There's a special kind of romanticism in stories about hugely successful woman CEOs whose origin stories begin with a job at their local mall and culminate in history-making.
Enter serial entrepreneur Morgan DeBaun. The 31-year-old St. Louis native started Blavity, a digital media group by and for Black culture and millennials, in 2014. Blavity, which is a fusion of the words "Black" and "gravity," reaches over 100 million readers a month and continues to grow with new franchises like Shadow & Act, its entertainment vertical, and Travel Noire for the thrifty traveler.
"If not me, then who? Who else would be building products for us?" DeBaun said in an exclusive interview with E! News. "It's on us to build products and solutions and I think that that's really the case for any underrepresented group."
And as the Black Lives Matter movement faced a resurgence in 2020, Blavity's growth exploded to new heights.
"It is both very humbling and exciting to be in this moment because we've been working on it since 2014," Debaun admitted. "And then all of a sudden it's very trendy and it was not trendy when it started and I was raising money for this."
With a special focus on social issues, DeBaun's Blavity provides a space that champions positivity and offers support to communities she feels are marginalized by mainstream media. "That's the energy that Blavity was founded with," Debaun said.
To hear more about DeBaun's inspiring journey to the top, keep reading our exclusive interview below!
E! News: Can you share a few of your early odd jobs and when you realized that entrepreneurship was your destiny?
MD: My first job was working as a cashier at Toys R Us in St. Louis, in high school, and then I worked at Delia's. I very much was like a traditional mall worker high school student. I was always a hustler, always someone who was building things and making things, making value out of something. I started basically selling candy to my friends in middle school and I started trading in the stock market when I was 13. I've just always been interested in creating value and investing.
E! News: What compelled you to launch a platform like Blavity in 2014?
MD: In 2014 there was a moment in which a lot of people were paying attention: Michael Brown's death. I'm from St. Louis but at the time I was living in San Francisco working in Silicon Valley at a big tech company and I just saw that disconnect so clearly from my community burning. We were all having so much pain within the Black community and talking about something really serious, and then I'm sitting in a tech industry that isn't even paying attention. And they're not creating products or solutions for the Black consumer and Black audience. So I started Blavity to be a part of the solution to build a product, a brand, a company that would be a positive force for the culture, for the Black American in the U.S. and even Black people abroad.
E!: Who are some celebrities that you feel are really making a difference in a way that you appreciate?
MD: Not only has Shonda [Rhimes] of course been incredibly successful in the entertainment industry, but she also then built a media company ShondaLand. They produce content, they fund initiatives and it allows her impact to scale much, much greater than just television. Jesse Williams invests in a lot of Black entrepreneurs and has even founded his own tech companies and tech apps. And he has used his voice, not only on-screen but off-screen, to build these different entities. Issa Rae is an incredible producer, an incredible executive, but she's also built companies that empower other people, other Black creatives, by financing their scripts, by teaching them and training them, by hiring them and including diversity writers and all of the projects.
E!: What's the best career advice anyone ever gave you, and how did it impact you?
MD: The best career advice that I needed to hear at that time was from one of my good friends Jason Maiden. He said that I needed to own my own narrative. That was the push that I needed at that point to kind of step from behind my computer a little bit and be a little bit more public with the work that we're doing.
E! News: In your Forbes profile, you talked about how your corporate mission is to advance Black happiness. What do you define as Black happiness and do you feel like you've achieved that?
MD: Oh, we're definitely not there yet. I think Black happiness is defined in a lot of different ways. The way we define it is freedom. Freedom for self-expression, freedom to exist. Freedom to not always be achieving but to just be. Freedom to be happy and free to feel safe. It means so many different things and I think that all people deserve to be happy, and specifically Blavity is designed to help advance happiness in so many different ways.
E! News: What else do you have coming up that?
MD: The main thing is the bigger Afro Tech Conference in November. If anybody who's reading this is like, I love entrepreneurship, I love her journey, I love business, I love tech, they should come to AfroTech. It's virtual and in person this year. It's a very immersive virtual experience and then we also will have local happy hours and parties and gatherings, depending on COVID, in those respective cities.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.