“One day at a board meeting, Jobs started berating Smith and other top Pixar executives for the delay in getting the circuit boards completed for the new version of the Pixar Image Computer. At the time, NeXT was also very late in completing its own computer boards, and Smith pointed that out: “Hey, you’re even later with your NeXT boards, so quit jumping on us.” Jobs went ballistic, or in Smith’s phrase, “totally nonlinear.” When Smith was feeling attacked or confrontational, he tended to lapse into his southwestern accent. Jobs started parodying it in his sarcastic style. “It was a bully tactic, and I exploded with everything I had,” Smith recalled. ”
“Before I knew it, we were in each other’s faces—about three inches apart—screaming at each other.”
Jobs was very possessive about control of the whiteboard during a meeting, so the burly Smith pushed past him and started writing on it. “You can’t do that!” Jobs shouted.
“What?” responded Smith, “I can’t write on your whiteboard? Bullshit.” At that point Jobs stormed out.”
I'm glad someone stood up to Jobs, what a complete and utter asshole. Nothing says job security like telling your boss that their demands are "bullshit"
While the Pixar people are probably not aware, they were actually in a race. There was a small group in Brazil using computer graphics for TV commercials that decided to do a full length movie:
They had very limited resources and were using commercial tools instead of building their own like Pixar. They cheated by having their characters be aliens who were mostly blobs without legs or arms, though they like to complain about Pixar cheating by having many objects be physical models or sculptures that were then digitized instead of fully designing them in the computer.
They reached the big screen second after Pixar, but even if they had been first I doubt they would have been remembered.
The film was completed much earlier. But distribution company held it for reasons nobody know. /insert business conspiracy theory.
It was very amateur. 3ds-max-4-like program on dos, called topaz (never saw it after that). and render "farms" were just using the animators (486?) computers at night.
This article focuses on the technical side of Pixar, which was truly revolutionary. But the thing that makes Pixar a really amazing company is that they also have great graphical designers and story writers. It is the integration that makes Pixar movies so great.
There's a story told by (if memory serves) Lasseter that when they showed Luxo Jr. in 1986 at SIGGRAPH, someone came up to him afterwards with a question. He was dreading the conversation, because he thought they were going to ask some terribly technical question and he'd have to flag down one of the studio members for help, but the questioner just asked "So is the big lamp the mom or the dad?"
When I attended WWDC 2018, one of Pixar's lead lighting engineers gave a high-level presentation on the intertwining of math/physics/art to shade animated scenes in their movies. I would love to walk through one of their internal scene files and inspect all the polygon's on Woody's shirt. It's a fascinating intersection of programming not many people relate to.
They tried to sell my dad some machines. He was in the oil industry. The sale didn't work out. My dad later had a job interview with them. That didn't work out either. Both were probably for the best, but what a different life I would have had if either had gone the other way.
> This wouldn't be the first time we'd talked to Jobs. Three months earlier, on August 4, Steve had invited Ed, me, and Ajit Gill, our financial manager, to his mansion in Woodside, Calif. Steve, who had just been ousted from Apple, proposed that he buy us from Lucasfilm and run us as his next company. We said no, that we wanted to run the company ourselves, but we would accept his money in the form of a venture investment. And he agreed.
That wasn't the first time they'd talked to Jobs either:
>> One of my champions at Xerox PARC was Alan Kay. So I knew Alan Kay, who was by this time a fellow at Apple. And Steve Jobs had expressed some interest in computer graphics, so Alan Kay said let me introduce you to the guys who do it best. So Alan Kay brought Steve up to spend an afternoon with us at Lucasfilm. That’s when we first got to know each other. I had actually had one earlier conversation with Steve at some design conference on the Stanford campus one summer, but that was just a first meeting sort of thing. The first serious meeting with business possibilities was that one at Lucasfilm with Alan Kay.
>> Shortly after that, Steve and Apple broke up. And meanwhile, Lucasfilm was trying to sell us. Steve ended up buying us from Lucasfilm for $5 million.
> So not only was Jobs alerted to Pixar by an existing contact, in buying it he was to a large extent reusing the business model that had already worked with the Macintosh: take PARC goodies and commercialise them, hiring some of the PARC guys themselves.
As a side note, that Stanford link sadly no longer works any more:
> Page Not Found
> Oops! We can't find that page!
> We have a new site and things have moved around a bit. Here are some good places to start.
Oopsie doopsie! They seem to have moved the Alvy Ray Smith interview into oblivion, because search doesn't seem to find it. It doesn't seem to be archived on the Wayback Machine or archive.is or replicated anywhere else on the internet. For all I know my HN comment is the last record of the quoted text anywhere. STANFORD ENGINEERING did this.
This is why I hate the "sell shovels to miners" advice. No, the biggest winners are the ones who vertically integrate and capture the full value stack, not the tools vendors.
Vertical integration is so clearly the best path when you are operating in technology, and especially when dealing with pure software plays. If you control everything down to the bare metal, no one can ever fuck with you. Your common denominator is your adversaries common denominator too. Only super exotics like Apple have actually captured a true 100% vertical down through the hardware, and the impact of this shows in the market.
Vertical integration can be a massive mistake too. Usually manifesting itself as rewriting external dependencies to use in-house functionality before you have established happy customers, cash flow and/or business value propositions.
Back in 2017 a "Humble Bundle" package included the Lawrence Levy book "To Pixar and Beyond: My Unlikely Journey with Steve Jobs to Make Entertainment History"[0]. I got the book there and really enjoyed it.
Levy was brought in, by Jobs, as CFO of Pixar prior to the IPO and the book is concerend with more of the business side of Pixar pivoting from hardware company to studio.
Dealers of Lightning has an interesting chapter about Pixar's PARC roots in the SuperPaint group. There's also a very good article somewhere on the web (I can't find it now) about the NYIT years; the NYIT lab was a very strange arrangement. https://www.vice.com/en/article/wnpqnm/the-1970s-graphics-pr... is short and OK.
its so interesting to me how so much of entrepreneurship today is showing up with a narrowly defined problem, and building a solution around it. then there is the huge trap of building a solution without a problem.
what's touched on here seems to me as the best approach - showing up with a passion / vision with talented colleagues, then working towards that through any means possible.
For anyone interested in the history of Pixar (and lucas films sprockets) I would recommend the books "Droid maker" and "Creativity inc". Droid maker is more historical about the early years, and creativity inc is more about how Pixar works.
I vaguely remember a paragraph from a Pixar interview around the topic of attention to detail.
I can't find the interview but maybe someone knows which one I'm talking about. It was around how the graphical designers put a lot of effort around designing the under side of a draw inside of a desk which no one will see. It was around the topic of going the extra mile for the things that don't matter to set the stage on how much they must care about the things that do matter.
It was in an industrial park. I didn't think it was a bad part of town when I visited but the Pixar folks considered all of Richmond to be the bad part of town.
[+] [-] whatever_dude|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bleair|4 years ago|reply
https://www.cartoonbrew.com/artist-rights/ed-catmull-on-wage...
[+] [-] mprovost|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JKCalhoun|4 years ago|reply
“One day at a board meeting, Jobs started berating Smith and other top Pixar executives for the delay in getting the circuit boards completed for the new version of the Pixar Image Computer. At the time, NeXT was also very late in completing its own computer boards, and Smith pointed that out: “Hey, you’re even later with your NeXT boards, so quit jumping on us.” Jobs went ballistic, or in Smith’s phrase, “totally nonlinear.” When Smith was feeling attacked or confrontational, he tended to lapse into his southwestern accent. Jobs started parodying it in his sarcastic style. “It was a bully tactic, and I exploded with everything I had,” Smith recalled. ”
“Before I knew it, we were in each other’s faces—about three inches apart—screaming at each other.”
Jobs was very possessive about control of the whiteboard during a meeting, so the burly Smith pushed past him and started writing on it. “You can’t do that!” Jobs shouted. “What?” responded Smith, “I can’t write on your whiteboard? Bullshit.” At that point Jobs stormed out.”
Excerpt From: Walter Isaacson. “Steve Jobs.”
[+] [-] pseudosudoer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scudd|4 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps0RRx0Wd7w
[+] [-] cm2012|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jecel|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassiopeia_(film)
They had very limited resources and were using commercial tools instead of building their own like Pixar. They cheated by having their characters be aliens who were mostly blobs without legs or arms, though they like to complain about Pixar cheating by having many objects be physical models or sculptures that were then digitized instead of fully designing them in the computer.
They reached the big screen second after Pixar, but even if they had been first I doubt they would have been remembered.
[+] [-] ajklsdhfniuwehf|4 years ago|reply
The film was completed much earlier. But distribution company held it for reasons nobody know. /insert business conspiracy theory.
It was very amateur. 3ds-max-4-like program on dos, called topaz (never saw it after that). and render "farms" were just using the animators (486?) computers at night.
[+] [-] NotSwift|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shadowgovt|4 years ago|reply
... and that's when he knew they'd succeeded.
[+] [-] mcast|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] salamanderman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hiei|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edge17|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leoc|4 years ago|reply
That wasn't the first time they'd talked to Jobs either:
> It's probably worth mentioning how Steve Jobs was introduced to (what became) Pixar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3687900
> https://engineering.stanford.edu/profile/alvy-ray-smith-ms-1...
>> One of my champions at Xerox PARC was Alan Kay. So I knew Alan Kay, who was by this time a fellow at Apple. And Steve Jobs had expressed some interest in computer graphics, so Alan Kay said let me introduce you to the guys who do it best. So Alan Kay brought Steve up to spend an afternoon with us at Lucasfilm. That’s when we first got to know each other. I had actually had one earlier conversation with Steve at some design conference on the Stanford campus one summer, but that was just a first meeting sort of thing. The first serious meeting with business possibilities was that one at Lucasfilm with Alan Kay.
>> Shortly after that, Steve and Apple broke up. And meanwhile, Lucasfilm was trying to sell us. Steve ended up buying us from Lucasfilm for $5 million.
> So not only was Jobs alerted to Pixar by an existing contact, in buying it he was to a large extent reusing the business model that had already worked with the Macintosh: take PARC goodies and commercialise them, hiring some of the PARC guys themselves.
As a side note, that Stanford link sadly no longer works any more:
> Page Not Found
> Oops! We can't find that page!
> We have a new site and things have moved around a bit. Here are some good places to start.
Oopsie doopsie! They seem to have moved the Alvy Ray Smith interview into oblivion, because search doesn't seem to find it. It doesn't seem to be archived on the Wayback Machine or archive.is or replicated anywhere else on the internet. For all I know my HN comment is the last record of the quoted text anywhere. STANFORD ENGINEERING did this.
[+] [-] prpl|4 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPXkRzY26eg
[+] [-] ralph84|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bob1029|4 years ago|reply
Vertical integration can be a massive mistake too. Usually manifesting itself as rewriting external dependencies to use in-house functionality before you have established happy customers, cash flow and/or business value propositions.
[+] [-] teslafire124|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EvanAnderson|4 years ago|reply
Levy was brought in, by Jobs, as CFO of Pixar prior to the IPO and the book is concerend with more of the business side of Pixar pivoting from hardware company to studio.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28114529-to-pixar-and-be...
[+] [-] leoc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] finwhat|4 years ago|reply
what's touched on here seems to me as the best approach - showing up with a passion / vision with talented colleagues, then working towards that through any means possible.
[+] [-] quelsolaar|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickjj|4 years ago|reply
I can't find the interview but maybe someone knows which one I'm talking about. It was around how the graphical designers put a lot of effort around designing the under side of a draw inside of a desk which no one will see. It was around the topic of going the extra mile for the things that don't matter to set the stage on how much they must care about the things that do matter.
[+] [-] tigertigerbb|4 years ago|reply
Didn't they have that shop in Richmond in a bad part of town?
[+] [-] hondo77|4 years ago|reply