One day in November 1994, Lawrence Levy received a phone call out of the blue from Steve Jobs, whom he d never met, offering him a job running Pixar, a little-known company that had already lost Jobs $50 million. With Pixar s prospects looking bleak, it was with some trepidation that Levy accepted the position. After a few weeks he discovered that the situation was even worse than he d imagined.

Pixar s advertising division just about broke even, its graphics software had few customers, its short films didn t make any money and, on top of all that, Jobs was pushing to take the company public. Everything was riding on the studio s first feature film, codenamed Toy Story, and even then it would have to be one of the most successful animated features of all time…