Source: The Pixar Story (2007)
I just watched this documentary, and it was terrific, as a movie, and a biopic. A couple of things stuck out to me during the viewing. The first was how Steve Jobs funded Pixar, to the tune of $1M for 5 years. This wasn’t a lot of money for him. This wasn’t a lot of money to run a business on. The amount of money wasn’t interesting from either side. The process was the significant bit. In essence, this was venture capitalism in its infancy. Apparently, in 1990, this was novel.
This is the way the whole world works now. The entire empire of Amazon was built on burning VC money until they became the online titan they are now. For 20 years, they chewed through capital until they couldn’t be challenged. For Jobs and Pixar, it only took 5 years until they proved their “product” was great, via the massive success of Toy Story. One week after the release of the movie, they took the company public, in a reportedly wildly successful IPO, and Jobs cashed out.
That is genius.