The real woman who came up with the poems for Beanie Babies talks Ty Warner and what 'The Beanie Bubble' got right and wrong about her life

• "The Beanie Bubble," streaming now on AppleTV+, tells the story of the rise and fall of Beanie Babies.
• Geraldine Viswanathan plays a fictionalized version of Lina Trivedi.

In "The Beanie Bubble," now streaming on AppleTV+, Maya (Geraldine Viswanathan) reads a poem for Stripes, a tiger Beanie Baby. While it's not the real verse, Stripes' poem was the first of dozens of Beanie Baby poems written by the real Maya: Lina Trivedi.

Trivedi, Ty Inc.'s 12th employee, came up with the idea to include birth dates and rhymes in every Beanie Baby hangtag.

"I was looking at the tag and how it said 'To:' and 'From:' I was just thinking nobody uses that. Nobody actually gives a Beanie Baby to someone and writes their name on it," Trivedi, now 50, told Insider via phone. "How do we use that space to build some type of connection with people and tie it into content that we can have on our webpage that people will want to come look at and get excited about?"

After a pitch to CEO Ty Warner, she made a mock-up in Photoshop, writing Stripes' poem "within a couple minutes." Warner tasked her with writing more than 80 Beanie Baby poems in 24 hours.

Based on Zac Bissonnette's 2015 bestselling book, "The Beanie Bubble" follows the story of the rise and fall of Beanie Babies with a focus on three women who were close to Warner and instrumental in the company's success.

Viswanathan plays a fictionalized version of Trivedi who really built and ran the company's website with her brother and wrote an estimated 137 Beanie Baby poems, most of which were penned in three days, not one.

"I was always nervous that my role was going to be played by someone that doesn't necessarily reflect who I am," a relieved Trivedi, who identifies as Indian American, said of Viswanathan's casting.

"I was like, 'It's gonna be a white male college kid playing my role," Trivedi said. "That's gonna be so terrible. I'm gonna feel so slighted. Not just for myself, but for women in technology."

While the film gets many things right, others are embellished for the screen

Before the pandemic, Trivedi spoke with a production company that indicated they were working on the adaptation to answer questions about Ty.com crashing on New Year's Eve and to later correct any inaccuracies from Bissonnette's book based on her daughter in the event she was mentioned in the film.

The film still took some liberties.

Trivedi was hired at Ty Inc. at 19, not 17, while studying sociology at DePaul University in Illinois. She didn't have an office cubicle and didn't suggest the idea to retire Beanie Babies.

She estimated starting at $10 an hour and getting paid $12.50 an hour by the time she left Ty Inc. at the end of 1997. The film claims she made $12 an hour upon her departure.

Trivedi didn't really leave Ty Inc. to work for The Pokémon Company

Trivedi laughed when she learned the movie's ending suggested she was swooped up by The Pokémon Company, saying her teenage daughter, a fan of the cards and games, would be thrilled by that detail.

In reality, when Trivedi left Ty Inc., things weren't easy. A website development business she started with her brother didn't pan out.

Bissonnette's book claims Trivedi went to jail for a string of felonies and potentially forged postal money orders. While Trivedi denies those claims, she acknowledged being in jail, explaining how it helped shape her.

"In the '90s, I was in jail for random things all the time," Trivedi said, specifically referencing underage drinking and a dispute with an officer. "I was a rebel against authority. If you give me a ticket and I walk away, I'm not going to court. That was my attitude back then."

"The important thing to focus on is what I got out of it," Trivedi said of working for three years with a non-profit once she was out of jail, originally making the same money she was at Ty, Inc. "I was basically making jobs accessible to communities that didn't have access to jobs."

Today, Trivedi's a single mom, living in Wisconsin. She wants to continue carving out a space for women in tech as the cofounder of an AI start-up, Joii.AI.

Currently working with a longtime friend on a program to tackle loneliness and social disconnection, their goal is to create an AI that users would "train to emulate their patterns and how they communicate and how they talk to one another for the purpose of connecting with the people they're closest to."

Trivedi hasn't reached out to or heard from Ty Warner since leaving Ty Inc.

"I know he's a very private person," Trivedi said of Warner, adding, "I don't even know how I would reach out to him. He's so private. It's not like he's on Instagram."

When asked about Warner, who is played as a bit of an egotistical manchild in "The Beanie Bubble" by Zach Galifianakis, Trivedi described the Ty she knew as "quirky," "intelligent" and "a visionary."

"I never saw the side of Ty that I sometimes hear from a lot of people of him being harsh or angry," Trivedi said. "He was always very appreciative for everything that I did. He was always very kind and courteous."

Recently, Trivedi considered trying to reach out when she saw Ty Inc. released 30th-anniversary versions of some older Beanie Babies, the poems still on her mind.

"I saw the inside of the tags, and I was like, 'They did that all wrong," Trivedi said with a laugh, suggesting they should've written fresh poems that provided updates on the characters.

Trivedi almost felt compelled to write new poems to send to Ty Inc., but refrained.

To this day, she keeps two Stripes Beanies, one of which sits in her car. The tiger shares her birthday, and its poem was written as a personal reflection. She had no idea the impact they may have one day.

"I had a 12-year-old boy that found out that I wrote the poems to Beanie Babies, and he told me thank you for making the world a better place," Trivedi said.