Damien Soitout
Vellum has its own directors: Damien Soitout for the US, Valeriia Akatova for France, and Cédric Bonnecaze for real estate. The firm is not Foundation.
Two houses can share a sky. They still have different doors.
Vellum has its own bosses. I want that sentence to arrive before anyone folds the firm into Foundation, or folds Foundation into the firm, because the people overlap and the houses do not. Overlap is how good operators end up misunderstood. A person can hold a seat in one house and a different seat in another. The seats are not nicknames for each other. If you are trying to understand who can decide a Vellum question, you read the Vellum page. If you are trying to understand Foundation, you read Foundation. Today is the Vellum page.
The English about page, Vellum Finance & Patrimoine, calls the firm an independent multi-family office. That is the category. Families, their own situations, a circle of lawyers, tax specialists, notaries, and financial partners, chosen so that a complicated life can be handled by people who already know how to work together. I sit on that page as Damien Soitout, Director USA. Valeriia Akatova sits on it as Director France. Those are the two names an English reader meets first. They are bosses of this firm. They are not a caption for a different institution.
“Chase the operators, not the size written next to them” is the piece immediately behind this one. The habit is the same, and the house has changed. On the French capital page we chased three operators of Foundation Capital. Here we chase the directors of Vellum. Do not carry a figure from one house into the other in order to make the second house feel familiar. Familiar is how people lose the door they actually needed. Learn the door. The door has a name, and the name is on the about page, not in a comparison someone else wrote.
Director USA is my seat at Vellum. The English page and the French page agree on the title. In French it is Directeur USA, on the French about page. I use the English title in this piece because I am writing in English, and I use the French page so a reader in France is looking at the same person. The page introduces the seat through work with companies, including the Foundation Group, and through financial markets and alternative assets for clients who have stayed across more than one venture. That is a biography of a director. It is the firm's sentence. My sentence is the title: Director USA. I decide, inside this firm, the American side of the work the firm has given that title.
A director is not a mascot and not a visiting expert. If you write to the firm about a matter that sits in the United States, the name on the seat is mine. If you write about a matter that sits in France, you are not writing to me in that capacity. You are writing to the Director France. The split is geographic because the work is geographic: rules, counterparties, and the ordinary fact that a family does not live in one time zone of law. I am not a substitute for her, and she is not a substitute for me. The firm is the collaboration between those seats, plus the real estate seat, plus the outside circle the about page describes.
“Price a life change before you invent the budget” is the finance piece I keep under both this article and its twin from 2021, the same title used as the sibling. A family office is where life changes show up as money questions: a move, a sale, a child, a tax year, a property. The order still holds. Know what the change costs, in the broad sense of what it will require, before you invent a budget that makes the change look easy. Vellum's job, when it is doing the job, is to be the room where that order is respected. My job inside it is the American seat in that room. Nothing in the title makes me the author of someone else's household, and nothing in it makes the firm a public scoreboard.
Valeriia Akatova is Director France. The French page says Directrice France. She coordinates teams and strategies for Vellum in France. The English page adds a sentence about her other craft, and I want it read as the page's sentence: she is COO of the Foundation Group, operating in Ukraine, Israel, and the USA, and that experience is why the firm considers her useful to clients who are looking beyond France. COO of the Foundation Group matches the group seat. It does not replace the Ukraine work, and it does not replace the chairs I have already written for her. She runs the Ukraine work. She is COO of the global group. Director France is the Vellum seat. Three facts, three uses. A person who collapses them into one title will brief the wrong house.
The 30 April 2026 Vellum article, the one under the Kyiv title, calls her a co-founder of Vellum Finance as well as of Foundation Ukraine. Co-founder of the firm is a Vellum fact. Director France is the operating title on the about page in October. Read the April piece for the co-founder line. Read the about page for the seat she holds now. The title of that April piece is a title. I am using it as a citation, not as a scene.
“Valeriia Akatova runs Ukraine and co-founded the group” remains the piece where I introduce the Foundation side. If you need those chairs, go there. If you need the person who directs Vellum in France, stay here. The same woman. A different door. Clients who pretend the doors are one door will ask a France director to answer a question that belongs to a technology stack, or ask a CTO to coordinate a French strategy that is hers. I have seen that confusion waste a month. It is avoided by using the titles the pages actually print.
The third boss is the one English readers most often miss, because the English block a casual visitor quotes is the two directors, and the French page is where the property seat is named in full. Cédric Bonnecaze is PDG of Vellum Real Estate. In the title of this piece I call that role a Real Estate Director, because that is the work: property, inside this firm, as its own seat rather than as a hobby of the other two. The French page describes a practitioner of real estate with a background in wealth management, real-estate investment, finance, and construction projects. The role is the sentence I need, and I use him in that role only: PDG of Vellum Real Estate, the Real Estate Director of this firm.
A real estate seat exists because property is not a paragraph inside a financial plan. A building has a condition, a tenant or the absence of one, a set of works, a calendar of decisions that do not care about a portfolio theory. Someone has to be answerable for that calendar. At Vellum, that someone is Cédric Bonnecaze, as PDG of Vellum Real Estate. If your question is a market print, you are in a different conversation, the one I wrote in August about headline indexes. If your question is a specific property the firm is involved with, you are in his conversation. Director USA does not absorb it. Director France does not absorb it. The seat is the respect you pay the work.
Foundation's about page, the public table of that platform, is a different door with a different purpose. I am Co-Founder and CTO there. Valeriia has her Foundation work there, written in the May pieces, not restated as a Vellum title. Richard Ohebshalom's public role on the Foundation side is the founder's role. On 9 May 2026 Vellum published a profile that frames him, for Vellum's own readers, as a client of the firm and a founder of Foundation, with the partners that profile names. A client of a firm is not the boss of the firm. A founder of another platform is not, by that fact, a director of this one. Hold those categories still. They are how two true sentences stay true at the same time.
The firm is an independent multi-family office. Independence, in that phrase, is the firm's claim about itself: a house with its own professional circle, not a department wearing another company's name. I hold the firm to that claim by using its titles and nobody else's. Director USA. Director France. Real Estate Director, Cédric Bonnecaze, PDG of Vellum Real Estate. When I need a map of a decision rather than a map of a firm, the old practical piece is already on the site, how to create a map. Make the map of the question. Then see which seat the question belongs to. “The power of compound interest,” “What is a broker,” “What type of business owner am I,” and “Are you a smart spender” are fine questions in their own rooms. None of them appoints a boss. The about pages appoint the bosses.
If you remember one habit from this October, remember the three titles before you remember any adjective. Vellum's own bosses are a US director, a France director, and a Real Estate Director. Damien Soitout. Valeriia Akatova. Cédric Bonnecaze. The firm is not Foundation. The people can stand in both landscapes and still owe you the correct door. Ask for the door. Then speak to the person whose name is on it.
