Like me, John remembers discovering that there were people who made animation for a living and thinking he’d found his place in the world. For him, as for me, that realization was Disney-related; it came when he stumbled upon a well-worn copy of The Art of Animation, Bob Thomas’s history of the Disney Studios, in his high school library. By the time I met John, he was as connected to Walt Disney as any twenty-six-year-old on earth. He had graduated from CalArts, the legendary art school founded by Walt, where he’d learned from some of the greatest artists of Disney’s Golden Age; he’d worked as a river guide on the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland; and he’d won a Student Academy Award in 1979 for his short film The Lady and the Lamp - an homage to Disney’s Lady and the Tramp - whose main character, a white desk lamp, would later evolve into our Pixar logo.

Michael walked through the world with a set designer’s eye, and while he wasn’t a natural mentor, it felt like a kind of apprenticeship to follow him around and watch him work.

That was the source of so much of his and the company’s success, and I had immense respect for Michael’s tendency to sweat the details. It showed how much he cared, and it made a difference. He understood that “great” is often a collection of very small things, and he helped me appreciate that even more deeply. Michael was proud of his micromanagement, but in expressing his pride, and reminding people of the details he was focused on, he could be perceived as being petty and small-minded.

Kevin Mayer couldn’t stop fantasizing about what Disney could do if we added Marvel. Kevin is as intense and laser-focused as anyone I’ve ever worked with, and when he sets his sights on something of value, it’s very hard for him to accept my advice to “be patient,” and so he harangued me on a near-daily basis to find some way to get to Ike, and I told him we needed to wait and see what David could do.

Now that John and Ed were in place, that problem was well on its way to being solved. Once Disney Animation was solid, I was open to other acquisitions, even if they weren’t obviously “Disney.” In fact, I was much more conscious of not wanting to play it safe.