I have sat on the other side of the table. Here is what I have learned.
Roger King has spent thirty years inside Silicon Valley's startup ecosystem, first as one of its most active executive recruiters, then as the founder of Bay Angels.
Three decades in the room
Roger King has spent more than thirty years inside Silicon Valley's startup ecosystem. In 1997 he founded Bay Angels, which has grown into one of the Valley's longest-running and most active angel investment groups. Over nearly three decades, Bay Angels has hosted hundreds of companies on its pitch stage and helped facilitate more than $50 million in early-stage transactions.
Before Bay Angels, Roger spent decades as a top executive recruiter for early and mid-stage startups, placing C-suite and engineering talent at companies including Adobe, Oracle, Zynga, and OpenTable. A handful of those companies first found their seed funding at Bay Angels.
Roger has hosted and judged pitch competitions all over the world, in Havana, Beijing, Prague, Seoul, and Tokyo. His perspective has been featured in Forbes, Fortune, and on CNN. He remains deeply connected to the Valley's network of angel investors, venture capitalists, and investment bankers.
Why I am doing this
After thirty years of watching brilliant founders stumble on the same fixable problems, a story that does not land, a deck that buries the lede, a market slide that misses the real why, Roger is opening his calendar to early-stage founders who need an honest set of eyes before they walk into an investor room.
This is not deck design. It is pitch coaching from someone who has spent three decades sitting in the audience. The goal is simple: help you walk into your next investor meeting having heard the hard questions before, knowing exactly which slides matter and which ones do not, and pitching with the clarity that gets investors to lean in instead of check out.
What actually moves the needle
The pitches that work share a few things. They open with a sharp, specific problem the listener immediately recognizes. They make the founder's right to win that market obvious without overclaiming. They answer the investor's first three skeptical questions before the investor has to ask them. And they leave the audience wanting more, not less.
The pitches that fail usually fail in the first ninety seconds, and the founder rarely knows why.
“Roger King is one of the most impressive people I have ever met. His ability to connect with people and then connect those people to other people is second to none. He is extremely thoughtful, generous and always willing to help.”