FOUNDER-LED VENTURES · PRODUCT & COMMERCIAL FOUNDATIONS

Sergio Barguilla

I turn founder-led ventures into scalable,
product-driven businesses.

Over 20+ years, founders and CEOs have hired me to run the business alongside them: at trivago from 200 people through the NASDAQ IPO, at Sygic as Managing Director of the founder's full operation through the exit to Eurowag, and at Eurowag through the post-acquisition integration. The common thread: I build the product and commercial foundation that lets a founder's vision scale.

Every business I have run needed the same things before it needed anything clever: clear priorities, a monetization model that holds, an operating rhythm the team can trust, and accountability that reaches the P&L. That is the work. At Sygic it meant building the KPI dashboards, the pricing, and the go-to-market myself alongside a 40-person team. At Eurowag it meant protecting revenue and product performance through an integration where both could easily have been lost.

I keep organizations lean by conviction: small senior teams, short decision loops, and no function that exists to manage another function. Product decisions connect to commercial outcomes or they do not survive the weekly review.

The tooling behind my own work is modern. I build the systems I operate with, and they keep my discovery cycles short and my teams small. If you want the detail, it lives in my writing below.

2025 – 2026

Director of Product & Technology

Eurowag inherited me with the Sygic acquisition. The mandate: protect the asset and complete the integration. Operated the navigation business (500K+ MAU, €7M annual revenue) through post-acquisition integration, drove a product-health turnaround (ratings recovered to ~4.55), launched freemium monetization retaining ~70% of users, and built the EW Office TMS platform with the founder of FireTMS. Mandate completed March 2026.

2021 – 2024

Managing Director

Sygic's founder hired me to run his operation so he could stay on product vision: 40 people across product, tech, marketing, analytics, and support, with full P&L. Scaled Roadlords ("Waze for trucks") to 2M+ installs, 250K MAU, and €1M net sales across 22 countries. Turned the B2C driver base into a B2B fleet product with 8,000 customers in 12 months. The performance contributed to the founder's exit: acquisition by Eurowag.

2013 – 2020

VP of Product

I joined trivago through its founder, brought in to help develop the company as it scaled from ~200 people to a NASDAQ listing (Dec 2016). Built Business Operations & Strategy for the CPO, then founded the B2B business with the CRO: trivago Hotel Manager, launched in 12 languages across 17 countries, grown to €15M ARR. Weekly data-driven experimentation was the operating rhythm.

2004 – 2013

Principal Delivery & Development Manager

Group Products & Services team across Madrid, London, and Düsseldorf. Built mobile platforms and converged products serving 28 operating companies and 20M+ users. Led teams in Germany, UK, and India. Transitioned the development team from California to Germany.

Most organizations are implementing AI. Almost none are redesigning how they work because of it. That's the gap. And it's not a tooling problem — it's an operating model problem.

After 20 years building product at scale, the pattern is consistent: the ceiling is almost always organizational. How decisions get made, how strategy reaches teams, how work gets scoped, questioned, and improved. AI doesn't change that ceiling automatically. But it does, for the first time, give you the means to raise it — not by making teams faster at the same work, but by changing what's possible to build, how the organization learns, and how much a small team can actually own. That only happens if you're willing to treat AI as an operating system, not a feature layer.

The companies getting this right aren't asking, “How do we use AI?” They're asking, “How do we redesign our decision loops, learning cycles, and execution systems around what AI now makes possible?” That's a different question. And it leads to a different kind of organization — leaner, faster, and higher-leverage — where a well-structured team of ten can outcompete a traditional organization of fifty.

Articles

From LinkedIn

I work with founders, CEOs, executives, and investors who need a product and commercial foundation built: as an executive in the leadership team, a managing director for a venture or portfolio company, or an operating partner through a transition. Also available for consulting engagements and product-team training.

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