To Pixar and Beyond Book Summary

Book Summary

15 min

Audio available

Brief Summary

When Pixar was on the verge of failure, Steve Jobs called Lawrence Levy and asked him to help recover the company. Pixar started as a Lucasfilm computer graphics company before being bought by Jobs, who feuded with the creative team. After Levy was brought on, they decided to take the risky chance of turning Pixar into a full-fledged animation studio. They implemented a four-pillar plan, hoping to win back profits and credit from a bad contract with Disney, make movies regularly, and have a successful IPO. After the release of their Toy Story, Pixar proved to be an inventive and dependable studio and eventually raised their valuation to 6 billion dollars after investing in their creative team. Despite their rocky start, Pixar was sold for 7.4 billion to Disney and restored Steve Jobs as a leader at the cusp of technological innovation.

About the Author

Lawrence Levy served as the Chief Financial Officer and a member of its Office of the President for 12 years. Later he became a member of its board of directors. He helped take Pixar from a graphics company to a billion-dollar entertainment studio. He later left to pursue his passion for Buddhist philosophy and founded the Juniper Foundation with his wife. He is developing a series of books on balancing materialism, consumption and inner strength. He had degrees from Indiana University and Harvard Law School and lives in Palo Alto.

Topics

Biography & Memoir

To Pixar and Beyond Book Summary Preview

Who Should Read This?

Business-owners or finance professionals looking to turn a business around.
Anyone curious about the scrappy origins of one of the most inventive animation studios of all time.
People interested in the intersection between Silicon Valley and the entertainment industry.

What You Will Learn

The details of Pixar’s transition from a money-losing hardware company to an animation studio.
Why Levy injected Pixar’s strategy with Buddhist principles.
How Pixar built its reputation from nothing and re-negotiated a deadly contract with Disney.

Key Insights

In 1995, Pixar released its debut film Toy Story and quickly became one of the most powerful animation studios in the world with a long line of successful and inventive films. But in the years leading up to Toy Story, Pixar was a small graphics company-turned-animation studio struggling to keep its head above water. The author Lawrence Levy became the chief financial officer and joined CEO Steve Jobs in developing a strategy to turn Pixar around.

Steve Jobs purchased Pixar in 1986 with the intention of turning it into a computer graphics hardware company.

In 1971, George Lucas founded Lucasfilm, and Industrial Light & Magic in 1975, a visual effects company that won a ton of Academy Awards for its work on franchises like Pirates of the Caribbean and Mission: Impossible. A few years later, Lucas wanted to include computer-generated graphics into the business. He created a department headed by Ed Catmull and John Lasseter, who was recently fired from Disney. This department would later become Pixar.

When Jobs purchased Pixar, he never intended for it to become a filmmaking company. Rather, he wanted to use it to demonstrate their unique ability to create computer graphics. But as Pixar continued to lose money, Jobs sold the hardware section of the company and was left with the animation studio.

Pixar’s creative staff felt that Jobs didn’t see their creative potential and only saw the company as a failed hardware endeavor. They were also frustrated that Jobs refused to give the team stock options, wanting to keep the majority of the company to himself.

Levy writes that this may have been justified since most start-ups lose value in the long-run and employees can be left overworked and bitter. But at Pixar, the employees wanted to invest in their work and were convinced that it would eventually be a financial success, and felt particularly upset that they couldn’t own part of the company.

Jobs saw Pixar as a chance at redemption and learned from his dismissal from Apple.

10 years prior, Jobs was dismissed from his position at Apple. If Pixar succeeded in going public, he would feel redeemed as a businessman. He decided to put everything he could into Pixar’s rise and was cautious in choosing his staff. He only brought on people he could trust, worried that his peers would kick him out again.

In the 2005 Stanford commencement address, Jobs explained how he felt. He said that after getting fired, everything he had worked for in his adult life was gone. He felt devastated and publicly humiliated. With Pixar, he felt like...