Pat Hanrahan's Tableau Analytics Software

If you were to draw a Venn diagram with “data scientist” in one circle and “Academy Award winner” in the other, there’s probably only one person who fits in the overlapping area: Stanford University professor Pat Hanrahan.

The computer scientist is a graphics expert and former Pixar engineer who has spent much of his career designing software to make movie special effects and animations more realistic. These days he’s spending less time with Sharon Stone and Jennifer Garner (the actresses who presented his two Oscars) and more with business analysts at Zynga, Wal-Mart Stores, and EBay. Those are just a few of the companies that have fallen for Tableau software, created by the Seattle startup of the same name co-founded in 2003 by Hanrahan. It’s a kind of high-powered, highly visual Excel. Tableau integrates with a company’s databases or spreadsheets and lets anyone easily turn drab columns of numbers into interactive maps and graphs—no programming skills necessary. In effect, it’s taking business analytics mainstream. “We let any user ask questions of their data by a simple drag and drop interface,” Hanrahan, 56, says.