Metabase's origins

Metabase began as an internal tool at Expa (https://www.expa.com), a start-up studio in San Francisco run by Garrett Camp, the co-founder of Uber. His CTO, Sameer Al-Sakran, had been working on simple ways to serve actionable data to CEOs and investors of companies in the Expa portfolio.

These start-ups needed an easy, low-cost, and low-friction way to understand their product data and measure things such as growth and engagement. It didn't take them long to realize that if the tools they were building were helpful for Expa's start-ups, they would probably be helpful to other start-ups, technology companies, and other organizations. They decided to turn this internal project into a company. Soon after, they put the source code for their project on GitHub, a website for collaborative software development that we'll rely on throughout this book. It became available for everyone to use, and Metabase was born.

On October 21, 2015, Metabase debuted to the public via the popular product discovery website Product Hunt (https://www.producthunt.com/).

Interestingly enough, I had joined Expa as a data scientist in residence just 9 days prior to Metabase's public launch on Product Hunt. I was coming from Twitter, where we had struggled to keep an internal analytics tool called BirdBrain both usable and free of bugs. I immediately saw the value of an open source project designed to give companies easy access to insights around their data. I quickly became a Metabase fan.