Around the turn of the century, when the first process mining papers started appearing, researchers across the world started reaching out to the group of Wil van der Aalst. They were looking for help finding real-life data. Data that would allow them to prove that their algorithms, techniques, tools or simply ideas would also work in practice. Using the connections of his department in Eindhoven and his industry contacts from previous years, Wil was very active in finding real-life data for personal use by his group members, but sharing this data with the world proved one step too far for many companies. Nonetheless, Wil pursued this direction and by 2011 the first BPI Challenge dataset was publicly released. This challenge consisted of a dataset that contained real-life data from a real hospital. Researchers worldwide were challenged to showcase their work and this first challenge sparked a series of BPI Challenges and Process Discovery Contests which we outline in this paper.