Like all dynamic self-organized systems found in nature, the self-organized chemistry that initiated life must have been driven into existence by the non-equilibrium nature of its environment. This pre-life chemistry would have been enabled by natural catalysts such as minerals and metal ions. Due to the difficulty of making fundamental changes to a continuous, complex, and highly interconnected system, this network of reactions, or proto-metabolism, would likely still share many similarities with biological metabolism. Our team is experimentally reconstituting non-enzymatic metabolic processes and extrapolating from the results to identify the initial conditions that triggered self-organization. This talk will summarize our experimental progress towards this goal.