63 THE INSANELY GREAT
$50-MILLION GAMBLE

Steve Jobs will be forever intrinsically linked with the Apple brand, but his part in the story of another brand was also pivotal. It was his investment, his gamble that was to help make that brand insanely great.

“Pixar Animation Studios wouldn’t exist without Steve Jobs. It’s pretty remarkable to think about what he gave us. When he bought us [in 1986] he had just left Apple. He had just started to form his company NeXT and he bought our group from Lucasfilm,” explains John Lasseter.

“In the beginning Pixar was a computer company. We did hardware and software. It was a very high-end computer; it was way ahead of its time, so frankly there was no market for it. It was very expensive. Steve was trying to figure out a way to sell it and market it. He had been used to the consumer computer world but this was more of a professional world.”

Pixar’s core product was in fact the Pixar Image Computer, a system primarily sold, when it sold at all, to government agencies and the medical community.

It was in a bid to drive sales of the Pixar Image Computer that Lasseter, the only traditionally trained Disney animator at the company, started to create short demonstration animations (such as Luxo Jr) to show off the device’s capabilities. He premiered his creations at SIGGRAPH, the computer graphics industry’s largest convention, to great fanfare.

As a result, Lasseter’s animation department began producing computer-animated commercials for outside companies. Early successes included campaigns for Tropicana, Listerine, Life Savers and Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

But poor sales of Pixar’s computers threatened to put the company out of business. In April 1990, Jobs sold Pixar’s hardware division to Viacom Systems and in 1991 another 30 employees were let go. This left just the software programmers and Lasseter’s animation department.

Jobs, who by this time had invested $50 million of his own money, was tempted to sell the whole company but instead choose to take a risk as he saw a different future for a new Pixar.

“Steve was always very supportive of letting us continue the animation research. He really started seeing the potential of the evolution of Pixar, from a computer company to an animation studio. And then he saw the vision of us doing a feature film with Toy Story. He kept guiding us.

“The only thing he ever asked for me was to make it great. The famous term he used was ‘make it insanely great’. That’s what he strove for us to do. Always. And he loved the fact that we were doing things that nobody else had ever done.

“Two things I remember him telling me. One was how important quality is to what we do.

“He said that ‘the way that the audience feels about your brand is like a bank account – you can either make deposits or you can make withdrawals’. Deposits are of course making something great that everyone really loves. A withdrawal is putting out something you know isn’t very good but you still put your name on it. He refused to ever do that.

“That was so vital to him, how people cared about our brand and it really permeated into Pixar. There are 1,200 people at Pixar now. If you ask any one of them, ‘What’s the most important thing to you?’ In most of Hollywood people might say, ‘What’s in it for me?’, but at Pixar, all 1,200 people would answer number one Pixar, number two the movie you’re working on and down the line, then they’d get to themselves.

“The other thing he said to me that I’ll never forget was when we were working on Toy Story, before he went back to Apple.

“He and I would talk all the time. We became like brothers. He would stare off sometimes and just start thinking. One time he was doing this and he said, ‘Back when we were making computers at Apple, the lifespan of these computers were three years, in five years you’d have a doorstop. You do your job right and these movies can last forever.’

“And in animation we have that opportunity. Name another movie from 1938 that’s seen as much today as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. That simple statement has kept me focused on the right thing when making our movies – the stories and the characters.

“Steve always drove us to get to the higher level. It’s great for business, right, and we’ve been very successful with our films. But it’s because of the quality and Steve always pushed for that, quality in every way.”

And the moral is that your brand is like a bank account. When are you going to make the next deposit?