(p. 116) Jobs met with the remaining employees soon after the layoffs and brought his reality distortion field with him. “You’re seeing your friends packing their stuff up and pushing it out to their cars,” Phillips remembered, “and yet somehow he had convinced you that that was the greatest possible thing that could happen.”
Within the Silicon Valley community, the talk was not of the way Jobs had handled his former employees at Pixar, but of his having kept Pixar going at all. It seemed to make little sense from a business point of view. For all his bravado about RenderMan, his motivation was likely a matter of status as much as economics. After his rise and fall at Apple, the onus was on him either to create another success story or to leave his peers to conclude that the first one had been a quirk of fate.
“It wasn’t really working,” Smith said of Pixar’s early years. “In fact, that’s being kind of gentle. We should have failed. But it seemed to me that Steve just would not suffer a defeat. He couldn’t sustain it.”
Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: italics in original.)
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)