Pixar Famous Quotes

In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends. Last night, I experienced something new, an extraordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source. To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions about fine cooking is a gross understatement. They have rocked me to my core. In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau's famous motto: "Anyone can cook." But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere. It is difficult to imagine more humble origins than those of the genius now cooking at Gusteau's, who is, in this critic's opinion, nothing less than the finest chef in France. I will be returning to Gusteau's soon, hungry for more.

When they built their headquarters, Pixar famously put the only bathrooms in the building inside the central atrium to force interdepartmental small talk, knowing that innovation often comes from the serendipitous collision of ideas.

It is a matter of legal record that, for years, the CEOs of Apple, Intel, Google, Pixar, and other Silicon Valley firms operated something very much like a cartel against their own employees. In a scandal that journalists now call “the Techtopus,” these worthies agreed to avoid recruiting one another’s tech workers and thus keep those workers’ wages down across the industry. In 2007, in one of the most famous chapters of the Techtopus story, the famous innovator Steve Jobs emailed Eric Schmidt, demanding that this CEO and friend of top Democrats do something about a Google recruiter who was trying to lure an employee away from Apple. Two days later, according to the reporter who has studied the case most comprehensively, Schmidt wrote back to Jobs to tell him the recruiter had been fired. Jobs then forwarded Schmidt’s email around with this comment appended: “:)

Brian Chesky sends to all Airbnb employees is a powerful one. “You have to continue to repeat things” Brian told our class at Stanford. “Culture is about repeating, over and over again, the things that really matter for your company.” Airbnb reinforces these verbal messages with visual impact as well. Brian hired an artist from Pixar to create a storyboard of the entire experience of an Airbnb guest, from start to finish, emphasizing the customer-centered design thinking that is a hallmark of its culture. Even Airbnb conference rooms tell a story; each one is a replica of a room that’s available for rent on the service. Every time Airbnb team members hold a meeting in one of those rooms, they are reminded of how guests feel when they stay there. At Amazon, Jeff Bezos famously bans PowerPoint decks and insists on written memos, which are read in silence at the beginning of each meeting. This memo policy is one of the ways that Amazon encourages a culture of truth telling. Memos have to be specific and comprehensive, and those who read the memos have to respond in kind rather than simply sit through some broad bullet points on a PowerPoint deck and nod vague agreement. Bezos believes that memos encourage smarter questions and deeper thinking. Plus, because they’re self-contained (rather than requiring a person to present a deck), they are more easily distributed and consumed by a wider population within Amazon. The late Steve Jobs used architecture as a core part of his deliberate communications strategy at Pixar. He designed Pixar headquarters so that the front doors, main stairs, main theater, and screening rooms all led to the atrium, which contained the café and mailboxes, ensuring that employees from all departments and specialties would see people from other groups on a regular basis, thus reinforcing Pixar’s collaborative, inclusive culture.

Moreover, Netflix produces exactly what it knows its customers want based on their past viewing habits, eliminating the waste of all those pilots, and only loses customers when they make a proactive decision to cancel their subscription. The more a person uses Netflix, the better Netflix gets at providing exactly what that person wants. And increasingly, what people want is the original content that is exclusive to Netflix. The legendary screenwriter William Goldman famously wrote of Hollywood, “Nobody knows anything.” To which Reed Hastings replies, “Netflix does.” And all this came about because Hastings had the insight and persistence to wait nearly a decade for Moore’s Law to turn his long-term vision from an impossible pipe dream into one of the most successful media companies in history. Moore’s Law has worked its magic many other times, enabling new technologies ranging from computer animation (Pixar) to online file storage (Dropbox) to smartphones (Apple). Each of those technologies followed the same path from pipe dream to world-conquering reality, all driven by Gordon Moore’s 1965 insight.