What Held It Up

Despite what this photo looks like, physics isn’t what was holding that container up. I was.

The real story

The piece sits in the middle of a roundabout in Brussels — Luc Deleu’s The Container, balanced on one corner. Everyone assumes it’s physics: the right center of gravity, the right angle, a structure holding itself up. But in the photo, my hand is on it. And that’s the real story: getting underneath something and carrying the full weight of it, so it stays standing.

What I saw in logistics

Five years before Syntask, that’s exactly what I saw in logistics. What kept operations standing wasn’t the process, wasn’t the system — it was one operator staying up at night, one manager who never turned their phone off. Everything was balanced on someone’s strength.

Why I built Syntask

That’s why I built Syntask. To take that balance — held up by one person’s effort — and hand it to a system instead. No one has to stay up at night anymore making sure the container doesn’t tip. Syntask sees it six hours before it starts to fall, tells you why, and tells you what to do.

A founding story

When I put my hand under that container that day, I didn’t know it would become a founding story. But looking back now, I can see it clearly: Syntask exists so that no one has to do alone what I did that day.

Holding something up is, most of the time, an invisible kind of strength.

— Field Note, Brussels 2019

Berna Bulgurcu — Co-founder & CEO, Syntask