Toy Story (1995) changed filmmaking. It was the first fully computer-animated feature film and ushered in an era of computer-generated imagery, or CGI, replacing hand-drawn techniques. Made on a budget of $30 million, it reportedly grossed $370 million, establishing CGI as a profitability magnet.
Steve Jobs was Toy Story’s executive producer.
After he was ousted from Apple in September 1985, Jobs started NeXT Inc, which designed computers for the education market. Alongside, in 1986, he acquired control of the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd, owned by George Lucas, the maker of the Star Wars franchise. According to various accounts, Jobs paid $10 million or less for the division. He renamed it Pixar and, 20 years later, in 2006, sold it to Disney for $7.4 billion. The deal also made Jobs Disney’s largest shareholder.
Long story short, though NeXT had its share of struggles and stopped making hardware altogether, Jobs was not exactly twiddling his thumbs while outside Apple and inserting pins in a voodoo doll that looked like John Sculley, the man who had ousted him from Apple. Yet, what he truly pined for was a return to Apple. The Jobs legend truly began to take shape only after he returned to a teetering Apple in December 1996 and put it on the path to becoming arguably the most valued and admired company.
The United States, the homeland of the most remarkable tech startups, has many examples where founders stayed with their companies for ages, steering them on the journey to becoming large enterprises. Even today, tech companies from Meta to Nvidia and Tesla to Dell are run by their founders (it can be argued that Elon Musk was not Tesla’s original founder, but it was he who put it on its current path).
The story is turning out to be different in India.
Deepinder Goyal shows no signs of anguish in his statement that he was stepping away from the group CEO role at Eternal—a company he spent 18 years building. Elsewhere in this magazine, you will find a handy list of founders who stepped away from their startups. Some moved into non-executive roles, some on to other things.
The new group CEO of Eternal is Albinder Dhindsa, who came into the company when it acquired the beleaguered Grofers in 2022. It had been renamed Blinkit and became the driving force at Eternal. This is one of the few cases of a startup being acquired by another in India and could not have yielded great returns for Grofers’ early investors because it was a distress sale. This deal, if anything, is part of the sobering of expectations for investors in India’s startups.
Oddly, for a segment built on the passion of the young, the core principle of startup investing is steeped in pessimism. The VC playbook, as drafted in the world’s most developed startup ecosystem of Silicon Valley, says nine out of 10 investments would fail. But the 10th, the one to succeed, will give such a high return—90- to 100-times the investment—that it would make up for the failures.
That is not the case in India. It is now clear that the returns here will be far lower. And therefore, more of the investments must succeed. This is leading to a redrafting of the investor playbook, with more meticulous due diligence and a sharp eye on the revenue model and path to profitability. Gone are the days when a star investor would commit millions on a Skype call.
Indeed, the unwritten rules of the startup world are being rewritten in India.
Suveen Sinha
Editor, Forbes India
Email: suveen.sinha@nw18.com
X ID: @suveensinha
First Published: Feb 06, 2026, 14:15
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