Comcast’s Antonia Dean doesn’t want to recreate the wheel. She wants to invest in the folks who made it.
The most exciting opportunity in tech isn’t in the future, Antonia Dean, director of startup pipeline diversity at Comcast, said. It’s in the present, she told Green Room.
“Sometimes in tech there is an emphasis on bleeding edge technology, the future and where we’re all going,” Dean said. “And I think that’s great. And the people that get excited by that should stay excited by that. But I also think that sometimes we can ignore the present. And there’s still a ton of opportunity and great investments to be made, and still, quite frankly, money to be made on problems that exist today with solutions that could exist today, if someone just focused on it.”
Dean, who makes investments through Comcast’s Startup Engagement arm, said she became interested in startups while working at Estée Lauder’s ventures division back in 2015. Dean was tasked with brainstorming new brand concepts, testing them and then rapidly scaling the ideas that worked.
“Being told to think like a startup and act like a startup is how I got bit by the startup bug,” she said.
Since joining Comcast last April, Dean has led investments in Backstage Capital’s Opportunity Fund and two startups, SoLo Funds and Honeycomb Credit. Part of Dean’s investment strategy is to invest in startups solving today’s issues rather than the issues of tomorrow.
SoLo Funds, a peer-to-peer lending platform taking on the predatory payday loans industry, is the perfect example of “applying technology that already exists to create a novel solution to a legacy problem that’s been largely ignored by other industries,” Dean said.
Dean also said startup founders need to show a clear understanding of the problem they’re trying to solve, and how their product will address it.
“I often find that people try to boil the ocean,” she said. “They’ll see a potential opportunity in a given industry and want to offer everything. But I want to know the one problem they’re trying to solve and how their product does that. You can have a roadmap for the future but you have to be super laser focused.”
Comcast typically invests in companies that have already raised some funding and have built a product, Dean said. Underrepresented founders, however, sometimes struggle to get to that stage.
“What we saw is that, for a number of reasons that are outside of Comcast’s control, that women and underrepresented people of color struggle to even get to that point,” she said. “If you don’t raise a friends and family round from your friends and family, you may never be able to raise a proper seed or Series A round.”
That’s what attracted Dean to Backstage Capital, she said. Backstage has invested in 200 early stage startups led by underestimated founders. In some cases, Backstage writes the first check in a startup, fulfilling the role of the “friends and family round.” Instead of Comcast building its own pipeline of early-stage underrepresented founders, Dean and her team sought out the expertise of those who have already done the work.
“Our thought process was, let’s not recreate the wheel,” Dean said. “There are folks that have already built the wheel, honed their tools and know exactly what it takes to win in these spaces, how to find those founders and invest in them.”
By investing in Backstage, Dean hopes to “create a virtuous cycle” that ultimately results in funding more women and people of color across a variety of stages.
Dean added, “Then we can start to really change the tides in our industry and in startups as a whole.”
