I build things to understand how they work — software, systems, and companies.

For 15+ years I've been on the operating side of technology businesses as Founder, CEO, COO and Managing Director, mostly in startups and innovative SMEs. My natural habitat is the messy middle: taking something that barely works and turning it into a machine that scales — through operations, automation, and AI.

I'm not a developer by title, but I live close to the code. I use technology as leverage: I prototype, automate, and wire systems together to remove friction from how a business runs. If a process is repetitive, I want to kill it with a script. If a decision is fuzzy, I want data and a model behind it.

• Automation & AI in real workflows — LLMs, agents and no-code/low-code plumbing applied to operations, e-commerce and customer care, not demos.
• E-commerce & logistics — supply chain, fulfillment, data. I've built and scaled operations where a broken process costs real money.
• Building companies — from MVP to scale: what breaks, what to hire, what to buy vs build, and when to just ship.

I've learned the hard way that execution beats ideas, and that a company is a system like any other: inputs, feedback loops, failure modes. I read businesses the way an engineer reads a machine — where's the bottleneck, where's the waste, where's the single point of failure. I also spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking about risk, uncertainty and decision-making (Bayes, ergodicity, and a healthy respect for randomness).

The through-line: I understand how companies are built because I've built them — and I use technology to make them run better.

• BSc in Computer Engineering — Politecnico di Milano (in progress) — to know how to build products
• BSc in Economics and Management — Università Cattolica — to understand how business works
• MSc in Business Administration and Consultancy — Università Cattolica — to know how to build and run a company
• Technology Entrepreneurship (ENG 145) — Stanford University summer session, taken between my BSc in Economics and my MSc (partly funded by a Università Cattolica scholarship)
• No Code AI and Machine Learning: Building Data Science Solutions — MIT Professional Education
• Founder, CEO, COO, MD across startups and innovative SMEs
• Today: Fractional COO · Board Advisor · Interim / CRO — I help founders and boards scale, restructure, and put AI to work

• Website — donatovillani.com — heads up: this is my business/advisory side (Fractional COO · Board Advisor · Interim/CRO), not a dev portfolio
• LinkedIn — in/donatovillani
• X / Twitter — @donatovillani

I take things apart to understand how they work. Companies included.