Robert Welch

Mr. Welch is CEO of Coast Ventures, LLC, a San Francisco, CA based company that he formed in 2001 which specializes in consulting to the CEOs of emerging companies, assisting them in achieving profitable sales and shareholder liquidity. His career started in engineering, but quickly grew into general management where he specializes in finance, marketing, and operations. Mr. Welch is a passionate entrepreneur who enjoys mentoring and investing in startup and emerging companies and uses his engineering background to keep up to date on the latest technology and opportunities in the telecom and computer industries.

He began his working career in 1963 as an Engineer at Douglas Aircraft's Missile and Space Systems Division in Huntington Beach CA, with a tour of duty in Huntsville, AL and finally as part of a launch crew for the Saturn V space vehicle at Cape Kennedy, FL. Returning to Northern California, he formed his first entrepreneurial startup company in 1969.

Mr. Welch's next entrepreneurial venture was at National Semiconductor in 1975, where as General Manager he built a new division, which ultimately grew to 70 employees and $10M in annual sales by 1979. That year he founded a new company called Zitel, which as CEO he and his team took "public" in 1983, after acquiring a $10M division of Intel. Mr. Welch built Zitel into a $30M public company with 120 employees. He retired from Zitel n 1987, but after taking a few years off, he founded another startup in 1996 called Telegra which, as CEO, he and his partners built and sold to Hewlett Packard / Agilent in 1999 at a substantial return on investment to all of the shareholders. From 1999 to 2001, Mr. Welch was the Director of Business Development for the $200M division of Agilent that acquired Telegra. Since 2001 he has been active in his investment and consulting firm, Coast Ventures, LLC.

Mr. Welch is a 1963 graduate from West Virginia University with a BSEE degree and resides in San Rafael, CA.

In 2006, Mr. Welch obtained his Series 62 and Series 63 investment banking securities licenses. In 2007, he formed Seal Rock Capital, Inc. in San Francisco, CA, where he and his partners specialized for four years in equity financings and mergers and acquisitions for emerging companies. In 2012, Mr. Welch became the co-founding CEO of two new ventures; NetGevity, Inc., a cloud based eCommerce platform for membership organizations, and Amrita Winery, Inc., which produces and bottles natural wines with a proprietary "all-natural" wine making process that does not contain any sulfides or chemical ingredients as used in the traditional wine making process. Mr. Welch now resides in Capitola, CA where he enjoys working and relaxing near the ocean and Monterey Bay.