The Steve Jobs Roller Coaster by Ed Catmull

Ed Catmull is the Co-founder of Pixar. This essay is an excerpt from his book Creativity, Inc., originally published in 2014.

The 1985 SIGGRAPH conference was being held in San Francisco, right up the 101 freeway from Silicon Valley. We had a booth on the trade show floor where we showcased our Pixar Image Computer. Steve Jobs dropped by on the first afternoon.

Immediately, I sensed a change. Since I’d last seen him, Steve had founded a personal computer company, NeXT. I think that gave him the ability to approach us with a different mindset. He had less to prove. Now, he looked around our booth and proclaimed our machine the most interesting thing in the room. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said, and we set off on a stroll around the hall. “How are things going?”

“Not great,” I confessed. We were still hoping to find an outside investor, but we were nearly out of options. It was then that Steve raised the idea of resuming our talks. “Maybe we can work something out,” he said.

As we talked, we came upon Bill Joy, one of the founders of Sun Computer. Bill, like Steve, was an extraordinarily bright, competitive, articulate, and opinionated person. I don’t remember what they talked about as we stood there, but I’ll never forget the way they talked: standing nose to nose, their arms behind their backs, swaying from side to side—in perfect sync—completely oblivious to anything going on around them. This went on for quite a while, until Steve had to break off to go meet someone.

After Steve left, Bill turned to me and said, “Boy, is he arrogant.”

When Steve came by our booth again later, he walked up to me and said of Bill: “Boy, is he arrogant.”

I remember being struck by this clash-of-the-titans moment. I was amused by the fact that each man could see ego in the other but not in himself.

It took another few months, but on the third day of January, 1986, Steve said he was ready to make a deal and addressed, right off, the issue that had concerned me most—his previous insistence on controlling and running the company. He was willing to back off on that, he said, and not only that, he was open to letting us explore making a business out of the nexus of computers and graphics. By the end of the meeting, Alvy and I felt comfortable with his proposal—and his intentions. The only wild card was what he was going to be like as a partner. We were well aware of his reputation for being difficult. Only time would tell whether he would live up to it.

At one point in this period, I met with Steve and gently asked him how things got resolved when people disagreed with him. He seemed unaware that what I was really asking him was how things would get resolved if we worked together and I disagreed with him, for he gave a more general answer.

He said, “When I don’t see eye to eye with somebody, I just take the time to explain it better, so they understand the way it should be.”

Later, when I relayed this to my colleagues at Lucasfilm, they laughed. Nervously. I remember one of Steve’s attorneys telling us that if we were acquired by his client, we had better be ready to “get on the Steve Jobs roller coaster.” Given our dire straits, this was a ride Alvy and I were ready to board.

The acquisition process was complicated by the fact that the negotiators for Lucasfilm weren’t very good. The chief financial officer, in particular, underestimated Steve, assuming he was just another rich kid in over his head. This CFO told me that the way to establish his authority in the room was to arrive last. His thinking, which he articulated out loud to me, was that this would establish him as the “most powerful player,” since he and only he could afford to keep everyone else waiting.

All that it ended up establishing, however, was that he’d never met anyone like Steve Jobs.

The morning of the big negotiating session, all of us but the CFO were on time—Steve and his attorney; me, Alvy, and our attorney; Lucasfilm’s attorneys; and an investment banker. At precisely 10 A.M., Steve looked around and, finding the CFO missing, started the meeting without him! In one swift move, Steve had not only foiled the CFO’s attempt to place himself atop the pecking order, but he grabbed control of the meeting. This would be the kind of strategic, aggressive play that would define Steve’s stewardship of Pixar for years to come—once we joined forces, he became our protector, as fierce on our behalf as he was on his own. In the end, Steve paid $5 million to spin Pixar off of Lucasfilm—and then, after the sale, he agreed to pay another $5 million to fund the company, with 70 percent of the stock going to Steve and 30 percent going to the employees.

The closing took place on a Monday morning in February 1986, and the mood in the room was decidedly muted because everyone was so worn out by the negotiations. After we signed our names, Steve pulled Alvy and me aside, put his arms around us, and said, “Whatever happens, we have to be loyal to each other.” I took that as an expression of his still-bruised feelings in the wake of his ouster from Apple, but I never forgot it. The gestation had been trying but the feisty little company called Pixar had been born.

— Ed Catmull

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