Tableau listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker DATA, and one of its founders had built rendering software at Pixar. The Seattle company made software that turned rows of numbers into charts and maps as fast as a person could drag a mouse. When it went public in May 2013, companies were drowning in data from the web, and most of it sat in reports that only analysts could build.

A Stanford Lab Project

Tableau grew out of a Stanford research project. Chris Stolte, a graduate student, worked with professor Pat Hanrahan on a way to turn a database query into a picture. Hanrahan had earlier worked at Pixar on its RenderMan software. Christian Chabot, a Stanford MBA, joined them to found the company in 2003. Their bet was that people who knew the business best should explore the data themselves, without waiting for the IT department.

A 64 Percent First Day

Tableau priced at $31 a share on May 16, 2013, above a range it had already raised. The stock opened at $47 and closed at $50.75, up 64 percent. Marketo also soared that day. Six years later, Salesforce agreed to buy Tableau in an all-stock deal worth about $15.7 billion. The deal closed in August 2019, and Tableau's stock left the NYSE.

Cover: Celestial Map of the Northern Sky with the Twelve Zodiac Signs, Albrecht Dürer. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a star chart (a picture made from data).