David Price's corporate history of Pixar traces the studio from its 1979 origins inside Lucasfilm's computer division through Toy Story to the $7.4 billion Disney sale. Jobs is the financier and eventual chairman here, not the protagonist — Ed Catmull, Alvy Ray Smith, and John Lasseter carry the narrative — which is the point. Price was given access to early Pixar employees, internal documents, and even SEC filings that had never been released in full, and the result is a thorough account of how a money-losing hardware company that happened to employ the best animators in the world became the most successful animation studio in history. Jobs appears intermittently: buying the division for $10 million, bankrolling it through years of losses, negotiating the Disney distribution deal, and eventually selling it at a price that made him Disney's largest individual shareholder. But the book is Pixar's story, not Jobs's, and that distance makes it a useful corrective to hagiography.
The Pixar Touch is the best book on the shelf for understanding what Jobs was buying when he spent $10 million on Lucasfilm's computer graphics division. He bought it as a hardware company — Pixar's first product was a rendering computer called the Pixar Image Computer — and it sold almost nothing. What he actually owned was a team of people who would figure out how to make the first computer-animated feature film, but that took a decade. For founders, the lesson is about patience and optionality: Jobs did not know he had bought a film studio when he wrote the cheque, but he kept writing cheques until the asset revealed itself.
Price also documents the internal tensions that make Pixar's success seem miraculous in retrospect. The animation group was treated as a distraction by the hardware side; Lasseter's short films were considered promotional material for a product nobody bought. The structure of the company was wrong for the asset it contained, and only when Jobs accepted that Pixar was not a computer company did it work. Founders should ask whether they are clinging to a business model that no longer fits the company they actually have.
The book's account of the Disney distribution negotiation is also valuable. Pixar had no leverage — Disney was the only game in town — but Jobs structured a deal that gave Pixar co-financing, co-ownership, and a 50% profit split because he understood that Disney needed the creative talent more than Pixar needed Disney's distribution.