#56: Pixar’s Ed Catmull on Steve Jobs, Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Up & Building Creative Teams

**Ed Catmull** (0:00)
I do believe that if you just accept that you're wrong half the time, then you find it faster, you spend less time on the things that don't work. And that's what counts. But you're still going to be wrong this innumerable times. Just don't spend as much time pursuing the wrong path.
Divot.

**Derek Andersen** (0:29)
This episode is brought to you by Google for Startups.
Today we're in Tiburon, California, with Ed Catmull, the co-founder and former president of Pixar, almost some of the most beloved stories of the last 30 years. Long before Toy Story changed movies forever, Ed was a pioneer in 3D computer graphics, helping build RenderMan, the technology that made digital worlds feel alive. He led Pixar from a bold idea into one of the most influential creative companies in history, partnering with Steve Jobs, John Lasseter and others to change how movies were made and stories are told. Disney acquired Pixar in 2006, and under his leadership, Pixar shaped the culture of become part of our lives from Toy Story, The Finding Nemo, Bugs Life, Ratatouille, The Incredibles, Wall-E and Up.
He earned the AM Turing Award and multiple Academy Honors. The Creativity Inc, his best-selling book on creativity and team-building, he gave the World of Playbook for building great teams and ways to help ideas survive and thrive. Hope you enjoy the conversation.

**Ed Catmull** (1:31)
We taught a couple of two-day courses at MIT Sloan, and it was wrestling with a problem which has plagued me for a long time is, why is it the leaders of many companies cannot think long-term? Why they can't make long-term decisions, even when they know that things are changing fast? So I'm now referring to sun and silicon graphics. So if you will notice or think about it, no workstation company survived until today. But if you look at the history of computers as computers got faster and faster, then it was pretty obvious that the low end was coming up and displacing the high end.
So part of it's a little obvious in that for the high end, once they get a customer base and a way of working and a business model, there it actually makes it more difficult because they're pulled into thinking about...

**Derek Andersen** (2:36)
What's serving the current customers?

**Ed Catmull** (2:37)
Yeah, within the short period of time. Even though they know that this phenomenon is happening, and very few people can think about that, the implication of the rate of change.
And at the time, the term we were using, until fairly recently, was Moore's Law, which is just the compounding rate of increase of the number of transistors on a chip. Now, a problem was that this was the name of a phenomenon. So it was called law.
It wasn't actually the right thing to call it. Everybody knows that. It was just an observation. And even Gordon Moore said, well, due to physical limitations, it will probably only be true for a certain period of time. And these were real physical limitations. How close can they be together? How do you mask it? The reason that Moore's Law continued as long as they did was because it was so successful commercially. Because computers were so successful. The amount of money poured into solving the problems was enormous. The book, The History of Modern Computing, it was actually in its preface, it's been said it very well, is that the society created the modern computer and the modern computer created society. But they went hand in hand. So Moore's Law was the name of the result of this super complex process.
Nevertheless, the rate of increase was basically, you got every year 40 percent more compute power per dollar. So it's an annual compounding rate of increasing compute power per dollar at 40 percent for over 60 years, and it's increasing recently. All right, so now if you just make some decisions saying, this is true within a certain period of time, and you can look out.

**Derek Andersen** (4:49)
You can forecast it basically.

**Ed Catmull** (4:51)
Yeah, for 15 years, you can say, if this is true, what does this mean for us? Now, it's only impactful if it impacts your business, but if you're in the computer business, it impacts your business. It is your business. So why couldn't these people make better decisions at the time based upon that rate of change? So that was a question that Hal and I wrestled with in this reading top of the course, was to try to figure things out. One of the things we tried to figure out was how do we explain exponential to people so they understand it? And what we realized was that, don't stop saying exponential.