Hanrahan co-founded Tableau in 2003 with fellow Stanford Alum Christian Chabot and Stolte, using VizQL as its main technology.

FORBES: Tableau Software's Pat Hanrahan on "What Is a Data Scientist?"

Seattle-based Tableau was founded by Chris Stolte, Christian Chabot and Pat Hanrahan, an Academy Award winner and founding member of Pixar.

FORBES: Tableau Files For IPO As Strong Run For Business Software Companies Continues

As part of his PhD thesis, Chris Stolte, his student at Stanford, invented the Polaris technology, now called VizQL, which allows database queries to be generated and represented visually.

FORBES: Tableau Software's Pat Hanrahan on "What Is a Data Scientist?"