To Pixar and Beyond

This book was written by Lawrence Levy. He was recruited by Steve Jobs to be Chief Financial Officer at Pixar. When Levy was first summoned, he did not know much about Pixar. It was far away from his home. And he knew about the bad rumors about Steve Jobs - got kicked out of Apple, failed with his NextStep company, and was known to be a ruthless leader.

Levy did join. He found out that Pixar was involved in a lot of projects. Most of them were not making money and were not good choices to grow the company. Steve Jobs was funding the company out of his own money. The people at the company were worried that Jobs was going to come in and screw up their magic. Plus the employees were grumbling because they were promised compensation in the form of stock options that never showed up.

The big thing going on when Levy arrived was that Pixar was under contract to produce Toy Story for Disney. Levy studied the situation and came up with a plan to grow the company and take it public. Steve Jobs wanted to do that to make his investment return some value to him. Taking a firm public is a tough job, and only works if people want to buy into your company. Not many people knew about Pixar. And Jobs/Levy were not experts in the Hollywood industry.

As history knows, Toy Story was a smash hit. Pixar did go public at a high price making Jobs a billionaire. And then Jobs went on to return to Apple, get cancer, and die. Levy did spend a lot of time working closely with Jobs. But that is not the entirety of this book. In fact, Levy also traces his path after he left Pixar.

This book was really a slam dunk. It gave many details about what it was like to be at Pixar after Steve Jobs essentially bought the company. There was a lot of dealing with Disney, especially since Pixar was already wrapped up in a multi-movie deal with Disney once Levy arrived. Luckily, the success of Toy Story allowed them to renegotiate go to infinity and beyond with the company.