Effective Pitches

Startups can succeed and fail for a myriad of reasons. However, at the critical time of delivering a pitch, there are core ingredients that simply must be met to make a good impression. Startups that are successful with these core ingredients will get funded, and those without those core ingredients won’t. If you are looking for a real-world deconstruction of a real-world pitch, come to this event and take notes.

We will have 5 startups pitch to the group and then our panel will deconstruct the pitches. They will go through the issues that they see with the pitches and spend some time providing suggestions about what is important for them when they hear pitches.

Geoff Harris, Board Member – Seattle Angel

Geoff Harris has been an active angel investor in Seattle for the last several years. He is on the board of Seattle Angel, a non-profit, which serves to educate both the angel investment community and startup founders. Seattle Angel sponsors the Seattle Angel Fund and Seattle Angel Conference, where Geoff is the fund manager for Fund VII. Geoff is also a member of Alliance of Angels.

Previously Geoff held executive and engineering management roles at Microsoft for over 15 years. His areas of focus included Speech and Natural Language, Mobile and Digital Media, where he holds several patents.
Geoff holds a BA from Brown University

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Kevin Croy, Co-founder & Partner - 9Mile Labs
Kevin is a Co-Founder and Partner at 9Mile Labs and has invested in 48 B2B technology startups since 2013. He is a serial entrepreneur who has co-founded five startups, two of which (Lostpedia, Jupiter Hosting) have had successful exits. Kevin is a technologist and enterprise architect with hands-on experience in a broad range of Internet technologies, data center infrastructure, and development tools. Kevin holds an MBA from the University of Washington, Foster School of Business.

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Elaine Werffeli

Elaine Werffeli is an active Angel Investor within the Seattle WA startup community and specifically focuses her time as a member of the Seattle Angel Conference. Elaine enjoys mentoring early startups to contemplate, understand, and communicate their full potential so they can grow into future leaders of industry. She is also working with Ecuiti, a start up from Silicon Valley that specializing in enabling intelligent insights from big data.

Elaine is a 25 year veteran at Microsoft where she was passionate about driving impact from data driven decisions across Microsoft’s diverse set of products and services by leading efforts to deploy and operate real-time feedback to create action from insight. Her leadership comes from a wealth of experience in Product Marketing, Product & Business Intelligence as well as Customer Data & Analytics, as well as in areas including but not limited to Business Strategy, Customer Behavioral Analysis, Visualization and Executive Dashboards, and Market Research. She holds an Applied Physics degree from the University of California, San Diego and an MBA from San Diego State University.

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