See show notes for this episode: S 02 | Ep 18 From Design Sprints to Boardrooms: Turning Human-Centered Insights into ROI.
Alex Shevelenko:
Today’s guest is Iliana Oris Valiente. By the way, before we start, did I pronounce it correctly? I just want to make sure—I can sometimes get excited and mispronounce names. Okay, I’ll try not to do any fake accents. Let’s record this. Hold on a second.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Alex Shevelenko:
Well, I think we should start with the story behind your innovation. I think you discovered blockchain before most people knew what it was or why it was relevant, back when you were at Deloitte, and then built a business around it. Tell us what fascinated you about taking old things and making them new, and how you bring that into very established, relatively conservative organizations like Deloitte or Accenture.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
I’ve always been the square peg in a round hole, so to speak. I’ve always asked a lot of questions, which may have annoyed some of the people I worked with early in my career. Thankfully, there were many who nurtured that curiosity, and that lifelong spark has never left.
For me, I’m always questioning: just because things are a particular way today, does that mean they’ll be the same tomorrow? Or next month, or next year? And the answer is inevitably no—there are no guarantees.
So step one is being endlessly curious. Step two is that I tend to be very multidisciplinary, a multi-hyphenate, if you will. Yes, I’m a chartered accountant, but when I stumbled into the world of blockchain back in the day, I thought, wait a second—these are just ledgers. Distributed ledgers. I’m an accountant by training; I think about ledgers. Why don’t I apply that world to this world, which was very foreign at the time?
I’ve continued that curious streak and the habit of connecting dots across disciplines that don’t often talk to each other. Today, I sit at the intersection of emerging tech trends, societal trends, and capital investment trends, and I love stitching all of those together.
Alex Shevelenko:
Yeah, I see it—and I love your LinkedIn headline. We were just saying how “building a future humans want to live in” really aligns with many themes we care about and that our audience connects with—especially engaging with complex, important ideas.
So tell us: how do you help humanize this innovation? For many people, it’s like, “Okay, it’s a ledger, it’s difficult, I’m not a CPA.” How do you bring it to life? Is it about value? Storytelling? Show, not tell? Live demos? What have you learned from building innovation infrastructure at Accenture to take complexity and make it accessible inside large organizations?
Iliana Oris Valiente:
At the core of my work, and the work of my teams at Accenture, is human-centered design. There’s a human in every process—whether you’re talking about how a company revamps its products to better serve end customers, or how it redesigns internal workflows where the end user is the employee.
You’d be surprised how many times I’ve walked into rooms with clients undertaking massive technology transformation programs—spending tens of millions of dollars—and when I ask, “What’s the change management plan?” or “You’re rolling this out to every frontline employee—what feedback did you get during your sprints to inform the product roadmap?”—it’s crickets.
Alex Shevelenko:
“What’s a sprint?” They’re asking, “What’s a sprint?”
Or, “What do you mean an hour?”
Iliana Oris Valiente:
“You want input from our employees?” And I’m like, well, yes—the frontline people who actually have to use this widget you’re spending so much time and money designing. Has anyone asked them, “Does this actually work for you? Does this workflow make sense?”
Often, I might as well be speaking a foreign language. When we look at technology adoption, it frequently goes sideways. You can throw technology at people, you can throw money at the problem—but if you haven’t considered the needs of end users and stakeholders, you’re not setting yourself up for success.
I keep this front and center not only in my work, but in my life, as I try to build a future world that humans want to live in. I fundamentally believe we have a lot of power and input into what that future looks like—it’s not just happening to us. Especially at the senior executive level, we can shape it. We just have to be intentional about that shaping.
Alex Shevelenko:
What’s preventing most organizations from doing this really well? I’ll throw out a few hypotheses and see if they resonate.
One is scale—when you’re a very large organization, you become inward-oriented. You have reporting structures, promotion cycles, and internal incentives that shape how people think.
Second is role identity. If you’re a technology person, you focus on technology. You’re doing what you’re good at, but you’re siloed, and you don’t always have direct access to customer or employee experience.
Third, many large organizations historically built technology for internal projects, not with fast feedback loops or customer-centric DNA—except maybe within a digital team that wasn’t always involved in these initiatives.
Do any of these ring true? Are there other recurring themes or patterns you see that organizations consistently struggle with?
Iliana Oris Valiente:
I would say that in many organizations, this idea of being human-centric doesn’t come organically. It’s not something that has historically been rewarded or prioritized, for all the reasons you listed. So oftentimes, my teams are brought in to facilitate dialogue between the CTO, the technology functions, and the business functions, to get alignment.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
Alignment around questions like: What is the vision? What are we driving toward? And how do we make sure we’re not talking past each other, but actually speaking with one another? I’ve joked before that sometimes I feel like I run teams of corporate therapists—and it doesn’t feel like rocket science.
Alex Shevelenko:
Lean back.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
It’s like, “Please grab a seat on my couch. Let’s talk about what’s keeping you up at night, and what dynamics inside your organization we need to address.”
Alex Shevelenko:
Your deathbed—and what would this project look like?
Iliana Oris Valiente:
We don’t have to go quite that far. But yes, a lot of it boils down to stakeholder alignment, and that’s a big component. When you do design thinking and follow the principles of human-centered design, that’s where the best breakthroughs and innovations actually happen.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
We’ve run multi-week, multi-month design sprints with clients, incorporating firsthand research, market research, and analysis of technology and societal trends. We synthesize all of that and bring key stakeholders along on the journey, with a series of working sessions in between. The feedback we get from C-suite executives is often, “Wow—we’ve accomplished more in this eight-hour workshop, and the few weeks leading up to it, than we would have on our own in over a year of trying to figure this out.”
Iliana Oris Valiente:
So yes, I’m a very strong proponent of design and design thinking as a methodology.
Alex Shevelenko:
Let’s connect design-centric thinking with customer centricity. One of our guests, investors, and friends of the pod—and of the company—is Peter Fader, a Wharton professor who developed the customer lifetime value framework and has written for many years about customer centricity. And then, of course, there’s Amazon, often described as the world’s most customer-centric company. All of us experience that as consumers and feel the benefits firsthand.
Alex Shevelenko:
So where’s the disconnect? As consumers, we know what great customer experience looks like, yet in enterprise settings we don’t always take the next step and say, “How do we deliver this in our own organizations?” Why do we need someone like you and your teams to bring that voice in? Philosophically speaking, is this like Plato’s cave—where we’re only seeing shadows of what we think customers want and assuming that’s good enough? Everyone wants to say, “We design for the customer.” Who doesn’t want to be the next Jeff Bezos as a CEO, right? Help us understand the blinders people have.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
I don’t know why this is the case, but I do know that it is the case. We have one set of experiences as consumers in our personal lives and a completely different set of experiences as employees or as people interacting with organizations.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
I often use this example: with Uber, I know exactly where my car is, down to about 50 feet. But if I renew a passport, I may have no idea whether it’s going to arrive next month, two months from now, or three months from now. There’s zero visibility. Our expectations, shaped by private-sector experiences, are bleeding into how we expect to interact with governments and corporate systems—both as customers and as employees.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
If things are sleek, efficient, and user-centric in one context, but clunky and frustrating in another, that gap no longer works. That’s why many organizations are undertaking experience-transformation journeys: to raise the bar and genuinely surprise and delight both customers and employees.
Alex Shevelenko:
So it starts with asking the right questions and creating an environment where you can really dig into them. That connects to another topic I find fascinating. In the startup world, things are chaotic and constantly changing. Then you have an organization like Accenture, which I personally admire. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve had great experiences in Accenture’s innovation labs, and Accenture became one of our earliest promoters, partners, and customers for what has evolved—through several iterations—into our AI work.
Alex Shevelenko:
Many people assume these worlds don’t coexist very well. Are you the unicorn who bridges them—CPA meets innovation? Or is there something special happening at Accenture that attracts people like you and supports these connections between startups and large enterprises?
Iliana Oris Valiente:
Yeah, I see myself as a translator between different worlds. I actually have a Substack called Translations. I speak multiple languages, which often involves literal translation, but I also spend a lot of my time translating between the startup world, the corporate world, and the investor world.
Alex Shevelenko:
Innovation!
Iliana Oris Valiente:
They’re really overlapping, Venn-diagram-type circles. Oftentimes, I’ll take insights from smaller startups and say, “Hey, there’s something brewing on the fringes—we should be paying attention to this.” I’ll bring those insights, where relevant, to large Fortune 500 companies at the board level and say, “Have you seen this startup? Have you seen this idea? If not, would you be open to me brokering a conversation and putting the two of you in the same room?”
Iliana Oris Valiente:
That’s often about preventing the classic problem of the elephant accidentally stepping on the mouse—which is what can happen when corporates and startups interact.
Alex Shevelenko:
Are you referring to a two-year pilot?
Iliana Oris Valiente:
Yes—a two-year, unpaid pilot. Exactly. And we want to avoid those, because that’s incredibly difficult for startups.
Alex Shevelenko:
Six months just to sign an NDA.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
Exactly. It’s too high-stakes for a startup to get entangled like that. So I often act as that translator.
For example, just yesterday I was at the Creative Destruction Lab, the incubator that started at the University of Toronto and now has, I think, 14 or 15 sites around the world, attached to some of the most prestigious universities. They bring in startups from all over the globe. Yesterday, we were hosting a stream focused on AI—specifically AI for the sciences.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
We looked at how AI is changing R&D in pharma, materials science, human–computer interfaces, robotics, diagnostics, and more. I’m able to take insights from those companies and directly connect them with large corporates. I also play a translation role with capital groups.
Alex Shevelenko:
Wait—before we get to capital, let me clarify something. Are you actually able to take a big pharma company and help it roll out innovation in two months, like a startup? Or are you still operating in reality? We know this well because we work in regulated industries, where—for very good reasons—processes around quality and compliance are extremely rigorous and slow things down.
Is that still the reality, where you’re mainly trying to bridge gaps a bit better? Or do you see real breakthroughs where companies innovate very fast in areas that are normally hard for that industry?
Iliana Oris Valiente:
It’s a combination of both. You’re not going to change the regulatory process—it exists for a reason. But at a minimum, you can introduce a concept to a senior C-suite executive that changes how they think about new product development.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
Sometimes that also means advising a startup and saying, “I know this sounds exciting, but I would not recommend barking up that tree. You’re going to spend the next six to eight months trying to get this pilot off the ground, and you may or may not have the runway to survive that.” Some startups can afford that; others can’t. Having those candid conversations on both sides is incredibly valuable.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
If you look at Accenture and how we’ve structured our Ventures program, for example, we have the Spotlight program. When we invest off Accenture’s balance sheet, we don’t just write a check—we become a strategic partner and help those companies scale.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
One example is Sanctuary AI, which operates in the humanoid robotics space. Accenture is an investor, and they’re working with companies in retail that are focused on packaging, warehousing, and related areas. We have deep relationships there, so we often work with our clients and our portfolio companies to broker those relationships, run pilots, and help them scale.
Alex Shevelenko:
Amazing. So we’ve covered startups and corporates talking to each other—and now I understand you’re also something of an LP and family office whisperer. Tell us about that.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
Yes. I’m an investor—an angel investor, a VC, and an LP in a couple of venture funds—as well as an advisor. I spend a lot of time in that ecosystem, connecting startups and portfolio companies with my corporate network to help them scale.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
Over the last year or so, I’ve also gotten many questions from next-generation family office friends about investing in venture capital as an asset class. The questions really run the gamut. Eventually, I asked them, “Why are you asking me this?” And they said, “We have advisors, but they tend to be much older, not tech-native, and they can’t explain complex topics in plain English.”
Iliana Oris Valiente:
They don’t deeply understand the technology. And they said, “You’re young, you’re immersed in this world, and you’re in these circles.” So I’ve essentially become an informal on-ramp for family offices that want to get more involved in frontier investing. I actually think that’s incredibly positive, because those with capital have a responsibility to deploy it thoughtfully and help shape a future world that humans want to live in.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
To live in. When I look geographically—for example, at Canada or Europe—very little of the capital sitting in family office pools is actually deployed into venture capital or early-stage investing. For many, it’s foreign. And people generally don’t invest in things that feel foreign or that they don’t understand.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
But the argument I’m making is that, if you can invest, you actually have a moral obligation to do so. Early-stage startups are the ones that eventually become scale-ups, and scale-ups are the ones that employ more and more Canadians and more and more Europeans. If you want to drive innovation in your region or your country and you have the capital—but you’re not deploying it—then who exactly is backing those companies? It’s not banks. It’s not traditional private equity firms. It has to happen at the individual level as well.
Alex Shevelenko:
So you’re saving Canada—and the EU, and maybe the UK—from economic irrelevance. That’s a minor mission on top of everything else.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
I’m trying to play my part.
Alex Shevelenko:
For the sake of those who are curious about how this world works, one interesting dynamic is that institutional investors are increasingly constrained by windows of innovation. Unless you’re a breakout AI story that’s already exploding, many innovations—especially deep tech and deep science, which you mentioned—take a long time to get to market.
Alex Shevelenko:
In that context, it feels like family offices are sometimes a better home for these investments because they have longer-term horizons and are less transactional. They may also be more aligned with a mission, as you were saying, because you’re drawing them in around purpose. By contrast, the mission of an average investor—despite what they might say—is often driven by portfolio strategy, returns, and raising the next fund. Family offices seem to have a longer-term perspective. Am I understanding this correctly?
Iliana Oris Valiente:
You are.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
And we’re not blaming VCs here. But what I often tell family offices is that their timelines actually align very well with venture outcomes. Today, it takes an average of 11 to 12 years for a company to go public, and that window has roughly doubled over the last decade. Exits are taking much longer.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
Family offices don’t have quarterly reporting requirements. They have the flexibility to invest in areas they’re passionate about and that align with their investment thesis. They also have patient capital—and patient capital is exactly what’s needed in domains like deep science, where you’re not shipping a quick direct-to-consumer SaaS product and calling it a day.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
When I explain it this way, I can literally see the lightbulb go on. They think, “Okay, this actually makes a lot of sense.”
Alex Shevelenko:
So where do VCs fit in, in your view? You’re an investor yourself—you see the value of family offices, strategic investors like Accenture, and you also invest in VC funds. How do you decide where to invest? Where do you see VCs falling short? Is it short-term thinking, trend-following, or not going deep enough on truly contrarian bets?
Alex Shevelenko:
Without naming names, what are the red flags for you? When do you think, “You’d be a great LP for this fund, but not that one”? It sounds like that’s sometimes a role you play. I’m curious about what kinds of misalignments you see—either for startups or for LPs.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
What I’ll say is this: yes, I do a lot of connecting across the deal flow I see and the investor landscape. One observation—documented in a recent research report I co-authored with a VC fund-of-funds called Allocator One, which I’m affiliated with—is about how capital is currently flowing.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
The report reviewed the funding landscape over the past couple of years. One key finding is that more than 53% of all VC funding last year went into AI-powered companies—at the expense of many other equally important areas, such as infrastructure investments that are required not only for AI, but simply to keep the global economy moving.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
In addition, most of the capital flowing into VC went into large, established funds. And the checks those funds wrote were disproportionately large, mega-deals. So what you see is an extreme concentration of capital. Meanwhile, many other sectors are effectively being starved of funding.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
So as an investor, you’re looking—
Alex Shevelenko:
It’s a weird tree—tiny, tiny branches.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
Exactly. You can actually see capital essentially ending up in one very small segment of the market. As an investor, it’s usually better not to go where the crowd is going. It’s better to go where there’s ample opportunity, strong upside, and far less competition.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
That’s what this research report is about. It’s called The Alpha Report because it’s designed to help investors find those contrarian—
Alex Shevelenko:
—in the weeds.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
—underlooked but high-potential areas. I’ll give you a simple example: fintech. If you look at fintech in the US, it’s an overweighted sector. There’s plenty of capital and no shortage of startups. Arguably, we don’t need another buy-now-pay-later product.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
But if you look at fintech in Latin America, there’s enormous upside and potential, yet far less capital deployed there. The same million dollars invested in a fintech startup in North America won’t go nearly as far as that same million invested in a fintech startup in LatAm.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
The report also highlights other geographic corridors where there’s high upside but very low investor appetite. It’s essentially a roadmap for contrarian thinking. That’s at the domain and geography level.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
Another area I focus on in my personal investment thesis is backing emerging VC fund managers. That means not the mega-fund that’s been around for 20 years, but smaller, niche, specialist funds launched by people with deep, domain-specific expertise and an investment thesis that’s truly organic to who they are.
Alex Shevelenko:
Not people just chasing the crowd—yesterday blockchain, today Web3, tomorrow AI.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
Exactly. There’s a fund called Common Magic, founded by Sarah Drinkwater. It was one of the first funds backed by the team at Allocator One. Her thesis was simple: back tech companies where community sits at the core of the value proposition and the moat.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
That wasn’t something she invented overnight. She was one of the first people at Google whose job title literally included the word “community.” She helped build Google Maps as we know it today, including its reviews and millions of monthly active users. She started investing on the side in companies aligned with that thesis and eventually launched her own fund.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
Today, she’s winning awards as a breakout fund manager of the year in Europe. Allocator One was one of the first to write her a check because she didn’t fit the traditional mold.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
The research is very clear: it’s often the smaller funds—sub-$50 million, sometimes even sub-$15 million—that generate the strongest returns. It’s incredibly hard to return a billion-dollar fund, because there are only so many companies that can reach the valuations required to justify that. That’s why smaller, niche funds are my contrarian bet for finding uncorrelated alpha.
Alex Shevelenko:
When you wear your Accenture innovation hat—your day job—one theme is helping industries that might look “boring” from a VC perspective, but are critically important and made up of very large companies that need innovation. They can get help from startups, they can get help from Accenture, and often it’s a combination of both.
Alex Shevelenko:
Are you able to spot pockets of demand that give you insight into where alpha might exist—especially across huge industries that are often left behind because they’re not sexy or trendy? The entire YC class isn’t going to build for those industries, but a few people who really love the problem will. Is that another signal you look for?
Iliana Oris Valiente:
Exactly. Whenever I invest in a startup—especially one with a B2B focus—I’m often able to coach them on how to approach enterprise sales.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
I once interviewed for a board role at a nonprofit, and the recruiter told me, “I think you’re going to be my secret weapon.” I asked why, and he said, “You can play a dual role on boards. You can be the adult in the room for a smaller-scale organization, or the young, disruptive innovator in the room, depending on the context.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
That really resonated with me because it captures the role I often play—whether I’m investing in and advising startups or working with large corporates. And you’re right: VCs don’t fund everything, nor should they. Not every business needs to be venture-backable. By definition, it’s a very small slice.
Alex Shevelenko:
So we’re interviewing a playful adult. I like that. I’ll tell my kids that’s something to aim for. What other words of wisdom would you share with people in enterprise who want to cultivate that openness to ideas, that playfulness, and that connection to innovation—on both sides of the table?
Alex Shevelenko:
Founders or scale-up leaders who want to work with the same organizations you serve at Accenture—one word of wisdom for each group.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
For corporates, I’d say this: think about innovation as a function. You have marketing as a function. You have technology as a function. But most organizations don’t treat innovation in the same way.
If I asked a group of CEOs, “What was your innovation spend across R&D and other initiatives, and what ROI did you get from it?” many would look at me blankly and say, “Actually, I’m not sure.”
Iliana Oris Valiente:
For organizations thinking about relevance and reinvention in the age of AI, I’d strongly encourage you to ask: how do we treat innovation as a function? How do we build an innovation engine inside the organization and develop that muscle over time? That’s what I work on with client organizations and teams every day. And I’m always happy to connect with organizations that are on that journey.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
For startups and entrepreneurs, my advice is: keep going. Don’t lose sight of the needs of the stakeholders you’re serving, but at the same time, don’t lose sight of where the world is going. Pay attention to new tools, new products, and new ways of working. With AI, this isn’t just a bolt-on technology you add at the end—it fundamentally changes how humans interact with systems and with each other.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
That advice applies equally whether you’re a three-person startup or a 33,000-person organization.
Alex Shevelenko:
So next year, are we doing this interview with your avatar?
Iliana Oris Valiente:
With my AI twin, Lila? She’s already ready. She was at the Google Next conference a couple of months ago, running an entire booth by herself. I couldn’t attend because I was double-booked elsewhere.
Alex Shevelenko:
So are we getting you, or Lila? Is there a tricky question we can ask to find out?
Iliana Oris Valiente:
You’re definitely getting the real me today. But next year, maybe I’ll be joined by a humanoid robot. Those are pretty cool—and moving fast.
Alex Shevelenko:
You heard it here first. That would be a fun one. I had such a great time—thank you so much, Iliana. Where can people find you and connect with you? You have a website, right?
Iliana Oris Valiente:
People can follow me on LinkedIn. I also have a Substack where I publish fairly regularly about what’s crossing my desk—everything from technology trends to capital investing and societal trends.
Alex Shevelenko:
You heard it here: one of the most innovative people at Accenture across North and South America. Iliana, thank you so much for joining us. This was a lot of fun.
Iliana Oris Valiente:
Thank you.