A great story on Techcrunch today regarding Oren Jacob, a former CTO of one of my favorite companies in the world, Pixar:
“… In the winter of 1991, Pixar had some major layoffs and the company shrank to less than 40 people. Oren was still an intern at the time and had attended both the “you’re being laid off” meeting and the “you are the few who are staying” meeting and decided he liked the latter one better. He went home for the rest of the week, didn’t attend any exit interviews, didn’t turn in any keycards and just showed up for work the next week to a company that was now focused solely on animation.
The guy who dealt with keycards never deactivated his key. Oren kept showing up. Folks were surprised to see him in the hallway, but he played it cool and nobody raised a fuss. Many months later, paychecks started showing up in his box again and continued for 20+ years. Over those 20 years Oren worked obsessively hard and rose through the ranks of the company to CTO.”
Here’s a guy who is passionate and won’t take ‘no’ for an answer. The story of how he got INTO Pixar is equally amusing. Plus, he was inspired to get into animation and join Pixar at the SAME “Spike and Mike’s” animation festival screening of Pixar’s early short “Tin Toy” that my middle brother and I attended way back in 1988. My brother has gone on to do movies … I’m equally passionate (if not more) about movies as I am about online startups but I guess I took a different fork in the road than he did when I went to college…
Incidentally, way back in the very early days of Rotten Tomatoes, we used to monitor our incoming traffic on movie release days to see if we had any online visits from the studios. This was even before Rotten Tomatoes was a real company and was just a hobby site that our partner Senh was working on and I helped to host and provide technical assistance. One of my fond memories was during the release of “A Bug’s Life” when we noticed a flood of visitors with Internet IP addresses from Pixar visiting the site. What was funny would be that we could see these same visitors would continually hit “refresh” on the Rotten Tomatoes reviews page for “A Bug’s Life” meaning that they were even more obsessed about the Tomatometer score than we were. What a thrill for our “newborn” web site. At the time Senh, who came up with the idea for Rotten Tomatoes, was pulling all-nighters just to keep the site up-to-date with the latest reviews, but we were all pretty excited when we saw the Pixar visits. Being huge Pixar fans, we had bought tickets in advance to see the film on opening night at Oakland’s Jack London Square AMC theater. I guess the excitement was too much for Senh because he fell asleep right in the middle of the movie — not an indicator of the quality of the movie… he was just was too tired from pulling an all-nighter collecting reviews for the movie the night before.
Anyways, Pixar was in Richmond at the time and would eventually move to become our neighbors in Emeryville and we would go over there to visit our friends and ex-coworkers there on occasion. The most memorable visit was to award Brad Bird the Golden Tomato award for “The Incredibles“.
Go Pixar!