EP069 - How to provide benefits for remote teams with Lona Alia at SafetyWing
About the episode
This episode focuses on how to provide benefits for remote employees, how to travel around the world as a remote family, and what is the future of work in general. Lona Alia from SafetyWing provides exclusive insights on how she travels with her family and how she ensures that they are always insured.
About the guest
Lona is the founder of StyleLend, a venture-backed Y combinator, and the Head of Revenue at SafetyWing.
She is an advisor to startups and the EU for innovation. Remote Work Enabler. Expert at building fully remote teams. Nomad: 80+ countries; Learned 7 Languages. Interested in building things that people want, teams you want to be part of, and companies with a mission that is greater than just making money.
Connect with Lona on LinkedIn.
About the host
My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. My mission is to help and inspire a community of remote leaders who can bring more autonomy, transparency, and leverage to their businesses, ultimately empowering their colleagues to be happier, more independent, and more self-conscious.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Want to become a guest on the show? Contact me here.
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Welcome to the leadership anywhere show. Today, we are going to discuss multiple things from how to provide benefits for remote employees. How to travel around the world as a remote family, and what is the future of work in general? I have the amazing Lona Alia with me who's built high-performing startups before serving as revenue leader for SafetyWing. Welcome Lona. I really appreciate your time for coming here.
Thank you, Peter. Really excited to be here.
Appreciate your time. So please tell me a little bit more about yourself. How did you start working remotely and what are you doing now?
Oh yeah, that's a interesting story. I finished the college in the US back in the day in the mid 2000s and I was always like unconventional type of person. So I didn't want to commute to an office, be sitting in a concrete box for eight hours, and then have to commute back to my home. So after finishing at the top of my class, and with really great results, I told my parents that I don't want to get a real job. And they were quite surprised.
How did they take it?
They didn't take it so well because, we're Albanian background immigrants. Of course, you want your kids to be doing great. And by doing great means that you have this amazing job at a corporate office and you being paid and you have a corner office and you have this and that, but I was not interested in any of those perks. I thought actually it would be the end of me, the end of my creativity, the end of my fun, my adventure. So I opted for something different and I started consulting for different startups. I actually was picked up by a startup that needed someone that spoke many languages for a trade show they were doing. And it was a company that had a software program they were selling to doctors all over the world. So I started traveling with them and going from country to country at a very young age, maybe about 25. And here I was, next to the CEO and the founder and presenting this product. In different languages to different doctors around the world. So I had this incredible experience by working from my laptop and working from wherever I was in any country. I was at such a young age so that's where it started, really. I became a salesperson for them and then managed sales team and I convinced them to let me work remotely from Paris one summer and that worked out great. That was before we had any of the tools we have now, so that had me addicted to this nomadic life, which was changing scenery all the time, being in different cultures, having different foods, different flavors, speaking different languages, absorbing everything that I could. So that was quite interesting for me, to be honest. And I was addicted to it, so I was like I don't wanna go to an office and just be bored to death every day. So then after working for this company, I reached the different levels and I was bored. So I needed something else. So I went to do my MBA in San Francisco. That's where I started my entrepreneurship journey. When I got to San Francisco, I met some of the most interesting people in the world. I met Marissa Mayer, Sheryl Sandberg the founders of Google, Larry and Sergei, founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman. So I was able to be inspired by these people that had built businesses that were worth obviously over a billion dollars at the time and now multiple billions and maybe a trillion some. So I thought, wow, I really want to build a company that impacts a billion people and also is worth that much. And my thing at the time was fashion. And I thought, how can I make fashion more sustainable? So I started a company in 2013 helping women rent out their nice items to each other. So think about dresses, purses, so this was really interesting.
Sorry. When was that?
This was in 2013. So after I had finished my MBA I went on around the world trip for a while, and then I was itching to start my company. So I pitched at a startup competition in San Francisco. I won that competition and then I went on to start building the company. I was accepted at Y Combinator, which is the most prestigious accelerator in the world. That's where Airbnb came from, Dropbox, so many great companies, and by the way, Safety Wing that I work for now also is a Y Combinator company. So I went through YC, I had raised 2 million dollars we've got about 60, 000 plus, users at the time. And then COVID hits and it went down to zero. And that's when I started working with Safety Wing, the founder reached out to me, the CEO. And he really wanted to build revenue channels starting with a sales team from zero to one. And because I was a founder and I had done this before he thought I'd be the right person. And when he told me about their mission and vision, to build the first country on the internet and to give everyone the freedom to be able to work and live from anywhere that sounded like music to my ears because I had been...
That's a great mission.
Yeah it's amazing. So that's why, I said, sure, I will be very happy to work on this mission, even though as a founder. It would be hard for one to work for another person or another company, but it's honestly been one of the most incredible and rewarding journeys I've had in my life, and now it's three years in.
It's just so interesting and an amazing journey that you share that two things came to my mind immediately. One is that I speak with a lot of people who started working remotely pretty early on. Even before we had these tools that we have today, like Zoom and others. Even before we had any kind of like tech stack for remote operations. And they all have the kind of the same or similar characteristics, right? In your case, you were coming from an immigrant family in the U. S. speaking multiple languages, attending university and MBA and stuff, but still you were driven to work not in a corner office like the traditional career path for these kind of people, but to work anywhere on the globe. And I think it's personal motivation and a personal drive that drives people to work remotely. That's one that immediately came to my mind. And the other one is that you were really early on everything. So on the fashion startup that you started this peer to peer lending companies. Now I wouldn't say they are abundant, but there are so many examples, but I assume that you were one of the first ones there and the Safety wing as well. There are other companies right now who are providing health care benefits for remote teams, but I actually remember that Safety Wing being I'm correct me if I'm wrong, but they were the first ones or at least one of the first ones.
Yes.
We're doing this. So it's an interesting thing that you were always on time. Good timing.
Sometimes too early, I think, but it's yeah, like with my company, it was very early on. So I had to educate a lot of the customers and a lot of the greater population to be able to turn their consumption from something that is very harmful to the world to something that's more sustainable. And of course, we saw sustainability become a big thing in the last many years where a lot of companies also greenwash with sustainability and they say they're sustainable, but actually they're not. Kim Kardashian's, the last.
Oh, yes, Jesus, yes.
Environmental, climate change, and she's using that to sell nipple bras, what are you doing? And these bras and these, underwear, they're made out of polyester, which is plastic. And it's made out of oil.
Yes, microplastic which is even worse.
Microplastic yeah. It just, it doesn't decompose, ever. However many you buy, and then they end up in landfills, those landfills choke the earth because they don't decompose. Really people like that have a lot of influence, they have a lot of money, they've made billions of dollars, they can't use their money to a good cause. They're still polluting the earth. At no remorse, and it's very sad to see that.
And you mentioned that the overlying mission for Safety Wing is truly ambitious, create a global country for people to work from anywhere. What do you mean by a global country? What do you mean by everyone can work from anywhere? Because I think it should be discussed.
Yes. So the first thing that I want to say is that our mission is the first country on the internet, and this is not a digital country. It really means a way for, we want to ensure equal opportunity and freedom for everyone. And the way that we do that is through our vision to build a global social safety net which means a health, retirement and income protection available to everyone everywhere. So what that means is that as people want to be more mobile and the global infrastructure right now is very much based on the country that you live in or the country where you were born, we want to be able to give you another way so that you can be more mobile. And you can live and work where you want to and bring that safety net with you. So let's say you are in Italy, for example, but actually you are born in Hungary and you have a Hungarian passport. Usually your safety net comes from Hungary, which means that your retirement, your health, all of those things you have to, get them in Hungary. But then if you want to live for three months in Italy. How do you do that? That's what we want to provide. We want to give you a health insurance that is good in any country that you go to a retirement plan that you can save from in any country that you go to and access from any country that you decide to retire in. These are something that are like very interesting for the future. And for those digital nomads, which there are 35 million people right now, but they're going to be about a billion in about 10 years. So how do we build a product and infrastructure for that future consumer? And we started with the healthcare piece, because that's the most important to make people feel safe. And our health plan covers you in more than 180 countries. Usually a lot of startups and scale ups acquire it because they want to cover their distributed teams in multiple countries. They don't want to deal with a headache of having to procure different health insurance in each country. So that's what we started with and then we're going to go and do a few more things. Of course, I can talk about, yeah, Plumia, which is the first country on the internet, so Plumia is the non profit arm of Safety Wing, and this is what will basically make the country on the Internet a reality. Plumia increases the global mobility rights of people everywhere. So it operates actually as a think tank, generating research policy, products and ideas to level the playing field across borders. We're building solutions to create this equal opportunity among citizens to different countries. And we're working with different politicians and countries to be able to have some type of a border pass that allows you to work from anywhere and not dependent where you're from or where your passport says you are. But actually what you do. So let's say you, Peter you come from Hungary and let's say Hungary didn't have a very strong passport. You normally would not be allowed to live in different countries maybe let's say even Italy, and it's the same for me, like Albania but I also have an American passport. Now, if I were to only have an Albanian passport, I wouldn't be able to live and work where I please. This is the usual way that countries give you a visa. It's based on your passport.
Of course.
What we're asking them to do is that not base it on the passport, but base it on the person, right? And also their income. So many digital nomads could be coming from India, from Pakistan, from Indonesia. And they have weak passports. However, they're making great money online. They would not rely on your country's safety net because they have Safety Wing, as health insurance and retirement. So all they want to do is live in Italy for three months legally, and why shouldn't that be possible just because of their passport or where they were born?
Perfect. And by the way, it rhymes really well with the current approach on taxation as well, by the way. So I'm not, I'm probably, you probably heard about that as well, but there will be a global tax incentive for digital nomads as well. It's in talks we will see, but yeah, it should be, I think that should be addressed.
Yes. You're talking about the UN tax treaty. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That is yeah, it's actually good news. It's being discussed. The good news is that there won't be any double taxation, which is nice. But it's good that obviously the UN is looking at this because they are seeing it as a future of people wanting to be more mobile and they want to be able to live and work in different places.
Yes. And because if we step back and ask ourselves, what is a country? If you enter a country and you live there for multiple months, let's say, what is the country for you? There are services that country where you're living is providing for you because of your taxation or your residency or whatever it is. It provides you with healthcare, right? That's where, Safety Wing and other companies come to the picture. They are providing you retirement or like financial security or planning. They are providing you other types of security. Even if you're not a citizen of that country, you are consuming that service passively anyway. And I think the other way that they're providing you is education. If you have a family, for example and I wanted to talk about this one as well with you, by the way, because because of your content that you share on LinkedIn and everywhere else that you have a family. And you work online and travel around the world with your kids. And they are attending some kind of a school or getting some kind of education. So how does that work for you? How do you solve that problem? Because that's a challenge if you don't have a residency in certain countries.
Yes. That's a great question. And I get this question quite often because being a nomad myself for many years and then having my first child, I did not want my adventures to end. I still wanted to live life fully. And usually in countries like America parents will have kids and then they'll retreat to the suburbs and then pretty much wait until the kids are 18 and then start to travel then if they're lucky. But I, I didn't want that life. To me, it seemed like the end and I really didn't subscribe to it. In addition, I saw also how expensive that life can be when you have children in the U. S. I was living in New York at the same at the time that I had my first child. And I thought, oh gosh, when I was single, I could easily live a life here. And it was very much doable but having a family, you just have to have a bigger space. And that means you have to make a lot more money. It means you would be less present for your child. So I also looked into geo arbitrage which is, living in other countries and making us dollars or let's say euros or et cetera and spending a lot less because the cost of living in another country is much less. So I've been doing this digital nomad family work from anywhere type lifestyle since my first child was two months old. We got the passport and then we traveled from the U S to Europe, bought a car in Germany and then started going from country to country from there. And the reason I've been able to do this is because I have two passports and I have more mobility and flexibility when it comes to where can I stay for how long. And right now there is a lot of companies that offer you different citizenships by different ways. But also there's, I think, 46 digital nomad visas or more around the world. So you are able to actually do this legally.
And sorry, but where do your kids go to school?
Yes. So the big thing was a long question, but I'm super curious. Absolutely. And I was going to get there. I just didn't want to make my long. Okay. Having a digital nomad family work from anywhere, there's three logistical pieces that somebody needs to figure out. The first one obviously is accommodation. Where are you going to stay? How long are you going to be? How much it's going to cost? The second one is education. And the third one is community. So for someone to be happy living this life around the world, they have to solve all three of those and they're not very easily solvable. So for me, because I am an entrepreneur and I just build the plane as I'm flying it, I have figured it out, how to do this thing. And what I figured out is that if you go to places that are not Western countries, meaning like Mexico or Albania or Bulgaria or Croatia or Costa Rica, you are able to get your kids into the system with not a lot of trouble, meaning like in the U. S. to have your kid go to a daycare, you have to be waiting list, there's no way you can show up and they take your kids within that week it has to be like months of waiting. Germany is the same. Maybe Italy is the same. I'm not sure. But so I avoid those countries. I would go to countries where I show up and I say, Hey, I have this two kids. Will you take them for the next month? And they say, yes. And I pay the fee. And then off we go. I have eight hours off time to do my work. I pick up my kids from the daycare or kindergarten or whatever you'd like to call it. And then we go from there. Now, the cool part is that there are some companies that are solving this for parents. So one of them is Boundless Life. So it's boundless. life. Yep. And then there's a lot of other similar companies in the same space that they solve all three aspects of this journey for parents. So the accommodation, the community and the education. So yeah, you can do it like on your own and hack it like I've been doing it and you pay a much lower price. Or you can choose a company to do it for you, but expect to pay five X the price. And if you're willing to do that, I would absolutely recommend you to do that option because it's so much easier, so much better. And I really would love to do that, but on a, yeah, monthly basis, I'd have to pay all of my salary to one of those companies to be able to do it, which doesn't make sense for me because I want to also invest my money into different.
Sure. Sure. Sure. And then I guess it comes down to the individual cases, money buys convenience. So obviously companies can help you to do solve these problems. But yeah, you can hack your way through.
And speaking of which Peter, I did put out a thing on LinkedIn saying that those who are interested in this lifestyle can join us this summer from May to August in different locations. So if people are interested, perhaps either reach out to me on LinkedIn or look at that post on my LinkedIn and fill out a form. But basically what we're going to do is just get a group of people together and just figure it out ourselves. So let's say we're going to be in Bansko Bulgaria for a month. And let's say we have 10 families then we could maybe get a teacher that could teach them different things. Maybe we get some different coaches that can take them on adventures. So anywhere from playing sports to hiking in the mountain to horseback riding to, I don't know, you name it, whatever sport they can do together in community, in nature, have fun. And I'm very much into the letting kids be kids. My kids are three and five. The five year old already knows how to read, write, whatever, add subtract. So that's quite a lot for a child to know, but that's because of the system in the U S I've been able to teach him all of that. And I'm okay with him like just going on these different types of learning journeys that various programs provide, let's say, world schooling provides a certain interesting program where you learn by different things in the world. There's, yeah, there's other online schools, there's so many different things that are popping up that I'd be very interested in my child looking like learning through that.
And it's so interesting to see, by the way, that I can't remember the number, but I think you said that 30 to 40 million people who are working fully online and living a digital nomad life, correct me if I'm wrong but you expect, yeah, 35, yeah, but you expect a billion within 10 years. It's so interesting to see that how it rhymes with the back to the original mission and vision for safety wing creating a digital country. I guess right now, at least for that 40 million people we are hacking our way together to be able to work online living this lifestyle. Everyone has their own personal solutions. Maybe they get together with two or three families, two or three people, there are digital communities, co working, co living, and all the others, but I assume that within five to ten years, this whole, the service level for these kind of people will even out and professionalize a lot.
Yes.
There will be more and more services popping up catering to this huge demand.
Oh, absolutely. I think even Airbnb can service this area, right? Because they already have the supply. They have the supply. They have the demand. And now, if they're able to solve the education piece, which could be by via experiences on their website, for example, like they have a section for experiences. Maybe there's a section for digital nomad families or remote work families that need that service. I think that could be huge because then you give people all of those three logistical pieces accommodation, education and community and boom, you've got like a turnkey solution in any country that you want to go to.
It's interesting to see how these service providers cater to the digital nomads right now and also for digital digitally distributed companies, remote companies and while individuals have their own, solutions and stacks and hacks on how they can get through in certain different situations when they are working online and traveling online, even with their families or without their family or individually. But let's turn the table a little bit. And what do you think, how do companies can cater to these individuals, how companies can motivate these individuals to work as a digital nomad community. What would be the ideal? I wouldn't say tech stack for these benefits.
Yeah, no, that's actually something that's super interesting right now. And I think that companies in able to attract and retain the best talent, they need to offer flexibility. And not just, when you work, but also where you work and what time you work. And if you're able to offer this to your team, you will be able to attract and retain really the top talent because the top talent doesn't want to be told to go to an office to work from nine to five and to be in a city that you picked and not what they picked. Giving them the ultimate flexibility which is, time, space, and place, you want to be able to offer them this type of arrangement. And that arrangement, instead of paying for an office for example and having utilization rates of 40 percent or less, you can turn those dollar amounts and give them as a workation type stipend, right? Big companies, especially enterprise and go and get the services from either boundless or another company or Airbnb and they can say, Oh, we're going to send 1000 of our workers to Bulgaria for one month or three months and they can work together. And they can connect in person, but also they're living their best lives with their families with the community that they build with their other coworkers and also the local people there. So I think this is something like really cool in the future of benefit space, where instead of just offering the usual things, you're actually offering these amazing experiences in other locations and let people fully utilize that flexibility of working from anywhere versus being stuck in just an office or let their home office.
This is so interesting that you mentioned this because I'm so totally supporting this and I can actually back that up with data. I had a guest a while back on this show. And they so they surveyed people working in corporate America and they found that around 20, 25 people, 20 to 25 percent of the people are able to work remotely. And what I mean by able is that if they are allowed to work remotely, they are able to manage their time, space, and, everything in terms of work wise they will feel cherished, valued, and also productive working remotely. Meanwhile there is a higher number of people, higher percentage of people, around 50 to 60 percent, who want to work remotely, but they are not able to work remotely, not because the company doesn't allow them to work remotely, but because they're as an individual, they're not used to that. We can be frank here. It's totally different lifestyle. We live flexibly. We live in a distributed world, as a digital nomad it's totally different compared to working in a city in the office. It requires different, I wouldn't say skill sets, but a different mindset. And my assumption, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that more people want to try out the remote work and sometimes if they are trying it out after they tried it out, they loved it, but they would love to return to their original community, their original home and whatever they are coming from. And that's amazing in terms of a benefit for a company because companies like Safety Wing or others let's these companies allow their employees to try this whole remote work thing. See if they see if it fits for them as an individual, see if the lifestyle takes out something for them. See if they can maintain the productivity levels. It's not that easy. And it's a great opportunity for everyone to be part of this community, if they want to, even for a trial period.
Yes. I agree.
I think we are like running out of time but it was a lovely conversation and truly appreciate for time coming here. Tell the audience where people can find you and what are you cooking up right now?
Oh, yes. That would be great. They can find me, of course, on LinkedIn, just like you, Peter, we're connected there. I put out a lot of content daily, but also I run a webinar series for leaders in the distributed workforce place, the future of work. And we talk about best practices, top benefits, how to do certain things. What are the tech stacks that companies are using? And that webinar series is quite interesting. We'd get about a thousand registrants per webinar or around 300 attendees. We have great companies that come on there anywhere from slack to Zapier to notion, et cetera. So a lot of leaders will be panelists. So I definitely would put a link there that where you can look at the future webinars and just sign up for the one that you feel is the most interesting for you. But otherwise, yeah, LinkedIn is perfect. Please do a follow and comment and join the conversation with me and Peter on LinkedIn.
Absolutely. All of these that you mentioned will be linked in the show notes. So feel free to hit up the show episode to check all the links, but we will be sharing all of this on LinkedIn as well as we always do. Again, Lona, thank you very much for coming here.
Thank you, Peter. And yes, if people have more questions, please feel free to reach out. I'm happy to share.
