Alvy Ray Smith
Smith and Catmull co-founded Pixar in 1986 with financing from Steve Jobs. After the spinout from Lucasfilm of Pixar, he served on the board of directors and was executive vice president. According to the Steve Jobs biography "iCon" by Jeffrey S. Young and William L. Simon, Alvy Ray quit Pixar after a heated argument with Jobs over use of a whiteboard. It was an unwritten rule that none other than Jobs was allowed to use it, a rule Smith decided to break in front of everyone after Jobs went "total street bully" on him and they ended up screaming into each other's face "in full bull rage". Despite being the co-founder of Pixar, Young and Simon claim that the company has largely overlooked his part in company history since his departure. For example, there is no mention of Smith on the Pixar website.
Pixar
While some of Pixar's first animators were former cel animators including John Lasseter, they also came from computer animation or were fresh college graduates. A large number of animators that make up the animation department at Pixar were hired around the time the studio released "A Bug's Life" (1998), "Monsters, Inc." (2001) and "Finding Nemo" (2003). Although "Toy Story" was a successful film, it was Pixar's first feature film at the time, becoming the first major computer-animation studio to successfully produce theatrical feature films. The majority of the animation industry was (and still is) located in Los Angeles while Pixar is located north in the San Francisco Bay Area. Also, traditional hand-drawn animation was still the dominant medium for feature animated films.