Story
The Exponential distribution is the continuous counterpart to the Geometric distribution. The story of the Exponential distribution is analogous, but we are now waiting for a success in continuous time, where successes arrive at a rate of $\lambda$ successes per unit of time. The average number of successes in a time interval of length $t$ is $\lambda t$, though the actual number of successes varies randomly. An Exponential random variable represents the waiting time until the first arrival of a success.
——adapted from Book BH