Toy Story

"Steve winced at this. He didn’t like it when I made any suggestion that Pixar might not be ready to go public. He was itching to go public as soon as we could. I had one foot on the brake, though. Pixar was frantically trying to finish Toy Story for its launch in six months. I didn’t want potential investors to see how precarious the project was. Worse, we didn’t have a business plan to confidently share with them, and I knew from my talks with Sam Fischer that Pixar’s share of the home video revenues under the agreement with Disney was very small, even if the market for home videos was big."

"There was another column, though. The first thing Steve wrote in the Pixar column was: IPO $ TO PAY FOR PRODUCTIONS “We can now pay for our own productions,” Steve said. “Disney doesn’t have to pay for all the costs.” This was why we had done the IPO. If money talked, we now had quite a bit of it. We anticipated that production costs for Pixar’s next film might approach $50 million, and production costs for future films more still. If we offered to put up half of it, this would surely get Disney’s attention. Then I added a second point: TOY STORY SUCCESS Steve wrote it in the Pixar column. “No one expected Toy Story to be so successful,” I said. “Least of all Disney.”"

"STEVE JOBS IS BACK IN THE SADDLE AGAIN, BECOMING A BILLIONAIRE IN PIXAR IPO The article said: There are plenty of analysts who think the market’s valuation of Pixar, at a total of $1.46 billion, is a sign of investors gone mad. Disney will get 80% to 90% of the revenue from “Toy Story,” and has locked Pixar into a three-picture deal through at least 1999 that promises to be a lot more rewarding for Disney than Pixar.5"

"During this interregnum, Steve Jobs asked me to fly up to San Jose so I could see a movie he was in the middle of making for this unknown company he’d acquired called Pixar. But first he wanted to show me what he was doing with a “revolutionary” computer system at another new company of his called NeXT. It hadn’t been going that well because its complex yet elegant design couldn’t find a market, given the absolute domination of Microsoft. I went to the NeXT office, where Steve showed me a few scenes from *Toy Story*, and asked if I would join the Pixar board. I said I’d have to think about it. I didn’t want to commit myself and didn’t want to insult him, but I’d never been much interested in animation and had never made any animated movies. I don’t really understand the form and I thought this new Pixar work was awkward, and, separating me from most of the world, I didn’t get any of the charm of *Toy Story.*"