Walter Roth

How I coach

I start with the experience, intuition, and judgment you bring. Your way of seeing is central to the work.

We return to real deals and customer outcomes to find where attention can make the biggest difference. Sometimes that points to a question, a skill, or a strategy that needs to change. Sometimes you already know the next move, but the stakes make it hard to take.

We slow those moments down, look at what is known and what is missing, and practice how to stay open and act.

Compassion, curiosity, and collaboration guide how I coach: care about the other person’s outcome, stay interested in what is true, and use both people’s expertise.

My aim is to help you and your team keep learning from customers, refine your approach, and help others see and act for themselves.

Building companies and learning to sell

At 23, I founded a venture-backed startup and raised $9.8 million across three rounds. I spent a year as entrepreneur in residence at the fund that led my Series B, then began my enterprise sales career at Oracle. I hold a degree in industrial engineering, and my work has included product development, recruiting, marketing, business development, company leadership, and sales.

Over the past decade, I have led sales or coached founders and their teams. I have been a mentor at Alchemist Accelerator since 2018 and sales coach in residence at HF0 since 2024. My coaching also extends to the LP conversations involved in raising a venture fund.

Beyond the sales conversation

I have also built mobile apps for mindfulness, coaching, and therapy, collaborating with psychologists and scientists.

I split my time between New York and San Francisco and enjoy hiking. Through the NYC Founder Community Hiking Club, I have brought founders together to walk, talk, and share their experiences outside the usual meeting room.

Where my lens began

My own lens began to take shape growing up with an innovative lawyer for a father and a professional clown for a mother. That combination is part of the perspective I bring to my work, and part of why I’m interested in the experiences that shape how each founder sees.

Looking toward the horizon

Sunrise and sunset have long been favorite times of day for me. I hadn’t given moonrise the same attention until my wife, Geeta, suggested we walk to Kahala Beach to watch one. The photograph I took there became the starting point for the moonlit ocean on this site.

Looking toward the horizon gave me another way to think about the work I do with founders: notice what is beginning to emerge, look closely enough to understand it, and act before it becomes obvious to everyone else.

The full-stack human

The more powerful the technology we use, the more of our own capacity we need to bring to it. I see becoming a full-stack human as a competitive advantage: developing the attention, range, and judgment to recognize an opportunity and act while there is still something to win.

That means drawing on thoughts, physical sensations, emotions, instincts, and intuition. A hesitation, a surge of interest, or a pattern you cannot yet explain can point toward something worth investigating. The capacity to stay with those signals under pressure, without being overwhelmed by them, gives you more to work with.

In coaching, we bring that attention to a real deal or decision. What are you noticing? What have you left unsaid? What would help you test it? We put words to the insight, seek the missing information, and use what we learn to decide where and when to act.

This is how I help founders turn their unique lens into an advantage others can use. An intuition becomes a question. A question brings new evidence. That evidence sharpens the idea, the timing, and the conviction to move. Your team gains a way to keep learning as it acts on the vision.

I use AI and other tools to extend that work. As those tools become more capable, I believe our ability to direct them with original insight and clear judgment becomes more valuable. My aim is to help people build companies that win, while developing the capacity to flourish in the lives they are building. Different ways of seeing deserve the chance to become something real.

Working with Walter at Simple Lens →