Meet The Content Creator Who Grew Her Newsletter to a $30 million Media Empire
As seen in Forbes, Tech Crunch, and CNBC, this millennial’s strategies were simple but hyper-focused. Now she’s a media giant.
At 2:15 pm on a hot Saturday in 2014, Michael Brown was walking down the street in his hometown of Ferguson, Missouri. It was a summer afternoon and he was on his way to his grandmother’s house. He never arrived.
Michael Brown was a young, Black teenager and was due to start college that fall. That fateful August 9th, an unarmed Brown encountered a White police officer who shot and killed him. The cop fired 12 rounds.
Over the course of that weekend, 24-year-old Morgan Debaun, an executive at a Silicon Valley startup, noticed Brown’s killing wasn’t even trending on Twitter. The silent coverage was deafening. The lack of response even by progressive, mainstream media outlets sent Morgan to quit her corporate job.
Two months later, without any connections and no external funding, she launched Blavity, a website to amplify the voices of the Black community. Seven years later, Blavity Inc. is a media empire worth $30 million.
Here’s how she did it.
Morgan DeBaun wasn’t a regular teenager. She grew up with a healthy entrepreneurial spirit. In an interview with CNBC, she shared how she started buying shares in middle school when her friends were buying clothes. Some of her first stocks were Netflix, Apple, and Tesla.
Born in St Louis, Missouri, Morgan grew up in predominantly White suburbs, meaning she navigated code-switching throughout her school years and into her professional career when she joined the financial software company, Intuit.
Moving to Silicon Valley, she was entering a new, exciting but foreign ‘techie’ world and wanted resources that would help her adjust. She quickly realized that everything she dug up came from a White lens as there weren’t nearly enough people who looked like her occupying that space.
Morgan discovered that her colleagues didn’t share her struggle with finding relatable information because online content didn’t include points of view by minorities. Her…
