Innovator Pat Hanrahan Applying the Pixar Magic to Spreadsheets
December 12 — December 18, 2011 | businessweek.com
Innovator Pat Hanrahan Applying the Pixar Magic To Spreadsheets
If you were to draw a Venn diagram with consin at Madison, he earned perfect grades “data scientist” in one circle and “Academy in his nuclear engineering major, then stuck Award winner” in the other, there’s prob- around for a PhD in biophysics. “I was looking ably only one person who fits in the over- for something more complicated than phys- lapping area: Stanford University professor ics,” Hanrahan says. “I really liked biology, Pat Hanrahan. there was less known about it.” He was intro- The computer scientist is a graphics duced to computer graphics by his roommate, expert and former Pixar engineer who has and for his thesis created software that mod- spent much of his career designing software eled the nervous system of a nematode. to make movie special effects and animations A few years after graduation, Hanr ahan more realistic. These days he’s spending less became one of the first few dozen employees time with Sharon Stone and Jennifer Garner at Pixar Animation Studios, where he was the (the actresses who presented his two Oscars) chief architect of the RenderMan software, and more with business analysts at Zynga, which makes it easy to add skin, light reflec- Wal-Mart Stores, and EBay. Those are just a tions, fur, and other textures to objects in com- few of the companies that have fallen for Tab- Ted Corbett, director of knowledge manage- puter images. The software is now routinely leau software, created by the Seattle startup of ment at Seattle Children’s Hospital, where 150 used in Hollywood, and it earned him his first the same name co-founded in 2003 by Hanra- staffers use Tableau for such tasks as schedul- Oscar in 1993 for technical achievement. The han. It’s a kind of high-powered, highly visual ing operating rooms and clinic space. In the second Oscar, in 2004, was for a new tech- Excel. Tableau integrates with a company’s past year the company released an iPad app nique to render skin and other materials. databases or spreadsheets and lets anyone and service for media websites. Revenue is on Hanrahan went on to teach at Princeton easily turn drab columns of numbers into in- track to nearly double, to $65 million, accord- University, then Stanford, where he decid- teractive maps and graphs—no programming ing to Tableau. ed to take graphics into new realms—includ- skills necessary. In effect, it’s taking business In high school, Hanrahan says he “was ing business analy tics. “I thought there were analytics mainstream. “We let any user ask pretty bored in class.” In his free time he did applications for graphics beyond entertain- questions of their data by a simple drag and his own chemistry experiments and taught ment,” he says. “I love Star Wars and all that, drop interface,” Hanrahan, 56, says. himself to program. At the University of Wis- but I really am a scientist.”
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