flâneur

David Senra: Ed Catmull, Co-founder of Pixar

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Ed Catmull is the co-founder of Pixar and the former president of Disney Animation. He grew up in 1950s Utah wanting to animate for Disney. Convinced he couldn't draw well enough, he studied physics and computer science at the University of Utah instead, landing in one of the great talent incubators in computing history. In 1972, he animated his own left hand—one of the first 3D computer renderings ever made. Since childhood he had carried a single ambition: to make the first feature film animated entirely by computer. Reaching it took more than 20 years. George Lucas hired Catmull in 1979 to build a computer division at Lucasfilm. When Lucas needed cash, Steve Jobs bought that division in 1986 for $5 million and spun it out as Pixar. For years it sold imaging computers and lost money while Catmull and John Lasseter made short films to keep the dream alive. Jobs sank roughly $50 million of his own money into it. In 1995, Pixar released Toy Story, the first feature animated entirely by computer, and went public days later. Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, WALL-E, and Up followed. Disney bought Pixar in 2006 for $7.4 billion and put Catmull in charge of both studios; he revived a fal

David Senra: Right before we started recording, you said that you had some Steve Jobs stories and that you had wanted to add something to it. What were you going to say? Ed Catmull: Well, this is a result of just thinking a lot about the last many years as we were... And a lot of it's reflection, but also trying to understand the nature of change and the process that you have of trying to come to an understanding or gain insight. In the book, I talked a lot about the Braintrust. The Braintrust is such a mechanism. Ed Catmull: Different companies have different ways of trying to arrive at the…

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