FINTECH FOCUS: CREATIVE MANAGEMENT
TALES FROM A Animation studio Pixar is a Cinderella story – with Steve Jobs painted as the prince who swept it off its feet. But, behind the scenes, there was also Lawrence Levy, trying to be ‘the fun adult in the room, willing to make the hard decisions’ as the studio’s CFO. Are you sitting comfortably? Then let’s begin… It looked like the fairytale might finally be coming to an end. The Walt Disney Company, the creative juggernaut behind some of the 20th century’s most memorable films, had entered the new millennium on unsure footing. Rival animators were conquering the third dimension, CGI technology was fizzing with new ideas, and Disney’s sprawling studios, in the beating heart of Hollywood, suddenly felt a long way from the action down in Silicon Valley. Happily, Disney had a long-standing distribution deal with Pixar, the animation upstart from San Francisco Bay. Unhappily, that partnership only exposed the creative ennui back in Hollywood. Disney’s 2004 Home On The Range flopped at the box office, taking just $145million worldwide. Pixar’s Finding Nemo (2003) and The Incredibles
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(2004), on the other hand, had netted $871million and $631million, respectively. Come the autumn of 2004, even that success-by-association was under threat, with Disney’s then-CEO Michael Eisner falling out with Steve Jobs, who’d been running Pixar since 1986, over a new distribution deal. Pixar reached out to other distributors, and Disney watched on, helpless. Meanwhile, isolated in their creative cocoon, Pixar’s animators would start working on a new story, initially titled Heliums, about an embittered old balloon salesman, stubbornly clinging to the past as the world raced on without him. By the time Heliums, now called Up, hit the box office in 2009, Eisner was out, Jobs was in the ascendant, and Disney had merged with Pixar, creating the archetypal case study for successful competitor acquisitions. Up, of course, ended on a high, too, the grumpy old children’s entertainer renewed and energised by his youthful sidekick – art imitating
life, perhaps? The film won two Academy Awards and was only the second animated feature in history, after Disney’s 1991 classic Beauty And The Beast, to receive a nomination for Best Picture.
A PARALLEL UNIVERSE So, what’s all this got to do with fintech? There are teachings in the Disney-Pixar merger. Their story aligns neatly with the fraught incumbent-challenger relationship in the financial services sector – and that enduring tension between secure stability and risk-taking innovation. Having played his part in slaying the dragon of financial uncertainty at Pixar, the studio’s former executive VP and CFO, Lawrence Levy, knows what it takes to walk the plank between ambitious overreach and staid consolidation. “It doesn’t matter if you’re making animated feature films or the next great fintech breakthrough, innovation companies live on the precipice of two things,” Levy explains. “On the one side, there’s the dream, the vision: ‘we’re going to make the world better, we’re going to make better products in this space’. And then, on the other side, there are the practicalities of it. The fundraising, the profitability, the cash. You can’t run out of money.” It’s all very well shooting for the moon, but if you can only afford the jet fuel to get halfway, you might as well have stayed on Earth. Pixar was initially funded by a mere $5million in cash when Steve Jobs bought the studio’s technology rights from George Lucas in 1986. As Levy explains, that’s an unenviable financial position for any incoming CFO. www.fintechf.com
