Reimagine: A conversation with Blavity, Inc. Founder and CEO Morgan DeBaun

Morgan DeBaun , Founder and CEO of Blavity Inc. , saw a need for a safe place for the Black community, a place for those to gather to learn about issues, products, and services that were most relevant to them. In 2014, Morgan launched Blavity, Inc., an online media organization that has transformed media for the Black community. I’m thrilled to share my conversation with Morgan and the impact she is making through her leadership.

CHRIS CAPOSSELA: You’ve launched several companies in various sectors – travel, health, wellness to name just a few. Can you give us a sense for what inspired you to do that? And what are some of the challenges you faced as an entrepreneur across these different industries?

MORGAN DEBAUN: I started my career in Silicon Valley. I’m a St. Louis native, and when I moved to the Bay Area, I really wanted to learn about incredible companies. As I was digging deep into the world of Silicon Valley, I realized Black consumers and Black audiences are never the target audience for these companies. You would rarely see representation of Black users in research studies and when testing out products and services.

As a result, I noticed that the products don’t reflect the vernacular or the nuances of the culture in the same way that America does. That was the first impetus for why I was going to build Blavity, Inc. as a corporation – to build products and services for Black consumers, with Black consumers in that core audience every single time.

In terms of challenges that I faced, there’s so many different ups and downs to starting something from scratch. To take an idea from whiteboard to real life, to raise money, and scale into a corporation that employs hundreds of people, you have to constantly evolve your leadership skills. I’ve had to constantly evaluate what I’m good at, what I’m not good at.

Making that transition from visionary founder to operator, CEO, and chairperson took a lot of leaps. I had to learn how to adjust where my shortcomings were, and then reinvest in myself to be able to rise to the occasion every single time.

CHRIS CAPOSSELA: It sounds like a tremendous amount of professional development happening while you’re also growing the business and figuring out what the business was going to be as it grew up. Congratulations, on all the success you’ve had.

You mentioned the AfroTech Conference, the largest Black tech conference probably in the world. It welcomes roughly 20,000 innovators and developers. I understand it recently took place in Austin, TX. Can you share the inspiration for the conference and what you’ve learned over the years?

MORGAN DEBAUN: The conference started six years ago. I was in San Francisco while I was building the company and when I would walk down Market Street, which is known for all these different, cool tech companies, I would not see one Black professional walking around. I know we work at these companies, but we’re not easy to see and we weren’t as visible.

AfroTech was a way to bring together every single person within the Black tech ecosystem, at least once a year, where we could leapfrog ourselves by sharing our collective knowledge and power.

When you go to AfroTech, it’s really about the sense of belonging within the Black tech community. We talk about belonging a lot in tech, but I’m not quite sure that people have nailed what that really should feel like. To me, belonging is when people can truly walk into a space, and the things that made them different are no longer crossing their mind because they are being seen and they are not an outlier. They’re a part of the group.

CHRIS CAPOSSELA: It’s amazing to see how big AfroTech is becoming. We do a sizable conference as well, and it is no small feat. Can you talk about the planning process and how you select the location for the conference? What do you think the future of the conference looks like?

MORGAN DEBAUN: I’ll be honest with you; I did not know what I was getting into when I decided to build a business conference. We start planning conferences two years out.

We are in the largest convention centers in the country now. We started off in the Bay Area and then we moved to Oakland because we wanted it to be in a city that was a reflection of our community.

There’s a lot of capacity that has to go into being able to build those kinds of spaces. It’s like building your own city. There are so many things you don’t think about. But it’s such a joy to be able to offer that moment every year. And then we do smaller moments throughout the year.

CHRIS CAPOSSELA: Blavity, Inc. curates content for the Black community, specifically Gen Z and Millennial audiences. Can you share what you think some of the more important things are to keep in mind when creating and distributing content for a specific community or audience?

MORGAN DEBAUN: Our team tries to stay in tune with the pulse of the culture, and that means that we are where our audiences are. More recently, we’ve hired content creators, content producers, and social producers to make content directly for those platforms because consumption behaviors are changing as people are aging.

More specifically, we’re seeing people are spending less time reading articles on the website. They’re interested in getting their news directly from social platforms like LinkedIn and they’re hanging out there. They’re not clicking over someplace else because they’re there for the conversations that are happening in the comment section, the dialogue, the ideas.

We have to change how we, as a media company, are engaging with our audience, and even how we’re structuring our content goals. It’s really important to have a full-circle content strategy when you’re approaching content creation for younger audiences.

Then for the Black community, we’re inherently social. If you look at early adopters of any new platform, you’re going to see Black users are there first. And we tend to create the culture of platforms, whether that’s new dances, meme trends, whatever it may be. What we’ve learned is to continue to embrace the early adopters and we work with them to create content.

CHRIS CAPOSSELA: Fantastic, it makes a ton of sense and it parallels a lot of the lessons we’ve learned with LinkedIn as well. Really great stuff.

Who’s the person in your life that has left a really big impact on you?

MORGAN DEBAUN: So many people. Someone that comes to mind now is one of my board members, Marlin Nichols. He was an early investor in Blavity and has become a friend. He’s someone that I go to whenever I am feeling my own sense of imposter syndrome.

I think it’s really important for any leader, especially of a fast-growing company, to have people around them that can say, “It’s fine. Get out of your head. Just keep going. Don’t overthink that it hasn’t been done before. Just stay focused and do the work.”

CHRIS CAPOSSELA: I love it, thank you. Do you have a favorite news outlet? Maybe that’s a loaded question for you.

MORGAN DEBAUN: That is definitely a loaded question. I’ve been really into newsletters. As someone who’s been a busy executive, it’s important that I get the daily updates. I read The Information and there’s a newsletter that’s called A Media Operator, and I love reading it for the B2B perspective.

On the consumer side, I am a huge fan of The Breakfast Club with Charlamagne. I love, of course, reading the Blavity newsletter. It’s funny because sometimes I don’t get to read Blavity as much as I used to. So, I’ll read the newsletter to keep up with the content that the team is creating.

CHRIS CAPOSSELA: And do you still have time to enjoy books? Or do you find you’re reading less books because you’re consuming news and information in other ways? Any great books you are currently reading?

MORGAN DEBAUN: I read or listen to a book about once a week. I’m an avid reader. I use books as a way to learn things I don’t know, especially from a leadership perspective.

The book I most recently finished was The Obstacle Is the Way. It’s a really great book to help you when things aren’t going as planned or you feel like there is an obstacle in your way. It taught me that the obstacle is the reason that you should persevere, and how you should navigate through those ups and downs of life.