Morgan DeBaun and the gravity of a lunch table

Before Blavity had investors, acquisitions or a conference badge, it had a seating problem. At Washington University in St. Louis, Black students gathered around a lunch table and kept making room for one another. Conversation pulled people in. Food provided a perfectly respectable excuse to stay. Morgan DeBaun and her friends had a name for the phenomenon: Black gravity. Blavity.

A name like that carries instructions. Bring people together. Give them something worth talking about. Leave space for the next arrival. Years later, the company would publish news, acquire travel and entertainment brands, and gather technology professionals through AfroTech. The lunch table had supplied a useful first observation: people wanted a place where they could recognize themselves without having to explain the entire backstory.

“No conversation was off limits,” DeBaun recalled of those campus lunches. She graduated in 2012. Two years later, she founded Blavity with fellow Washington University alumni Aaron Samuels, Jeff Nelson and Jonathan Jackson. They had already seen a community form. Now came the rather more expensive question of how to build a company around it.

A girl with several plans

DeBaun grew up in St. Louis with a household version of representation already in place. There were Black Santa figures, Black Cinderella books and pictures of Muhammad Ali and Martin Luther King Jr. Her parents made Black identity part of the ordinary scenery of childhood. Outside the house, in a predominantly white suburb, the scenery changed.

For middle school, her parents sent her to a magnet school in the city. She remembered coming home during that first week wanting to practice double Dutch and tonk. Belonging involved learning things, joining in and occasionally discovering that the education continued after the school day.

She read biographies and memoirs, including stories of Black women such as Sojourner Truth and Maya Angelou. In eighth grade, she finished Roots in less than two weeks. Her interests also ran to jewelry making, pottery and glassblowing. The future publisher spent time with both books and people who made physical objects. She liked seeing what could be created.

At university, she studied political science, with minors in education and entrepreneurship, and served as Student Union president. Running meetings and making an argument were part of her education alongside the coursework. A company would eventually give her plenty of occasions to do both.

The day job, and the way out

After graduation, DeBaun moved to the Bay Area and worked at Intuit. Product management and business development gave her a close look at how a technology company defined its customers and designed for them. She liked the prospect of making something that could reach many people. She also saw a gap between that ambition and the attention being paid to Black consumers.

There had been other possible routes. She had imagined teaching, then politics, as ways to influence the world around her. Technology offered another way to put an idea into circulation. It required a product people would actually choose, and a business capable of keeping it available.

Blavity’s initial product launched in July 2014 while she still had her job. The following month, police killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, near her home city. Watching from California, she saw a disconnect between information coming from people on the ground and the coverage reaching a wider public. The project took on urgency.

Her transition had a budget. She waited months before leaving Intuit and took on consulting work to cover her expenses. She later explained that she kept consulting for three years, so income from Blavity could go back into Blavity. A block on her calendar concealed an unglamorous piece of company building: earning the money that allowed her to keep building.

That arrangement complicates the familiar picture of a founder making one dramatic leap. DeBaun built a succession of footholds. Conviction mattered, but so did finding enough hours and paying the bills. The business needed time before it could support the person running it.

“I kill my darlings all the time.”

Morgan DeBaun, on changing an early product

Following the people who showed up

Early Blavity experiments included a curated video newsletter and a website built around video. The stories accompanying those videos attracted readers. DeBaun watched the response and moved the editorial work toward the center. Months spent making one version did not oblige the audience to like it. The audience, inconveniently for anyone attached to a finished project, had preferences of its own.

Her earlier projects had included Quad Connect, which helped students find free food through campus events. The scale was different; the habit was recognizable. Start with people and a need close enough to understand. Then find out whether the proposed solution is any use.

As Blavity grew, the editorial opportunity involved more than publishing another stream of links. DeBaun wanted people with first-hand knowledge to have a way to tell their stories. The company reviewed submissions, checked information and worked with contributors. In 2016, she described receiving essays and videos from people who wanted a wider audience for what they knew.

This required room for disagreement. “Black is not monolithic,” she said in a later conversation about the platform. A publication serving Black readers would encounter conflicting experiences and opinions. The lunch table had been good at holding several conversations. A publishing business had to find an editorial way to do that, with all the responsibility that came with sending those conversations beyond the table.

A business for the rest of life

News was part of the audience’s day. So were work, travel, entertainment, relationships and deciding what to do with a living room. Blavity’s expansion followed those interests. In 2017, it launched the women’s lifestyle brand 21Ninety and acquired Travel Noire and Shadow and Act. Home & Texture followed in 2023, addressing homes, interiors and the lives readers were building as they grew older.

The collection makes sense when seen from the reader’s side. The same person can want a reported story in the morning, an interview about film at lunch and a travel idea in the evening. A community does not remain at one age or hold one interest for the convenience of a publisher.

Building this collection required capital. Blavity raised $6.5 million in new funding in 2018 from investors including GV, Comcast Ventures and Plexo Capital. DeBaun’s work also received public recognition: Forbes named her to its 30 Under 30 media list in 2016 and its America’s Top 50 Women in Tech list in 2018.

The operating question remained how these different businesses could support one another. Blavity’s own description now separates media and advertising work from career and talent services. Its Talent Infusion product connects the company’s professional network to recruiting. Readers, event attendees and employers enter through different doors, while the company tries to make the connections useful enough to sustain a business.

The room gets bigger

AfroTech developed in 2016, bringing people together around careers, companies and technology. By 2022, more than 25,000 attendees came to Austin. For a person trying to picture a future in the industry, being in a room with other Black professionals offered a different experience from reading about the industry alone.

DeBaun’s work also took her into corporate advising. Her public biography lists relationships with PepsiCo, American Airlines and CES. She has invested in early-stage companies, including Public. These roles put her on several sides of a familiar exchange: the founder seeking resources, the investor considering an idea, the advisor asking an established organization to think about its customers.

There is a public-purpose argument underneath this activity. In a 2024 essay, she urged technology founders to consider their ability to shape daily life through what they build. Voting remained part of the picture. So did the decisions made in companies: which problems deserved attention, which people a product served, and what opportunities a network could make available.

That argument gives the conference a purpose beyond the programme. An introduction can lead to a colleague, an employer or a co-founder. There is no guarantee attached to a badge. Gathering people at least makes those encounters possible.

A return worth counting

DeBaun lives in Nashville, where her work now includes helping other business owners examine how they spend their time. WorkSmart offers resources, advising and training. Her current teaching emphasizes systems and AI tools that can help an owner grow beyond personally doing every task. The question is familiar from her early consulting calendar: how does someone create enough room to build?

Her book, Rewrite Your Rules, arrived from Ballantine Books on April 1, 2025. It carries the same scrutiny into personal decisions, asking readers to examine their values, their daily methods and the ways they adapt. A plan can be revised. So can a definition of success that has become awkward to live inside.

In January 2026, she wrote about a result of publishing that she had not fully anticipated. She had expected the book to bring new audiences. What she emphasized afterward was reconnecting with her own people. Yvonne Orji joined the Los Angeles stop. Angela Rye hosted in Atlanta. Washington University invited her back to meet students.

The return to campus gives the story a satisfying shape without tying it into a bow. There are still companies to run, people to advise and products to reconsider. But the old insight survives. Give people a reason to gather. Make the conversation worth their time. Notice who pulls up a chair.