Aug 2, 2017 · 26m · y-combinator
Morgan DeBaun on Reaching 20M Millennials - With Kat Manalac at the Female Founders Conference · Y Combinator
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
At the Y Combinator Female Founders Conference, Blavity founder and CEO Morgan DeBaun speaks with Kat Manalac about building the leading digital media brand for Black millennials. She details her transition from product manager to entrepreneur, sharing key lessons on rapid product iteration, community empowerment, overcoming fundraising barriers, and expanding a digital ecosystem.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. How this is scored →
The partners as informed peer 2.0 Guest teaching 2.7 Guest disagreement 0.3 The partners pushing back 0.0
speaking balance: gold is the partners, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 16:35 Defiant stance against unsupportive early investors
Morgan asserts firm boundaries against investors who initially doubted her metrics and only attempted to participate once success was proven.
Hardest push from the partners ▶ 23:44 Probing the root cause of editing down visionKat presses Morgan to clarify whether the tendency to shrink her initial company vision stemmed from a genuine fear of losing operational focus.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 14:00 Debunking common VC benchmark comparisonsMorgan educates founders on the pitfalls of pitching VCs using competitor benchmarks that ignore unequal ad-spend advantages.
The partners hold their own ▶ 12:48 Synthesizing community-led platform dynamicsKat succinctly captures and reframes Morgan's operational pivot from an editorial gatekeeper to a decentralized creator platform.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The partners as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The partners pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Morgan DeBaun's Early Life and Journey to Silicon Valley | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Kat facilitates a warm, conversational introduction inquiring into Morgan's background and college side projects. Morgan openly shares lighthearted stories of early product failures and learnings with no tension. | |
| The Founding Vision and Catalyst Behind Blavity | 1 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Kat asks open-ended questions about the genesis of Blavity. Morgan educates the audience on corporate design training at Intuit contrasted with the information void and lack of digital-first platforms during the Ferguson unrest. | |
| Acquiring First Users and Pivoting to a Blog Model | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Kat prompts Morgan on product iteration and abandoning early features. Morgan describes pivoting from a hard-coded video hub to a rapidly growing WordPress blog guided purely by user analytics. | |
| Nurturing Community and Empowering Black Creators | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Kat engages in collaborative dialogue around community building. Morgan details her philosophy of getting out of the way to empower Black creators and scaling user-generated content. | |
| Fundraising Obstacles, Pitfalls, and Bootstrapping Resilience | 2 | 4 | 2 | 0 | Morgan recounts the challenges of fundraising as a Black female founder and pushing past investor skepticism by bootstrapping until metrics were undeniable, firmly noting she now blocks dismissive investors from future rounds. | |
| Evolving CEO Leadership and Expanding the Brand Ecosystem | 2 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Kat asks about the shifting demands of the CEO role and testing new product lines. Morgan details building a portfolio across Afrotech, 21Ninety, and Shadow & Act by validating demand via social channels first. |
Statements from this episode (14)
Manalac: Blavity is the largest media brand for Black millennials
“So Blavity has, you know, grown into the largest media company and lifestyle brand for black millennials.”
Manalac: Blavity reached 7M readers and raised $1M since 2014
“So Morgan started Blavity in 2014, and since then they've built a community of over seven million readers and they've raised a million dollars, which they announced last year.”
DeBaun: Tech and entrepreneurship are the best ways to build community influence
“How do I both help the people that I care about in my community make enough money
so I can influence other people and make better decisions and technology and entrepreneurship is one of the best ways to do that”
DeBaun: The tech industry ignores the problems of Black people and women
“There's a thousand problems that black people have, and people of color have, and women have, that this entire industry ignores.”
DeBaun: Legacy Black media failed mobile while millennial media ignored Black audiences
“Black media is moving too slow because they're antiquated in terms of magazines and newspapers. They never really made the switch to mobile first and digital first. And then millennial media, they don't care.”
DeBaun: Black Americans watch 8 hours of TV daily while driving content
“Black people and people of color actually over index and watching television, so it's about eight hours a day on average, it's a lot, the average person watches about five, and at the same time, we're huge content creators”
DeBaun: Consumer founders must be channel-agnostic and fail fast
“I think failing fast is like, part of how you move in this world, particularly in technology space. And especially consumer social media engagement community. So, yeah, it, I am agnostic about how we reach people. I just want to make sure that we do.”
DeBaun: Blavity left WordPress and built custom CMS for UGC
“We're not on WordPress anymore. We've built our own website and our own CMS, a content management system, So that we can enable user-generated content.”
DeBaun: About 50% of Blavity content comes from community
“About 50% of our content today is actually from the community, which has its own problems but in the long run, you know, it does.”
DeBaun: Blavity raised an unannounced funding round beyond $1M
“Yeah, I had a, I had another round that hasn't really been announced.”
DeBaun: Pitching competitor's investors is a mistake for founders
“I think I made the mistake that a lot of first-time founders make, which is you raise you go and look at your competitors, right? You go look stocks on AngelList, you look at them on Crunchbase, and you're like, okay, well, who invested in them? We're like the…”
DeBaun: Blavity's women's vertical grew faster than core brand
“And then that was actually growing faster than Blavity.”