> This wouldn't be the first time we'd talked to Jobs. Three months earlier, on August 4, Steve had invited Ed, me, and Ajit Gill, our financial manager, to his mansion in Woodside, Calif. Steve, who had just been ousted from Apple, proposed that he buy us from Lucasfilm and run us as his next company. We said no, that we wanted to run the company ourselves, but we would accept his money in the form of a venture investment. And he agreed.

That wasn't the first time they'd talked to Jobs either:

> It's probably worth mentioning how Steve Jobs was introduced to (what became) Pixar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3687900

> https://engineering.stanford.edu/profile/alvy-ray-smith-ms-1...

>> One of my champions at Xerox PARC was Alan Kay. So I knew Alan Kay, who was by this time a fellow at Apple. And Steve Jobs had expressed some interest in computer graphics, so Alan Kay said let me introduce you to the guys who do it best. So Alan Kay brought Steve up to spend an afternoon with us at Lucasfilm. That’s when we first got to know each other. I had actually had one earlier conversation with Steve at some design conference on the Stanford campus one summer, but that was just a first meeting sort of thing. The first serious meeting with business possibilities was that one at Lucasfilm with Alan Kay.

>> Shortly after that, Steve and Apple broke up. And meanwhile, Lucasfilm was trying to sell us. Steve ended up buying us from Lucasfilm for $5 million.

> So not only was Jobs alerted to Pixar by an existing contact, in buying it he was to a large extent reusing the business model that had already worked with the Macintosh: take PARC goodies and commercialise them, hiring some of the PARC guys themselves.

As a side note, that Stanford link sadly no longer works any more:

> Page Not Found

> Oops! We can't find that page!

> We have a new site and things have moved around a bit. Here are some good places to start.

Oopsie doopsie! They seem to have moved the Alvy Ray Smith interview into oblivion, because search doesn't seem to find it. It doesn't seem to be archived on the Wayback Machine or archive.is or replicated anywhere else on the internet. For all I know my HN comment is the last record of the quoted text anywhere. STANFORD ENGINEERING did this.