Bio

Dirk is a hands-on Chief Executive Officer (CEO) with experience in building and growing technology centered companies, with a passion for business development, product design and data science innovation. He founded two companies and sits on advisory boards of tech startups. Dirk was featured in The Economist, awarded Actuary of the Year and became Top Entrepreneurial Talent. He started his career as a consulting actuary (Amsterdam) and moved to New York (2007) to learn about business strategy & transformations. Dirk founded his first company (Focus Orange) in New York during the economic crisis to help companies make big decisions and guide transformation programs, using data science. After 5 years, he relocated to Amsterdam and was awarded as Actuary of the Year by the Society of Actuaries for his innovations. Focus Orange grew to a market leader in the Netherlands in HR Strategy Consulting, with a focus on Total Rewards and employs over 30 people. In 2014, he co-founded Crunchr to build a scalable SaaS solution for Workforce Reporting, People Analytics and Strategic Planning. Crunchr won the prestigious ''Cool Vendor'' award by Gartner in Human Capital Management (as one out of five companies worldwide) and received many international innovation prices. The HR Tech Outlook Magazine awarded Crunchr as top10 leaders in the European Market, renowned industry analyst Josh Bersin put Crunchr on his global watch-list for people analytics (next to LinkedIn and Microsoft) and Everest Research named Crunchr a Top5 “Trailblazer in People Analytics” in the world. Crunchr raised series A with Randstad, Nationale-Nederlanden and Focus Orange. Even during the Covid19 Pandemic, recurring revenues grew with 100%. Dirk is a passionate lecturer on Business transformation and People Analytics topics at universities in the Netherlands and United States. He is a member of the expert panel of Executive Networks and leads community research, with universities and HR professionals for exponential contribution to business performance.