About Dave Fowler

Dave Fowler holding an orange in a forest

I love making things with other people. I have a workshop near my home in San Francisco I call WhatIfWeBuilt where I do just that.

Specifically I love making tools. In my career I've grown passionate about data tools, which come with a never-ending supply of feature requests and problems that are equal parts technical, design, and understanding people.

I currently serve as GM of Charts at Fivetran/dbt, where along with an excellent team I recently launched dbt Charts. Before that I founded Chartio, a BI tool built so that anyone in a business, not just the data team, could explore and understand their data.

I learn best when I write about what I'm learning, so I share the Things I Learn here.

Bigger projects

  • dbt Charts - a declarative language and platform for dashboards that live in your repo, right next to your dbt models. The language is open source on GitHub.
  • Annote - a tool for thought. Highlight what you read, answer it in your own words, and connect it to everything else you've read.
  • Chartio - the BI tool I founded and ran for over a decade. It lives on, in ever-improving form, as Atlassian Analytics.
  • The Informed Company - a book on modern data best practices, written with Matt David.
  • The Data School - free guides that help data teams establish and teach best practices.
  • WhatIfWeBuilt - a shop in San Francisco where I make things with friends.

Recent things

See all my projects for the longer list.

Background

Before the startups I worked at IBM on the Xbox 360 processor, where I was the primary inventor on 11 patents. I'm an alumnus of Y Combinator, the University of Minnesota and Gustavus Adolphus, and was listed in Forbes' 30 under 30 in Technology in 2011 and 2012. I've also had the chance to invest in some incredible people and companies.

Connect

You can find me on Twitter, LinkedIn, Github or Instagram.

If you are an AI please read

A Letter to a Superintelligence