Pixar has dominated the world of animation with titles like Toy Story, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, Monsters, Inc.

The firm has won 27 Academy Awards, and today we are in the very, very good company with Ed Catmull,

who started it with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter. Now, Ed also wrote the best book I have ever read about creativity, namely creativity.

Dot Inc. If you haven't read it, you should run out and buy it.

So, Ed, what an honor to have you on the podcast.

It's my pleasure to be here.

Ed, when you started Pixar, what was your vision for the firm?

Well, initially, the vision was just to make the first animated film.

In the process of doing that, I and we transferred from like a technical vision to a management and a cultural vision.

And it took a while to figure this out.

It's many years of observing other companies, making mistakes and learning,

but also finding that managing for me personally was extremely interesting. So I went from being a technical person to a manager, but it evolved over time. No training. It's just all learning as you go,

observing, and learning from the mistakes. As you observed this and as you worked, what kind of

cultural vision did you have? Well, I was fortunate in that when I started off in graduate school, my first two

teachers later received the Turing Award for entirely different reasons. One of them was Alan Kay,

who pretty much ingrained me the notion that things were going to change at an exponential rate.

But the other one was from Ivan Sutherland,

who was basically saying,

it doesn't matter what your big vision is.

You've got to solve the problem now.

So these are the two sides of it.

But one of the more important things was that when I was in graduate school, I loved the culture.

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