Women’s History Month: Morgan DeBaun Talks Her New Book ‘Rewrite Your Rules’

Morgan DeBaun is a trailblazer in the world of business. As the Founder and CEO of Blavity Inc. “a digital media company focused on Black culture and millennials”, the brand has grown to include several other properties such Blavity News, AfroTech, Travel Noire, and Shadow and Act. For her work, DeBaun had received numerous awards and recognitions including being featured on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 and America’s Top 50 Women In Tech lists.

For her latest endeavor, DeBaun will release her first book Rewrite Your Rules: The Journey to Success in Less Time with More Freedom on April 1. The book details her journey as a serial entrepreneur and all the lessons she’s learned as business woman.

To commemorate Women’s History Month, DeBaun spoke with HOT97 about navigating corporate America as a Black woman, launching Blavity, and why we should all be breaking the rules.

HOT97: How did growing up in St. Louis shape you into becoming the entrepreneur you are today?

DeBaun: I’m a St. Louis girl till I die. I still have my 304 number but I’ve had to evolve to adapt to a non St. Louis world. Where you come from dictates how you move through the world because it’s your initial lens. One of the beautiful things about being from the Midwest is that your’re taught to work hard. They generally follow the rules and do what “they’re supposed to do.” What it taught me is that even when you do the things that you’re supposed to do, life may not turn out the way that you want. I went to mostly white schools, so I didn’t know everything about Black culture until I went to a Black magnet school. My parents fought so hard to get me in there. Of course,  I knew I was Blac but I didn’t understand the culture of Blackness as a child. And so I had that experience in St. Louis of learning Double Dutch, learning how to play spades, and everything else.

HOT97: Fresh out of college, you begin working in Silicon Valley in the tech space. How was that experience as a young Black woman?

DeBaun: At the time that I joined Intuit, I think there were maybe about 3000-4000 people in their headquartered office in Mountain View, California. Of those people, I think there were less than 10 that were Black who were not executive assistants. Since then, they’ve done an incredible job on the diversity journey and are a huge partner with us at Afro Tech. But coming from Saint Louis, it was very jarring to be in a space where what I looked like was a part of the conversation. Questions like, “Oh, you changed your hair today?” I was the only Black girl in a mile radius of this campus and I didn’t really have the words for it at the moment. I was 22 but I could feel a sense of loneliness. Eventually, I asked myself, “Do I have to climb this corporate ladder? That’s when I knew I did not want to do it anymore.

HOT97: To your co-creators, Jonathan Jackson , Jeff Nelson, and Aaron Samuels, how important has their support been on your entrepreneurial journey?

DeBaun: To make a difference, to scale in life, you have to have a tribe. You have to have a group of people who help to motivate you when things are tough and to point out your blind spots. In the book. I talk about my blind spots. I probably didn’t get them all, but I got a lot of my blind spots and there were different moments in which my co-founders said, “You’re tripping. We got some things that you need to do as a leader of this group.” I also talk about times when I doubted myself and they showed up in a way that allowed us to take the company to the next level. I think that anyone has a network and can gather people around them for their vision. But they need to have a really clear vision of where they’re going.

HOT97: After more than a decade of success, Blavity is one of the legacy brands of Black culture. What are some of the challenges you see on the landscape that have caught your attention?

DeBaun: I used to make fun of old-school publishers because they wouldn’t do projects without a sponsor. Now I’m like, “If ain’t sponsored, we ain’t doing it” [Laughs]. I gotta hit payroll and y’all want 5% raises. It’s funny how the tables turn when you get to that next level. It’s a blessing, it’s a privilege, and it’s a lot of responsibility. I think what’s challenging in today’s environment is that the internet is changing. We were built in a time when people were transitioning from magazines and newspapers to digital. Now digital is changing from search engines and platforms to artificial intelligence, with social media content creators and podcasters being the distribution channel. So where does that leave legacy brands? We are always trying to innovate. Everything always comes full circle. 

HOT97:After all your success, what inspired you to pen “Rewrite Your Rules” at this juncture of your journey?

DeBaun: Writing Rewrite Your Rules is a culmination of over a decade of entrepreneurship. I’ve acquired three companies in the last 10 years, built a business from my apartment in San Francisco, and had a dream with my co-founders, for us to create a company that was helpful to Black people. Over time, we’d figured out different ways to make that happen from helping people get jobs and be exposed to emerging technology can be, to help them grow wealth, and to be a force of entertainment news and giving creators a platform for their work. So with Rewriting Your Rules, I just wanted to show people how they can rewrite their rules for themselves. I want to be a rule maker. I want to be the person who is saying, “I know that you told me I have to do this this way but I’m going to do it my way.” There are a lot of people want to do it their way, but they don’t have a strategy to make it happen. This book walks you through exactly how to design your own method so that you can do it the way that you want.

HOT97: During the writing process, what did you rediscover about yourself?

DeBaun: It took me four years to write the book and I rediscovered how much grit and risk that girl was taking when she was 24 years old. A lot of times, when you go through trauma, even work trauma, you forget about it once you move past it because you don’t want to dwell on how difficult those days were. There were times when I was writing this book, and there were things that I didn’t even get to write because I didn’t know how to articulate it in a way that people could understand. But there were times during Blavity’s existence when I did not like myself as a founder and a CEO. I couldn’t figure out how to be the person I wanted to be as a human being and figure out how to lead this company. Writing the book reminded me of how fierce I was working through that with so few resources and we pushed through it. Blavity has never been over 150 employees. If you think about what we accomplished at any given point with 75-110 people, how incredible Is that?