The XPNDR mission
Your organisation’s most valuable asset is also the most invisible. Our aim at XPNDR is to do something about that.
We often think of organisations as faceless things. It’s too easy to forget that organisations are people, working together towards a common goal.
When we work together we form a network — a network of human interactions that spans time and space.
Any flaws in the network — silos, bottlenecks, one-way information flows — can have a massive impact on how well an organisation functions. And yet, discovering flaw in the network is one of the hardest challenges when running an organisation.
Let alone fixing them.
XPNDR is the tool that helps your organisation deal with these problems. How? By giving you more control over your most valuable asset: your organisation’s collaboration network.
Our aim at XPNDR is to help you discover more about how your organisation works, and to give you the tools to improve it.
The origins of XPNDR
Early 2020 I felt that it was time for a real change. I had been a research mathematician for almost ten years, working in a perfectly isolated community with some of the smartest people on this planet. We were working on the deep mathematical science of networks. A science that has yielded breakthrough after breakthrough over the past few decades. Dense, abstract logic with a beauty all of its own. Worthy of Fields Medals and Abel Prizes, but not the kind of thing you would ever read about in a newspaper, or even a pop-sci magazine. That frustrated me. So much work, so many discoveries. Why aren’t people using this in real life? I decided I needed to find out. I left my academic bubble to join the real world.
And just at that time, the country went into lockdown — COVID. If there was ever a real-life network problem to be solved, this was it. Working as a consultant, I soon became a tiny part of one of the biggest and fastest growing startups my country (the Netherlands) had ever seen: the COVID crisis organisation. It was an exhausting but exhilarating time, fighting an invisible enemy within us, with our minds and our discipline as our most powerful weapons. It was also the perfect crash course: I learned many parts of the answer to the question that I started with. But not the whole.
When the (incredible) vaccines started having their effect, and the milder omicron variant arose (as predicted), the crisis organisation started to wind down. I too moved on, to another big challenge: crime.
I joined a joint team of the Dutch Ministry of Justice, the National Police, and the Central Bureau for Statistics, as lead data scientist. Being part of that team gave me real-life experience on how big organisations really work. On top of that, I had access to decades of data on some of the most complex organisational networks of the country: its biggest professional organisation (the police) and our biggest enemy, organised crime: the most complexly networked “business” model there is.
The final pieces started to fall in place: I knew how to take the abstract math that I started with, and put it to use in the real world. I had learned enough to start building my solution.
After long days and nights, and with a lot of help from some of the most brilliant people I know, that solution has turned into XPNDR. It takes the deepest ideas from the mathematical theory of networks, and applies it to the ultimate real-life setting: organisations. The goal: to improve the way we collaborate by an order of magnitude.
Care to give it a try?
Tim Hulshof — founder