Operations leadership · Founder and exit
Amsterdam

Mario Villani.

Operations leader and ex-founder. I build the systems companies scale on: from a zero-to-exit startup to a €600M product line at Booking.com. This is the visual version of my CV.

Amsterdam 1 exit Booking.com Bocconi 110/110
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Mario Villani
Fig. 1

Amsterdam, 2026.

1
Founded and exited
€600M
GMV owned
4
Countries
110/110
Bocconi, Milan
01 Where I've operated Six roles

Four countries, two continents. Founder once, operator throughout.

How to read it

Tap a city or a year.

Different markets. Different industries. One operator.

Fashion E-commerce Grocery Food-tech Travel Marketplaces
Jakarta 2013 Singapore 2015–17 2 Milan 2017 Amsterdam Now
Online travel
2023–Now
Booking.com
~€600M GMV
Strategic Operations Manager · Amsterdam, NL

World's largest online travel platform. 220+ countries, $20B+ annual revenue.

A matrix of 8 teams across Finance, Trust and Safety, Product, Commercial, Partnerships and Legal. ~€5M annual budget.

  • 10% above revenue target on the packaged-travel product (bundling), ~€600M annual GMV across 40+ markets.
  • Rescued a governance-broken programme: rebuilt the reporting, fraud below 0.1%, ROI up 10 percentage points.
  • Rebuilt the financial-protection forecasting model as the single source of truth, cutting compliance costs 40% YoY.
  • Turned EU Package Travel Directive compliance from a launch blocker into a repeatable path, reused across 5+ launches.
Between chapters
2022–2023
Post-exit
Milan → Amsterdam

Post-exit: angel investing, Mandarin to A1.

Food-tech · D2C meals
2017–2022
Nutribees
0 → Exit
Co-Founder and Managing Director (COO) · Milan, IT

Italy's first D2C ready-to-eat meal delivery service, scaled to a successful exit.

  • Founded and scaled from concept to €2.5M revenue, 3× YoY.
  • Bootstrapped, then raised from a corporate investor; board seat through to exit.
  • Built the supply chain from zero: cold chain, proprietary OMS, 300,000+ meals a year.
  • Owned full P&L with a team of 10; led the sale end to end, from audits and diligence to close.

In the media la Repubblica Affari e Finanza · StartupItalia · Corriere della Sera · La7 · Striscia la Notizia

On-demand grocery
2016–2017
Honestbee
14 → 40 hubs
Head of Operations · Singapore

On-demand grocery and food delivery marketplace across Southeast Asia.

  • Scaled operational hubs from 14 to 40 in six months.
  • Redesigned last-mile delivery routing and protocols, improving on-time performance from 88% to 93%.
  • Led a team of 45, including 4 direct-report managers.

Left to found Nutribees.

Online fashion
2015–2016
Zalora
100 FTEs
Senior Operations Manager · Singapore

Largest fashion e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia, part of Global Fashion Group (Rocket Internet).

  • Led 100 FTEs and 5 direct-report managers across Logistics, Warehouse and Marketplace Operations, driving process improvement that cut handling costs by 25%.
E-commerce fashion
2013–2015
Zalora Indonesia
700K+ items
Operations Support and Special Projects Manager · Jakarta, ID

Largest fashion e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia (Rocket Internet). Joined as intern; promoted to manager within five months.

  • Delivered the full relocation of a 700,000+ item warehouse and co-built the largest e-commerce fulfilment centre in Southeast Asia, completed in 2 days with zero downtime.
06 / 06
Reference

More references

“A rare mix of heart, hustle, and entrepreneurial mindset. Any team would be lucky to have him.”
Daniele Perotti · GM and Executive Business Leader · worked with Mario at Booking.com and Zalora
02 Method Live · runs on Claude

It reasons in five moves: Diagnose, Constraint, Sequence, De-risk, Result.

Zero-to-one builds, or broken systems at scale. I read which one you have, then put order in it.

I design and ship AI tooling. This one reasons the way I do, as a builder and a fixer: it reads whether your problem is a zero-to-one build or a broken system to fix at scale, then takes it apart.

Live AI · runs on Claude
Try one
03 Systems Built and maintained solo

Not demos. Software I designed, shipped and maintain, in daily use.

Systems I run my work on.

01Serverless · object store

Order and supply

The system a food shop in Amsterdam runs on: stock and reordering, suppliers, shifts, the counter register, food-safety logs, B2B events. Sales arrive on a schedule, so the reorder list is computed, not typed. Six agents work their own routines, each with tools and an approval queue, and nothing they propose ships unread.

02TypeScript · SQLite

Financial cockpit

My advisory practice in one place: pipeline, contracts, delivery notes, capacity measured against the hours already committed. Revenue reads live from the accounting system through a sync that is only ever allowed to read. Money is integer cents end to end, so nothing rounds twice.

03Markdown · git

Second brain

My own knowledge base, written by the model and curated by me: decisions and the reasoning under them, people, sources, kept as plain text under version control. One morning job collects and pushes every vault and puts a brief on my phone; agents run hourly in the cloud and file what they find. If the brief does not arrive, that is the alarm.

04Headless · Shopify

Sites

The shop's public site: a headless storefront with the Shopify checkout behind it and Cloudflare in front. Then the unglamorous half, which is where the traffic actually was: legacy redirects, dirty handles, one canonical settled between two catalogues that had been competing with each other. And this page, hand-written, no build step, on a design system I keep as tokens so it cannot drift.

Plus the tool above, which reasons the way I do.

04 Also running Five entries

Things that keep running when I am not in the room.

I build things that run without me.

Advisory
Strategic advisor
Own practice. Current retainer in the AI market.
Venture
La Bottega by Chiara's Food
Co-owner of a Sicilian gastronomia in Amsterdam. I built the software it runs on.
Teaching
Lecturer
Radar Academy, Master in Finance. Building a balance sheet, not just reading it.
Investing
Angel investor
Backing early founders (Unplugged, UK).
Speaking
TEDx speaker
Bari, 2018: the future of food.
Mario Villani speaking on the TEDxBariSalon stage Fig. 2 · TEDxBariSalon, 2018 The future has no place for home kitchens. Watch →
05 Foundations Bocconi · KPMG

Ran the sell-side diligence on my own exit. I teach financial statements at Master level.

Trained in finance.

Education
MSc Accounting, Financial Management and Control
Bocconi University, Milan · 2011–2013 · 110/110
BSc Business Administration and Management
Bocconi University, Milan · 2008–2011
Languages
Italian Native
English Fluent
Spanish B1
Dutch A2 · in progress
Mandarin A1
Skills and capabilities
Leadership
Cross-functional leadershipStakeholder managementChange managementProgramme governanceBoard experience
AI and tooling
AI / LLM tool development (Claude)Prompt engineeringWorkflow automationTableauLookerSQL
Finance and strategy
P&L ownershipM&A due diligenceRisk managementUnit economicsBudget managementKPI / OKR frameworks
Operations
GTM strategySupply chain designVendor managementOMS / WMSMarketplace opsFulfilment at scale
06 References Two entries

People who worked with me, in their own words.

What it's like to work with me.

“A rare mix of heart, hustle, and entrepreneurial mindset. He thrives in complexity: in my team at Booking he led multimillion-dollar initiatives and tackled thorny regulatory topics like the EU Package Travel Directive. Any team would be lucky to have him.”
Daniele Perotti · GM and Executive Business Leader · worked with Mario at Booking.com and Zalora
“I regard Mario as one of my best mentors. He taught me analytical skills and people management in my first working experience, and with him everything always seemed easy and on track. Knowledgeable and always energetic.”
Ingga Wulandhari · PhD in Management · reported to Mario at Zalora Indonesia
07 Contact Amsterdam
Email m.villani89@gmail.com
Advisory

lambertiana.com

Let's talk.

Operations leadership, built across Europe and Southeast Asia. Building something that needs it? I'm a message away.

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