In his youth, Dean was admitted to and won a scholarship to Blair Academy in Blairstown, where he also went on to win the Headmaster’s Award, and the Athlete of the Year Award during his senior year. In addition, he captained his varsity soccer and basketball teams. He also led his baseball team to the state finals. Dean went on college at Princeton, where he played two varsity sports as well.
Throughout college, Tanella held four jobs and paid for 100% of his own college education and eventually graduated cum laude. At Harvard Business School, he ran a clothing business for profit and graduated in the top-quartile of his class in 1987.
Four months before Tanella’s graduation at Harvard, he was chosen to run the Boston office for the London-based global investment bank, S.G. Warburg. He excelled at the institutional equity sales business in the Boston financial community over the next several years, and later became an administrator at the Boston office for Drexel Burnham in 1989.
In 1990, he became a partner and founding member of the Institutional Equity business at Adams Harkness and Hill, and was recruited by Raymond James in 1994 to manage their Institutional Equity Sales organization in St. Petersburg, Florida. In 1999, Tanella started his own fund-of-hedge funds business, Safe Harbor Capital Management.
Dean Tanella is also a member of the GunnAllen Financial team. Mr. Tanella established the Capital Markets Group at GunnAllen and now serves as the group's Executive Vice President. The Capital Markets Group oversees GunnAllen’s Venture Capital, Banking, Institutional Sales, Syndicate, and Alternative Products departments.
When Dean is not working, he enjoys spending time with his family, traveling and taking part in sports. Being a spiritual man, Tanella credits God for the skills, gifts, and success that have been granted to him.