Bob Donegan '79 President
Ivar's, Inc.

← Back

Five years after graduating from the Yale School of Management, Bob jumped from American Can, and the stability of a Fortune 100 company, back into the exciting chaos of his own consulting business and moved to Seattle. In the next ten years, he helped about forty start-up and growth companies raise (and spend) about $70 million dollars. In 1993, Bob got involved in the emerging specialty coffee business, helping the founders of Starbucks raise $3 million to start a new coffee roaster and retailer in Washington, D.C. Bob helped merge the D.C. company into Peet’s Coffee in Berkeley and then became the Bean Counter of the new combined company.

Four years later, after $6 million of new equity, building a new roasting plant, opening thirteen new stores, and developing a national growth plan, Bob left Peet's to return to Seattle to join Ivar's, a seafood restaurant group. Like Peet's, Ivar's is a well-known local company that needed some capital and systems to grow. Ivar’s operates more than fifty restaurants, primarily seafood in the Northwest, along with a wholesale business that sells its world famous white clam chowder across the U.S., in Japan, China, and Mexico.

Bob grew up in Milwaukee and earned undergraduate degrees in economics and journalism from the University of Wisconsin (1976). In Seattle, he chaired the corporate advisory board of the United Negro College Fund for the Northwest region, has worked with the advisory board of a Native Claims Corporation in Anchorage, serves on the boards of the Seattle Chamber of Commerce and the Seattle Chapter of the Boy Scouts, Costs U Less, and Golf Savings Bank. Bob met his wife when she was an economics graduate student down the street on Hillhouse Avenue at Yale; they have two daughters.