Steve Jobs asked me to fly up to San Jose so I could see a movie he was in the middle of making for this unknown company he’d acquired called Pixar. But first he wanted to show me what he was doing with a “revolutionary” computer system at another new company of his called NeXT. It hadn’t been going that well because its complex yet elegant design couldn’t find a market, given the absolute domination of Microsoft.
I went to the NeXT office, where Steve showed me a few scenes from Toy Story, and asked if I would join the Pixar board. I said I’d have to think about it. I didn’t want to commit myself and didn’t want to insult him, but I’d never been much interested in animation and had never made any animated movies. I don’t really understand the form and I thought this new Pixar work was awkward, and, separating me from most of the world, I didn’t get any of the charm of Toy Story.
I ended the night saying, “Look, I’m being really shy about making commitments to do anything.”
Steve said, “This is ridiculous. This is going be a giant hit. Pixar’s going to be a very big company. You’ll own a really nice slice of it. Why won’t you do it?”
I said, “I don’t know, please let me think on it.”
I got back on the plane adamant about keeping my mantra of independence for as long as possible, so a few days later I called him and said, “Thank you, but I just don’t want to do this.”
I completely underestimated the company and the man.
What a dunce.
By the summer of 1992, I hadn’t made any progress and was worried the world would pass me by. I’d soon just be the forgotten man—a once high-flying executive, sidelined.
Nothing filled my head but negatives.
Here’s all I knew:
I wanted to count. Which is all that’s ever really driven me. I wanted to do something that mattered.
Of course, that means different things to different people, and it meant something different to me at fifty than it had when I was twenty-five. It didn’t have to be grand, but it did have to excite my curiosity.
People say I’m competitive. I’m not really, at least according to the standard definition, which is wanting to best another person. Competing, for me, is simply wanting to succeed. I have no need for anyone else to fail in order to consider myself a success. I don’t have to be the first at the finish line. I just have to get there.
Growing up in the kind of family I did, with parents and a brother to whom I never mattered, what became necessary for me was to count in whatever world I found myself. I couldn’t be cellophane. Or a cipher. Feeling invisible for me was death. After six months of driving across this vast country, and taking meaningless meetings with people in whom I had no interest, I still had no idea what I was going to do. I was increasingly worried my career and life had peaked. The days ambled by aimlessly and anxiously.
Until, that is, one momentous day when Diane told me about a television shopping channel called QVC, the acronym for Quality Value Convenience. It sold all sorts of merchandise directly to viewers. I’d never heard of it before. She said since I was stuck in this limbo, I ought to go to the wilds of Pennsylvania, where it was located, to see the operation and report back if it would be worthwhile for her to sell her clothes on the channel.
It is no understatement to say that trip gave me one of the purest and most powerful epiphanies of my life. I didn’t know it then, but it would turn out to be my way forward.
At ABC, Paramount, and Fox, I had known what could be done with video screens: we told stories on them. But when I went to QVC in that eventful year of 1992, I watched a screen do something I’d never realized it could do. It wasn’t just a passive one-way delivery system of content. At QVC I witnessed the primitive convergence of telephones and televisions and computers all working together. They were interactive. There was a little video monitor on the set that showed the number of calls coming in when a product was offered for sale. The vertical lines representing the calls rose during the period of the sales pitch, and then, when it ended, they subsided.
I was thunderstruck. To me, those calls were like watching waves coming to shore. I thought, Screens don’t have to be just for narrative, for telling stories. Screens can interact with consumers—that was the epiphany. It was clunky and rudimentary and I had no clear idea how to turn that revelation into action, but it sat there for a while warming up on the back plate of my brain.
From Who Knew by Barry Diller. Copyright © 2025 by Barry Diller. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
