Brian

"We walked the Robertson Stephens team through the details of Pixar’s vision, business plan, and risks. We told them we were aiming to change entertainment history in a way few companies had ever had a chance to do, and we described the four pillars it would take to make it work: raise the money to finance our films, expand the studio to handle more productions, make Pixar a worldwide brand, and increase our share of film profits. But there were risks. Big ones. Wall Street would have to understand that. “Thank you,” Brian said sincerely. “This has been immensely helpful. Give us a couple of days. We’ll be back to you.” Later that day I received a call from Todd Carter. He thanked me for the meeting and wanted to explain the process by which they would make their decision. “The decision is made by our Commitment Committee,” he said. “That comprises all our top people and they make the final decision on every deal.” “Any idea how it looks for Pixar?” I asked him. “I wish I could say,” Todd replied. “You’re very aware of the challenges in Pixar’s business model. We’re excited about Pixar, we love the vision, but we have to be certain our investors can tolerate the risks. My personal recommendation is that we go for it, but it isn’t my decision. I think it’ll be close.” There wasn’t much there to make me feel comfortable. I could only sit and wait. It was hard to be patient, though. I hadn’t expressed it to Todd, but by this point I was flat out of options. If Robertson Stephens’s committee voted thumbs down, our chances of an IPO anytime in the near future would truly evaporate. Two days later Brian Bean called. “Our Commitment Committee made its decision,” he started. I held my breath. “We’re in,” Brian told me. “We think our investors will go for this. We know we have to get them on board for the long term, but there’s enough that’s exciting here that we think they will. We’d be honored to be the lead banker for Pixar’s IPO.” I put down the phone with a lump in my throat. Lightning had struck. This was huge. My first call was to Steve."

"When we returned to Denver from the CableLabs trip to the West Coast, while Bill was in talks to invest $1 billion with Brian, I called an old friend at GI, Ed Breen, who had worked on digital technology at the GI VideoCipher division. Ed got his start at GI selling converter boxes and rose fast to be SVP of worldwide sales; less than ten years later, he would be running the company as CEO. “Gates can make these boxes for three hundred dollars,” I blurted out to Ed almost as soon as he answered the phone. Of course, he raised the specter that Gates would simply subsidize the cost until the industry was in his stranglehold. I knew that GI needed a hit as badly as we did. Even though GI discovered the breakthrough for digital compression, business was hurting because cable operators, TCI among them, had put off costly upgrades in the rounds of rate cuts following the 1992 Cable Act, which had crimped cash flow. GI had about 60 percent market share in TV set-top boxes but wanted the new digital business. Ed said that the best price on the box at the time was $400, more than double the cost of a typical analog box. “Okay, let’s get serious about it,” I said. “How many do you have to be buying for and by when, to get your price down to a three-hundred-dollar price?” Ed knew the specs and pricing of the box better than anyone, and I trusted him. “You know, if you ordered ten million of these things, we could get the ball rolling, because that would be a three-billion-dollar purchase order.”"

"Brian broke the silence: “We know this is going to make you very angry. But we’re going to stop the CBS merger. We came here to personally tell you that we’re going to buy all of QVC at a twenty-five percent premium to today’s stock price.” Wowser. All I could think to say was “You can’t do that. You gave your word. And besides, we have the two-out-of-three rule, and Malone and I have agreed to proceed.” They coolly said that, nevertheless, they had a separate right to make any offer they wanted for QVC, and the shareholders could decide to buy into this merger or just sell out now for a high price. They handed me a formal letter with the proposal, repeatedly saying they were “really sorry.” Not sorry enough to have held off making the letter public. They had released a copy of it five minutes before my plane landed. I don’t believe they did it maliciously—they needed to put CBS on notice before they formally voted on the merger."

"I’d told Ralph and Brian that I’d promised myself to never again sign an employment agreement and that I’d report to a board, but not to an individual. QVC was a public company, and the other major owner was John Malone’s Liberty Media. Malone had become the overlord of cable media. He controlled the largest cable network, and with Liberty, he owned most of the programming. He was known both as the Cable Cowboy and, in a swipe from then–vice president Al Gore, as the Darth Vader of media. He was and always has been the smartest person in media, with an extraordinarily subtle and ingenious mind in the body of an outdoorsman conservationist libertarian who’s never met a tax he wanted to pay. I didn’t want to ever be stuck between them and would only agree to a three-way partnership where any two members could decide an issue, as long as I was one of the two. This made them more than uncomfortable, but I was adamant—I’d never do anything again where I wasn’t in some position of control."

"I spluttered, “I don’t know, but QVC is this primitive clay I want to get hold of and use it to pursue *interactivity.*” That was mostly babble, because all I really knew was that this was the first time in months I’d been intrigued by anything. Ralph and Brian knew they’d just hooked the big fish, but were bewildered by the small stream it wanted to inhabit."