In case you missed it, Y Combinator’s Paul Graham recently penned a blog post that kicked off a firestorm of discussions throughout Silicon Valley on the relative virtues of “founder mode” vs. “manager mode.” Amidst all the talk of whether a business leader should be intimately involved in every detail of their business or empower their managers to carry out their vision, I got to thinking about a spring day back in 1995, when I was a technical director at Pixar.
We had just come from a big meeting with Intel, where we met with then-CEO Andy Grove to present a concept of how Pixar and Intel could launch games that showcased Intel’s chip prowess together. Our job was to show a demo with inspiring characters and great storyboards. The demo had gone poorly, and Steve Jobs, as only he could do, was making his unhappiness clear. Steve was quite famously known to sometimes yell at his employees, and that day he let loose with a greatly impassioned rant, even by his standards.
