, fish, monsters, cars, superheroes, chefs, robots, and emotions emerged from the forces at work beneath it. It is about the choices and the absurd bets and risks t
hat made it possible. It is about the tension between creative integrity and real-world necessities, and how that tension shaped those involved with it—Steve Jobs; Pixar’s creative, technical, and production teams; and me. It is a story about what it means to put the creative impulse first, and why that is so very hard to do.

  This is also a story about how, through the eyes of a two-thousand-year-old Buddhist philosophy called the Middle Way, I came to see Pixar in a larger context. How I learned that the tensions at Pixar were the very same forces that lie at the heart not just of making great films, but of living great lives, building great organizations, and freeing our inner capacities and creativity.

  If I learned anything at Pixar, it is that story comes first. Pixar’s creative leader, John Lasseter, used to say, “Great graphics will keep us entertained for a couple of minutes; it is story that holds us in our seats.”

  This one began with a phone call.

  Lawrence Levy

  March 2016

  PART I

  1

  Why Would You Do That?

  One afternoon in November 1994, the phone in my office rang. I was the chief financial officer and vice chairman of the board at Electronics for Imaging, a Silicon Valley company developing products for the burgeoning field of color desktop publishing. It was a clear and cool fall day in San Bruno, California, near the San Francisco airport. I picked up the phone, not knowing who it might be. The last thing I expected was to speak to a celebrity.

  “Hi, is this Lawrence?”

  “Yes, it’s me.”

  “This is Steve Jobs,” the voice on the other end of the line said. “I saw your picture in a magazine a few years ago and thought we’d work together someday.”

  Even in those days, when the downfall of Steve Jobs was a favorite topic around Silicon Valley eateries, a call from him was enough to stop me in my tracks. Maybe he wasn’t as hot as he had been before his unceremonious departure from Apple ten years earlier, but our industry had never had a more charismatic figure. I couldn’t help but feel a spurt of excitement at realizing not only that he knew who I was, but that he had actually called me.

  “I have a company I’d like to tell you about,” he said.

  NeXT, I immediately thought. He wants to talk about NeXT Computer. Jobs’s latest venture, supposedly his long-awaited second act, had been famous for its eye-catching cube-shaped workstations, but it was also rumored to be on shaky ground, especially after it was forced to close its hardware business not too long before. My mind raced: he wants to turn NeXT around; that could be an exciting challenge. But what he said next caught me off guard.

  “The company is called Pixar.”

  Not NeXT. Pixar. What in the world was Pixar?

  “That sounds great,” I said, not wanting to reveal how little I knew about Pixar. “I’d love to hear more.”

  We agreed to meet.

  As I put the phone down, my first reaction was shock. A call from Steve Jobs out of the blue? That was startling. But the initial thrill faded rapidly; rudimentary research revealed that Pixar had a decidedly checkered history. Steve had acquired ownership of Pixar when George Lucas spun it off from Lucasfilm eight years earlier. He then apparently poured millions of dollars into the company in the hope of developing a high-end imaging computer and accompanying software. The result: not much. Pixar had long abandoned the quest to develop an imaging computer, and it was not clear to anyone I talked to what was sustaining Pixar now.

  Moreover, Steve Jobs may have been Silicon Valley’s most visible celebrity, but that made it all the more glaring that he had not had a hit in a long time—a very long time. His last two products before being stripped of all responsibilities at Apple in 1985—the Lisa and the original Macintosh computers—had both been commercial disasters, and the NeXT Computer was regarded by many observers as the triumph of hubris over practicality. It had been heralded as a technological marvel, but it had been unable to compete with the likes of Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics that sold less expensive, more compatible machines. More and more, Jobs was looking like yesterday’s news. When I told friends and colleagues that I was meeting Steve Jobs about Pixar, the most common response was “Why would you want to do that?” Still, I was intrigued, and there would be no harm in a meeting. I followed up by calling Steve’s office to arrange a time.

  Despite his reputation, I was excited to meet Steve in person, although I really didn’t know what to expect. Would I encounter the mercurial tyrant Silicon Valley loved to vilify, or the brilliant genius who led the personal computer revolution? Our meeting was in NeXT Computer’s ostentatious headquarters in Redwood City, California, where, upon arrival, I was ushered into Steve’s office. Rising from behind a commanding, book-strewn desk, wearing his trademark blue jeans, black turtleneck, and sneakers, Steve, a few years my senior, greeted me like he had been waiting to see me for years.

  “Come in, come in,” he said excitedly. “I have so much to tell you.”

  The conversation needed no warm-up. Steve jumped in, exuberantly telling me about Pixar—its history, its technology, and the production of its first full-length film.

  “Only a few minutes of the film is finished,” he said, “but you have to see it. You’ve never seen anything like it.”

  We hit it off immediately. For almost an hour I sat in a chair on the other side of his desk, listening carefully as Steve sketched out the role he hoped I would play. He explained how he wanted someone on the ground at Pixar while he was at NeXT, someone to run the business, to hone the strategy, to take it public. He described how Pixar had revolutionized the field of high-end computer graphics and was now focused on producing its first feature film.

  Steve quizzed me about my background, my family, and my career. He seemed impressed that I’d studied law at Harvard; had been a partner at Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati, Silicon Valley’s largest law firm, which had taken Apple public many years earlier; and that I had created a new technology transactions department there, the first of its kind as far as I knew. He also liked that I had personal experience taking a company public. I felt he was testing my pedigree; it seemed important to him that I be a solid citizen. I was glad that he seemed to like what he heard.

  The conversation proceeded effortlessly. But even while we were clearly hitting it off, a gnawing unease was growing within me. If Jobs had in mind taking Pixar public, he must have some serious notions about Pixar’s business and strategic plans. He never mentioned them, though. I thought about whether to ask if he had numbers or a business projection I could see, but he was driving the agenda, and I decided this wasn’t the time to interrupt. He was sizing me up to see if he wanted to meet again. When Steve eventually asked, “Can you visit Pixar soon? I’d love it if you could,” I felt pleased. I thought it would be fascinating to at least see what Pixar was all about.

  By the time I was halfway home, though, my mind was back on the business issues; he should have mentioned them, and I should have pushed to hear about them. We had made a personal connection—better than I could have imagined—but how did I know Steve wasn’t putting up another “reality distortion field” for which he was notorious? That phrase had long been associated with Steve’s ability to make others believe almost anything, regardless of the business or market realities. Maybe he was weaving another fantasy, this time about Pixar. If I took this job and Pixar flamed out, as everyone I had spoken to seemed to think it would, the career I had so carefully built, along with my reputation, would take a huge blow.

  Worse still, the more I looked, the more there seemed to be no end of individuals who felt burned by Jobs’s excesses. A year earlier, there had even been a book published, Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing by Randall Stross, a scathing critique of Steve’s behavior and business practices at NeXT. I didn’t want to risk being a Steve Jobs fall guy. But I decided it was better to be patient. This wasn’t the time for decisions. The next step was in sight: a visit to Pixar.

  Pixar was
located in Point Richmond, California. I had never been to Point Richmond, never even heard of it. I had to look on a map to find where it was. Point Richmond was a tiny town between Berkeley and San Rafael. My heart sank as I mapped out how to get there. From Palo Alto, it was a ride up 101 north to San Francisco, then onto the Bay Bridge via 80 east, then 80 veered north and went past Berkeley, then onto 580 west to Cutting Boulevard where Pixar was located. I tried to tell myself that this was manageable, that it wouldn’t be too bad. Inside, however, I was full of doubt. These highways were among the most clogged in California. Driving to Pixar would not be fun.

  I had always worked hard to be home for my family. I had two children—Jason, who was nine, and Sarah, who was six—and my wife, Hillary, was pregnant with our third. The demands of my career hadn’t made it easy to be home at the right times, but I had done my best to pull it off. I was part of my children’s lives, read to them at night, helped with homework, drove them to school. I knew how much discipline that took. I didn’t think I could take a job that might put this in jeopardy.

  I was pretty dejected when I put down the map.

  “I don’t know about this,” I said to Hillary one evening. “It’s too far away. I don’t see how we can pull it off and remain living here. And it makes no sense to move. It’s far too risky for that. Who knows how long this might last? If it flames out, I think we’d want to be here.”

  Hillary and I had met as undergraduates at Indiana University. I started there at seventeen, a year after my family immigrated to Indianapolis from London, England, where I’d grown up. Hillary was petite, with blue eyes, wavy brown hair, and a pretty face with a cute, pointy chin. She was sweet-natured, grounded, and insightful. We had married while we were both in graduate school. We liked to say we grew up together because our twenties were a time of much change.

  We had both attended graduate school in Boston, after which we worked in Florida for a little while, where my family then lived. After a couple of years there, we moved to Silicon Valley so I could try my hand at practicing law in the emerging world of high tech. With our one-year-old son in tow, we went west on our own. Hillary had a Master of Science degree in speech pathology and worked at Stanford Medical Center, where she specialized in rehabilitating stroke and head trauma patients who had language deficits. We talked through all our major decisions together.