Good morning! e.l.f. Beauty is accused of inflating revenue, Trump has a new pick for attorney general, and Fortune’s Sheryl Estrada writes about Blavity and its annual AfroTech conference.
— Entrepreneurial motivation. After graduating from Washington University, Morgan DeBaun moved from St. Louis to the Bay area to work for the software company Intuit. But over time, she felt that Silicon Valley didn’t have a connection to Black consumers. “I was surprised to find that no one was prioritizing us as a target demographic,” DeBaun, now 34, told Fortune.
She eventually left her full-time job and in 2014 launched Blavity, a media and tech company, for Black millennials to have a platform to tell their own stories. “Blavity really started with: How do we create product and solution services that put the Black community at its core?” said DeBaun, founder, CEO, and chair of the company.
It started out as a curated video newsletter, then eventually a website. It's now the largest network of platforms and lifestyle brands serving Black millennials and Gen Z through original content, video series, and experiences. “Taking the platform and then building around it is one of the reasons why Blavity has been able to sustain in these last 10 years,” DeBaun said.
Through organic growth and acquisitions, Blavity’s brand portfolio has grown to reach over 100 million individuals per month. Its major investors are GV, Plexo, Macro, Kapor Capital, and Comcast Ventures. Blavity has over 150 employees, with Jeff Nelson, a cofounder, serving as COO. The Los Angeles-based company's widely popular conference AfroTech, first held in 2016 in San Francisco, has become an anchor event.
The annual conference brought together 37,500 attendees last week at George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, focusing on AI and cybersecurity. Along with professional networking, it's become an event that big tech companies, like Google and Nvidia, and even big banks and retailers, attend to find top tech talent. This year, multi-platinum artist and tech entrepreneur will.i.am and Colin Kaepernick, founder and CEO of Lumi and former quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, were among the guest speakers.
Blavity also launched the Founders Circle at AfroTech, which connects venture capitalists (VCs), angel investors, and tech moguls with diverse startup tech founders. “We had hundreds of applicants, and picked 125 founders,” she said. “These founders went through a variety of training with myself and other executives at the company, and we hired an executive coach to work with them on their pitches for over two months.” Each day during AfroTech, different groups of the selected founders did demos of their products with the opportunity to meet VCs. They also met for informal sessions called “Coffee Brews.”
Research has pointed to a gap in venture-capital funding for Black entrepreneurs, and even lawsuits preventing funding. For example, Fearless Fund cofounder and CEO Arian Simone was sued to stop a contest for Black women business owners to win $20,000 grants, MPW Daily reported.
For the next 10 years, DeBaun mentioned a question that Blavity will continually work to solve: “How do we provide more spaces for innovation into specific industries that we believe are going to be the future and provide the most value for our community?”
Sheryl is the author of Fortune’s CFO Daily, a newsletter on the latest trends and news impacting the corporate finance industry. You can sign up for CFO Daily here.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
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