Earnest Sweat 00:02
Alex, welcome to Swimming with Allocators the VC podcast, from the LP perspective, with your host, Alexa bins and Ernest. You ready? Let’s dive in on today’s episode. We have Iona Oris valiante. She’s a managing director at Accenture, but she’s also a woman who wears many hats. She’s a very involved LP at allocate one. She also started her own series called capital decoded that informs the next gen of family offices about learning about venture capital. And she’s just a global citizen who’s trying to help other global citizens. We’re going to get into all of it today. She’s going to share with us why allocators need a new learning model for venture capital, and how her background involved in being a global citizen. Innovation lens and AI provide her perspective on the world. So with that, we welcome Iona.

Earnest Sweat 01:31
Remember in our prayer conversation, I was so impressed with just your background. And something that stood out to me is that you were bouncing around when you grew up between Siberia and Cuba. How has that shaped your perspective, let alone as an investor, but just as a person?

Iliana Valiente 01:51
You mean those two places, Siberia and Cuba have just a couple of things that are different from one another, just a little bit, just a little tiny bit. No, but I spend my childhood bouncing around two very, very different places, and I think it’s given me the ability to land anywhere in the world and instantly feel at home and learn to just feel grounded in myself. So it doesn’t matter where in the world I am. I am a self contained human, and you can land and you can generally figure it out. I think it’s part of the reason why now I’m building this marketplace to make life easier for the digital nomads and the people who are bouncing around all over the world, because it’s my lived experience from my earliest, earliest memories. And so it checks out that I’m continuing to live that lifestyle even now and then. From an investor lens, I’ve always looked at the world through a global perspective, no matter what the national policies might dictate, the flavors of the policies today around protectionism, the world is increasingly inter connected, and so the best investment opportunities are not always, necessarily in the one location that you happen to be right this moment. And thinking so is a bit of a short sighted

Earnest Sweat 03:10
approach. Yeah, having that kind of self awareness and self confidence. How has that impacted, like, even jobs or projects that you take on where you might not be an expert on day one.

Iliana Valiente 03:27
I actually think that in the AI era, experts is not the way to go when you think about career security and the rest. And I know that may be a bit of a controversial opinion, but AI is commoditizing deep expertise, and what it’s really rewarding are the generalists who can go sufficiently in depth in certain areas and start to stitch the non obvious ideas and data points together to really, truly generate an insight. So my superpower has been that I am a generalist. I am a multi hyphenate. I can easily context switch and go deep in certain areas when it strikes my attention. I did that in the blockchain space. I’ve done that in the AI world, but ultimately it’s the ability to have that connective tissue, and so I’ve applied that in every single one of my roles, much to the annoyance, frankly, of a lot of the managers that I’ve had early on in my career who would say things like, Iona, you’re like a square peg in in the round hole. It just, it’s not, it’s not working, like you’re great at doing the work, but something just says you’re not like the others that we have on the team. Can you just stick to your lane, stick to your corner? And I have defied that at every turn. I was like, no, please don’t put me in a corner. I don’t want to be in a corner. Don’t put me in a shoe box.

Alexa Binns 04:54
No, no. It sounds like you have too many, you have too many angles. You can’t be put. In a corner. No, you’re like a diamond with lots of different facets.

Iliana Valiente 05:03
I’ll take that analogy. I like

Alexa Binns 05:07
it as we’re moving from this sort of SaaS era to the AI era. How, how does that also apply for allocators?

Iliana Valiente 05:14
So the AI race is really reshaping where investors need to be deploying capital the way I look at all of the chaos and the AI space really is chaotic. I live and breathe it every day. My job is literally tracking the trends and figuring out what to do with it. And if I get overwhelmed, I can only imagine how an investor who comes from I don’t any industry whatsoever, feels when they’re paying attention to AI. So before I answer your question of SaaS and AI, let me take a step back. I ground audiences in three layers of an AI stack that I created that I use to cut through the noise and any headline that you hear, you can usually place it somewhere in these three three layers, and act accordingly. So layer one is infrastructure. This is where all of the hardware is built, the GPUs, the data centers that are the size of Manhattan. That’s usually the realm of the sovereign wealth funds and nation states who are vying for sovereign compute. It’s the realm of the massive multinational corporations who are investing, to the tunes of, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars. That’s the domain that when you read a headline, it probably doesn’t even sound like English, because it’s really not designed for the lay person and for most investors, most allocators. My advice would be, please don’t play in that area unless you have a license to be in that area. So for instance, you come from a data center type background, and you can easily apply that expertise here. You can mostly ignore that infrastructure layer. The second layer is where you get into the application layer. Those are the apps that you’re using in your personal capacity. Those are the different businesses that exist to make your professional business life easier. All the GPT is they live in this in this kind of ecosystem, a lot of the AI agents are hovering at that that layer, that’s where you’ll see more of the consumer facing, investment grade opportunities, all of the cursors of the world, world cursor lovable, all of the AI marketing tools. They all live in that layer. And the third layer is what I’m calling the human experience layer, because while the technical people would have you think that everything revolves around the zeros and ones in the technology. The reality is that humans don’t adopt tech unless they trust it, unless they feel secure, and their fears in general are allayed. And we do not spend nearly enough time thinking about that human experience layer, but we need to, and we actually need more companies who are building at that level of things. So as an investor, anytime I see a pitch, I’m trying to figure out where in the stack does this company get situated? And so it’s no longer just as simple as, oh, you’re building a SaaS company. That’s nice, but is SaaS for this vertical even going to exist? Or are you being taken over because chat GPT now has built a new wrapper, or conversely, that enterprise company can now build their own product in the span of a couple of months, and no longer needs to subscribe to your product indefinitely. It’s completely changing the playbook.

Earnest Sweat 09:07
The capital decoded series has been successful. How? But first, how did you get introduced to being an LP and diving into this industry?

Iliana Valiente 09:59
with it? And. AC is like the secret industry that quietly powers and backs all of the companies that are totally not obvious today, but fast forward five or 10 years and become inevitable. And so I’m actually surprised that there isn’t more information out about the sector that brought you your iPhone, that brought you your Tesla that brought you Spotify. If we didn’t have VC as a sector, none of those products would exist in the mainstream. And I would argue that every single one of those products has made our lives easier, more effective, more connected. So my personal journey was that I had no idea what VC was at the start of my career. It just was not in my field of vision whatsoever. My journey started out as an angel investor directly into companies that were in my ecosystem. So I grew up in the blockchain environment, and so I backed a number of companies in that domain, and my deal flow would happen organically, just through the founders that I knew the incubators that I was at. And as I’ve expanded my career, and as I’ve expanded my focus into covering all types of emerging technologies, and I have as my own investment thesis that I back the types of companies that build a future world that humans actually want to live in. And so my deal flow was coming through my network. It was coming through the incubators that I was coaching on really, really organically. And then I started to get approached by VC funds saying, Hey, we’re launching a VC fund focused on backing females. We’re launching a VC fund to back female founders in Canada, for instance. And I said, Great, we need more entrepreneurship in Canada. The statistics are declining no matter how you slice it or dice it, let’s go. Let’s back that up. And that kicked off a snowball of becoming an LP and a couple of other funds. And I realized there’s no education for this. I was piecemealing it together, reviewing the term sheets when I was an investor in startups on my own, and figuring on like, what is this? What does this mean? How do I make sense of this? And I’m a chartered accountant by training. I grew up building financial models for corporations. I’ve done audits of fortune 500 companies. I’ve worked on the corporate finance side of things, and yet I felt as though I was just stumbling completely in the dark as an investor, because there’s very little educational content geared towards the investor or geared towards the limited partner. There’s a lot of information out there if you’re going to go launch your own VC fund, there’s a lot of information if you’re a startup, around how to go and raise money from investors, but very little geared towards the the LP and not all lawyers are deep in this sector, because venture as an asset class is still considered, you know, fairly, fairly niche, and so it was a lot of trial and error and just talking to people. And I’m glad. I’m very grateful that I have this extensive network of people that I could pick up the phone and they would answer my questions.

Alexa Binns 13:50
hear a little bit more about capital decoded. You know, what all does this entail? I think you’ve mentioned a sub stack. And if allocators are interested in following, how do they get access to you?

Iliana Valiente 14:02
essentially, I put together a curriculum on paper of what are all the things I wish that I knew at the beginning of my investor journey. From explaining what venture capital is, what types of companies should be VC backed, because not every company that comes and asks you for a check. Should you even be considering it because not every business is going to have venture style returns and so on and so forth. So I put together this detailed curriculum. I floated it with a couple of VC funds for inputs. I was floated by a couple of the top law firms that specialize in VC, and said, Hey, how would you make this better? They gave lots of inputs, and then I sat down for multiple days with a full film crew and recorded a curriculum just going through the basics, multiple modules, got all of that package together, and now it’s available as a self serve, self paced. Program that allocators can use. And I originally started with the lens of preparing materials to make life easier for next gen investors, because I was getting so many pings from a lot of my contacts. And finally, this is my last straw. I got a call from one of my next-gen friends. I answer all her questions. And finally, I turned the floor back to her and said, Listen, why is it that you keep calling me with these questions? I love you dearly. I’m more than happy to answer this. But do you not already have 17 advisors to your family office that can do this? And her response was, Well, yeah, we have a bajillion advisors. However, they’re all in their 70s. They don’t understand technology, they don’t understand venture and this is the kicker. They talk to me like I’m an idiot. I am not an idiot. Like, Yep, totally fair. I hear you, and I realized that that was the motivating need behind so many of my next gens, and so my version one of this program was specifically for them, because next gens, let’s be honest, face a whole other set of extra challenges that your typical family office principal does not, and they’re not actually in a position to admit that there are things that they don’t know, because admitting that is actually puts them in a dangerous position. So yeah, all that to say, that’s why I ended up building the capital decoded program for the next gens, for the traditional family office principals, for the exited founders who are trying to make that transition from being a successful entrepreneur to being an investor, because, yes, you have a lot of transferable skills, but they’re not perfectly one, one to one.

Earnest Sweat 16:47
Yeah, that’s a tough thing to admit if you don’t really understand something. And venture is easy . I always call it the golf asset class, because it looks easy from afar, and then when you actually play, it’s really hard. And so to that point, what if someone next gen is coming to you? How do you do it without giving away your whole course?

Iliana Valiente 17:16
What education should be democratized, that access? Yes, I’m publishing regularly on sub stack. I want this information out there.

Earnest Sweat 17:24
Okay, I appreciate that. So then give it a wall away. No, what would you tell this person is like a framework of how to prepare and find the right approach to venture for your family.

Iliana Valiente 17:41
So a couple of things. First things first, the allocator needs to become very clear on who they are, where they come from, what their background and what their strengths are, and then figuring out where their gaps come from. So I’ll give you an example. If you come from a biotech, pharma background, amazing. You probably have more of an advantage if you’re going to invest in bio pharma as a sector, but if you come from that background and you want more exposure to all things AI, then chances are that doing direct investing, where you’re backing companies specifically, may not be the right fit for you, because it’s too risky and you don’t really have the background for it. In that scenario, a VC fund probably makes more sense. And then you come back to the allocator and understand who they are, it’s well, how much time do you have? Do you have time, or do you have capital? Or do you have both in equal measure? Because if you have a lot of time, then it means you have time to do the due diligence on the various VC funds that are out there in the market and compare them. If you don’t have time, then maybe a VC fund is more logical, because you put your money in at once, and then you can kind of set it and forget it and be a little bit more passive. So being very clear with how much time you have, how passive or active you want to be, where you do and do not have expertise so that you can be clear about your blind spots. That’s all kind of step one, then step two, which is an area where, when I’ve asked people the question, hey, what do you invest in? What’s your investment thesis? I’m often either met with a blank look, or they say, we invest in cool new, emerging tech.

Earnest Sweat 19:25
Do they do that hand motion too?

Iliana Valiente 19:29
We invest in cool tech. That’s not an investment thesis. That’s a tagline, that’s a slogan. What stage are you investing in? How big a check are you writing? Are you reserving anything for follow ons? How involved are you going to be? There are so many questions that need to be asked that they just haven’t necessarily stopped to think about. And frankly, when you’re out and about talking to people and you want to generate deal flow, how am I supposed? To bring you deal flow. If I don’t know what’s in your investment

Alexa Binns 20:03
thesis, everything fits. It’s cool tech, right? Everything fits. So

Iliana Valiente 20:07
that means the 30 companies I met last week while I was advising of the creative destruction lab, who are all doing AI for changing the way that scientific research happens, you’re telling me that every single one of those 30 companies when they’re ready to fundraise is going to be a fit for you, and I’m going to now start spamming your inbox. No, so you have to document it, and you have to clearly articulate so that the people in your network can bring you the better quality type of deal flow. So that’s another big module, and then the final piece is how to not get swindled. Venture capital is a very high charm industry, and a lot of fast talkers, a lot of smooth operators, and so being able to ask the right type of due diligence questions and figuring out what are the right allocator rooms that you should be in, and understanding compensation structures.

Alexa Binns 21:51
your private equity teammates at Accenture worked with an allocator one on a recent report, which I found super fascinating. And everything is available online, so everybody can click through, but you have proprietary reviews of 950 emerging managers. Can you tell us about first of all, that data set? Very cool. And then what some of the findings are in the report? Absolutely.

Iliana Valiente 22:21
So the primary contributor to all this data is allocator one. Allocator one is a VC Fund of Funds of sorts, if you will. Without the fee structure. I’m an LP. They’re actually full full disclosure, because their fee structure is the same as investing in a traditional VC fund. So to me, it was like, great. Someone else is going to do all the due diligence. Amazing son. Yeah, I’m ready. And so allocator one has a unique thesis. They back emerging VC fund managers from around the world. And because that’s a very contrarian take, it means that every fund manager out there around the world who’s interested in potentially having an anchor investor is more than happy to apply to be part of their program. And so over the course of the last year and a bit, they’ve seen over 950 funds apply. And so they have a really good sense of where the market is going. Where are these fund managers based geographically speaking, what’s their investment thesis? What is it that they’re backing? What is it that they’re not backing? And if you think about it, the data that allocator one is sitting on is the earliest stage signals of where smart money is flowing, long before you see an announcement in tech crunch of XYZ company just raising a funding round. And so I picked up the phone and called our team at Accenture and our private equity group and said, Hey, there’s access to all this data that exists at Accenture, that there’s this massive machinery and skill set around turning data into clear, clear insights, and that’s where the collaboration was was born, to put together this research paper, and this research paper broke out the trends across those 950 funds and where the money is and is not flowing, and also took a broader look at the VC landscape to say what are some of the big macro trends over the last couple of years. Because, of course, the 950 data set is a subset of overall VC because it’s very, very targeted to the emerging fund managers. And the report has been very well received by the family office investors who are looking at it as a bit of a map of where the non obvious places to go and park capital. Hint, it’s not AI because, you know, 53% of all VC funding in this past year has flown into AI and specifically into about 20 VC funds that have raised big mega rounds. And then most of that money has flown into companies raising mega rounds. So there’s 11 companies that have those Mega. Like type rounds, and that means that everything else, all the other really important industries that you know, sustain the planet that we live on, only got a tiny fraction of the funding out there, and most of the funding went into US based deals, which means, as an investor, if you’re looking at that terrain, if you’re looking for the non obvious bets, it’d be looking outside of the US and outside of AI, where that same $100,000 investment or million dollar investment is going to go a heck of a lot further than it would chasing one of the high valued AI deals in the US.

Earnest Sweat 25:37
Wow, that’s fascinating. Was there anything from the data or research that actually surprised you that you had to kind of, like, I know you’re really intentional. Your former accountant, so you probably like, Wait, double checked. Was there anything that made you double check? One

Iliana Valiente 25:55
would be around the Gulf countries. The Middle East is not necessarily an area that we’ve thought about from a VC standpoint, because by all accounts, they didn’t have a VC industry a couple of years ago, and in the past decade, that region has gone from non existent sector to fledgling and scaling because of The government backing, and they’ve essentially willed the sector into existence. And so across this year and last year, we’re seeing an uptick in the availability of capital in that region, but what we’re not yet seeing is a corresponding uptick in the number of companies and startups that are actually able to absorb that capital because now they have the big institutional LPs, but they’re scrambling to build the startup ecosystems and the incubators and the accelerators, and now you’re seeing these regions rolling out the red carpet to attract innovators to come into the Gulf area. It’s like, oh, hey, you’re smart. You’ve done something elsewhere, please come to the region. Help us build this ecosystem so that we have enough startups that can actually absorb this funding to go and progress and build something that’s really meaningful and worthwhile. So I thought that was a bit of an interesting observation to look at where the geopolitics is going and look at what is on the radar for governments. What are governments funding? Where are they creating the subsidies and the early stage incentives, where, if you come in on the ground floor, you are poised for significant upside. And it’s part of the reason why I’m so bullish on emerging fund managers, the people who haven’t been running a VC fund for the last 20 years. Because if you’ve been running a VC fund for the last 20 years, it means you’re an expert in running a VC fund. But does that mean that you really have your finger on the pulse of what’s happening in a local market, in a local geography, in a local niche, to know? Oh, okay, well, these government regulations seem to be changing in that direction. How might I align my investment thesis to disproportionately benefit from that as an LP that’s outside of that Gulf region? How would you have that insight? So that’s one of the findings in that research report

Alexa Binns 28:18
I have heard anecdotally of sovereign wealth funds in the Gulf saying we expect, when we write the cell P Check, one, you know, one percentage of it at some some percentage of it, you’re investing in your US based companies, but we do expect you to also be investing in some here at home, exactly, and and it makes sense that then you get these incredible name brand board members, etc, who are bringing their expertise of what does building a startup look like into their region? If you’re, yeah, if you’re willing to sign on for that assignment in order to get the capital. But

Iliana Valiente 28:59
I mean, have we talked about the taxes in the Gulf, you could be setting up a company in the free zone, and depending on what kind of business you’re launching, you either have zero or 9% corporate tax rate and no personal income taxes. I mean, I’ve been a Canadian for many years, proud Canadian. But when I did a presentation recently to the CFOs of every federal government department. I laid out the numbers in very stark contrast and said, Hey, folks, is anyone paying attention to the fact that our economy is subjectively going off a cliff and our tax rates are objectively speaking, amongst the highest of the OECD nation states, and our entrepreneurship levels so the numbers of new of Canadians that are launching companies is at an all time low and has essentially been declining since the 80s. And when you overlay those sorts of statistics with other countries around the world, it does not paint a very pretty picture. And so you start to compare and contrast. Okay, what are governments doing in regions like the Gulf? How is this? RBC investment agenda, all layering in. And is it any surprise that people are picking up and setting up personal residency in those regions, because it’s just all part and parcel of their portfolio life globally, I think it’s all totally logical and it’s incredibly interconnected as a topic.

Earnest Sweat 30:20
What’s your advice for GPS on how to best connect and build trust with these next gen members of the family office.

Iliana Valiente 31:04
So I think you actually answered your question when you said the word trust in your question, right there. What a lot of GPS do is they sell at the LP, which makes sense. They have a fundraising target, but you don’t want someone to invest in a financial product that is not actually the right financial product for them. That is not how you build a long term trusted relationship. If you talk to any fiduciary financial advisor, they’re always trying to figure out the suitability of this investment to the investor, and I’ve seen a lot of GPS try to bypass and speed up that process in an artificial way, and it backfires. But for GPS, it is really important to understand that oftentimes it is the next gen that holds the keys to a family’s allocation to venture capital. So let me explain what I mean by that. I remember about nine months ago, I was in discussions with a big US publishing house, and they wanted me to become a contributing author for their platform. And one of the ideas that we were toying around was they had asked, why is it that some families do invest in venture capital and others do not? Because, like, you know, it’s a really good question. I have some hypotheses just based on my network, but let me go poke around. And so I started to interview, I think I interviewed 35 different families, and I realized that a lot of times they weren’t investing in ventures because it feels unfamiliar to them. They made their wealth in infrastructure or in construction or in pharma, they understand that terrain. They don’t understand venture and so because of that, they’re like, it’s too foreign. The other piece is that for a lot of the families, the principle is, older, right? Let’s be honest, they’re not digitally native. They did not grow up with a phone in their pocket. They don’t necessarily accept that every business out there is now a something dash technology company. Even if you’re an agriculture company, you are now really an agriculture tech company. And those are the types of businesses that VC is very well suited for. But it’s the next Gens. They’re younger. They see the technology powers everything that they use. They see the technology backed companies have returns that are just significantly higher margins than the returns of more traditional businesses, and they’re far more likely to back a VC company in a VC play, which is why I think the GPs are understanding that, okay, like, we should really go talk to the next gens, because they’re more likely to write the check than the 75 year old family office principal. Great, but you also can’t expect, as a GP, that the next gen that you’re talking to has the same number of years of operating experience or business experience that the family office principal does. The family office principal built the wealth. They know what it’s like to build a company from the ground up. They know loosely what kinds of questions to be asking if you’re talking to a next gen that’s in their 20s. They might be very bright, but they’re still, you know, reps that they haven’t had in the professional world, and I think a lot of the GPS glosses over that fact. And so they try to talk to the next gen and the next gen, because they don’t want to admit that they don’t know things. They sit there and they nod, and then you have two and I’ve watched these interactions. I’m like, wow, there are two people who are clearly talking past each other, because neither of them was willing to recalibrate the talk track, and it does no one any favors. So, yeah, please don’t do that.

Alexa Binns 37:43
There’s a lot of reasons you have unique experience at Iona, but one with this accountant mindset, there’s, in some ways, very little data when you’re working with emerging managers. So can you sort of walk us through some of that decision making process for you on what you’re looking for when you are making an LP commit it how much of this is qualitative and how much is quantitative.

Iliana Valiente 38:09
So one of the biggest things that I’m looking for is fit. You know how we talk about product market fit, or founder company fed like, is this person really the right person to be the CEO of a company, to do A, B and C? The same thing applies for a fund manager. So I’ll use myself as an example. If I woke up tomorrow and said I’m going to launch an outer space fund, and if you were an LP, please don’t back me, because while I know things about multiple domains. Outer Space is not one of them, so I don’t have the right GP to fund thesis, but you’d be surprised by how many people overlook that one very simple thing, and that’s a kind of question number one that I’m asking of why should any allocator trust you, dear GP, to be the steward of their capital as it relates to this domain, if that’s not the area that you know as well as the back of your hand. So that’s often where people fall apart. That’s piece number one. And then piece number two is, why is your investment thesis actually unique and differentiated? So healthcare, great example. I have seen so many pitch decks for health tech funds, and they all look the same. You could do a search function across them and replace a couple of key words, and really, you’d have a hard time differentiating one from the other. What is your unique edge in the allocator? One research showed that 94% of all funds. That is currently out there fundraising has closed, done first close. That means that statistically speaking, most of those funds aren’t going to make it. They’re not going to close. There is not enough LP capital sitting on the sidelines that’s willing to come in and make those early bets. So for the GPS out there, I know that VC can sound like a really exciting, really hot area to go into, but I don’t know if enough people caution GPS against becoming GPS, because typically you are going to spend months and months and months of paperwork and administrative back end work to do your registrations and to get your taxes set up and to do the rest of it. That’s six months of your life, nine months of your life, 12 months of your life that you’re spending fundraising that you may not even succeed in closing that fund. So you need to have strong conviction in why your fund needs to exist, and you need to be able to articulate that very clearly because if you don’t have those kinds of qualitative aspects, it doesn’t matter what your fund economics look like. People probably aren’t even getting that far in in the review process, you want

Alexa Binns 41:26
to start a VC fund. What’s your second best idea? What’s the other thing you’re thinking about doing with your time

Earnest Sweat 41:31
as one? LP told me, said to a friend, he gave him all the like stats of why not to become a GP and he said, If you come back after all that and say you really want to do it, then I know you’re ready. So you really need to have conviction in yourself. The person the hardest person to convince is probably yourself to take on this journey

Earnest Sweat 41:54
for our audience of allocators and emerging managers, what are you reading or watching or listening to that’s really shaping how you’re thinking about the future?

Iliana Valiente 42:15
So I’m currently paying attention to a very random stream of details, which is government Country Briefings and changes in tax regimes and different types of investor programs, because the geopolitical lines as we know them are literally being rewritten in real time where people are choosing to live is being rewritten in real time, and people are looking at multiple passports and residencies and the rest as their backup options. And I think that their rewiring of talent flows, the rewiring of capital flows, is going to change economies as we know them, and that’s a bit of a signal that I don’t think a whole lot of people are necessarily paying attention to. And selfishly, I’m also monitoring this very closely, because I’ve been building a new venture to make life easier for the digital nomads and the global citizens and people who you know live life across two or more countries and are setting up multiple home bases and the rest. And so it’s very relevant market research to be able to advise our members as they’re thinking about setting up their multi, multi country life. But diversification is something I cannot stop thinking about of late. It’s not just diversification of your investment portfolio by having, you know, an allocation into Vc, but it’s also just diversification of your life, because you can’t expect that the country borders and the geographical borders as we know them today are going to be the same in the next three years, five years, 10 years, if history is any indication. So that’s

Alexa Binns 43:57
and if anyone’s interested in learning more about dual citizenship, or how do they find you?

Iliana Valiente 44:03
So ping me. I’m on sub stack. I publish very regularly, and I’ve been building a flexible class. The flexible class is the private member community for this type of demographic. And we’ve been building out a marketplace that brings together all the products, all the services that you might need in order to live this lifestyle. So we’ve onboarded some of the world’s top law firms that specialize in multiple residencies. We’ve onboarded some of the world’s top tax specialists that can help with the complex tax structuring. We’ve onboarded the folks that can help with health insurance coverage and ensure that you’re actually properly covered when you’re splitting time in multiple countries. You’d be surprised by how many people are actually exposed, because they haven’t stopped to revisit their coverage. In forever, we’ve onboarded different types of real estate models, from real estate ownership to the home swap platforms and the rest of. And so yeah, it’s been really fun to build out this marketplace, because I’m essentially building the product that I wish existed for me to enable my lifestyle, and I couldn’t find it. I’m like, Okay, well, if it doesn’t exist and I wanted to, and there are other people like me, maybe I’ll just go start building it. So yeah, that’s what we’re building with a flexible class.