Antonia Dean, a Cheltenham resident, secured her dream role after gaining experience at Venture for America and Comcast, where she developed programs to support local startups, writes Sarah Huffman for Technical.ly.
Today, Dean is a partner at Black Operator Ventures, a seed-stage venture firm where she focuses on investing in companies others might overlook.
Dean, a law school graduate, began her professional journey in the cosmetics industry, but neither law nor beauty inspired her the way the startup world and did. Making such a drastic career shift was not easy, but she soon realized there would never be a perfect moment for it. Instead, she decided to start taking small, deliberate steps toward the work that excited her.
“Opportunity meets you when you’re doing the thing, not when you’re waiting to do the thing,” said Dean.
What she enjoys most about her current role is the way it brings together so many of her diverse experiences.
“It combines being a profit and loss leader, being the person who’s launching the product, and some of the strategic work that I’ve done in terms of thinking broadly about where opportunity lives,” she said.
Read more about Antonia Dean and her work at Black Operator Ventures in Technical.ly.
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Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on MONTCO.Today in November 2025.
