“Shortly after Christmas, Jobs phoned Lucasfilm president Doug Norby, who, by now, was eager to wash his hands of the graphics group any way he could. The sale process had been a major distraction and the group’s forty-person payroll was a money sink. If he couldn’t sell it by the end of the year, he had decided, he would shut it down— thank you, and good-bye. Jobs offered him five million dollars, precisely the figure he had put forward at the outset. Norby accepted.

On Thursday, January 30, 1986, Catmull, Smith, and Johnson signed papers creating a new company and turning the graphics group and it technology over to the company. The spin-off was named Pixar, Inc., for the computer. On February 3, the following Monday, the three of them sat down with Jobs in a law firm conference room to sign the papers transferring ownership of the Pixar stock. Catmull and Smith, as co-founders, would each own 4 percent; another block of stock, vesting over a period of time, would be spread among the other thirty-eight employees. Jobs brought with him a five-million-dollar cashier’s check for this stake, plus a one-million-dollar cashier’s check as the first installment of the five million in capital he had agreed to put into the company.”

— The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company by David A. Price

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