#22 - Morgan DeBaun on Reaching 20M Millennials - With Kat Manalac at the Female Founders Conference

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, this is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's Podcast. Today's episode is with Morgan DeBaun, the founder of Blavity, and Kat Manalac, who's a partner at YC.
This conversation was recorded at our fourth annual Female Founders Conference, which took place here in San Francisco this June. All right, here we go.

**Kat Manalac** (0:16)
Now I'm really, really excited to introduce you to our next speaker, Morgan DeBaun. She's the founder of Blavity. So Blavity has, you know, grown into the largest media company and lifestyle brand for black millennials. 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. So I'm really excited to introduce her to you and hear more of her story. So welcome, Morgan.
Hello. I moved on to this couch so we could get real cozy. I love it. Hi.
Okay. So I want to... So for folks who might not know you very well, I'd like to just kick it off. Tell us a little bit about yourself, maybe where you're from and what you were doing before you started Blavity.

**Morgan DeBaun** (1:10)
Totally. So I'm from St. Louis, Missouri. Any St. Louis out there? No? Yeah.
So I went to school at Wash U in St. Louis, as did my three other co-founders, and I actually started off wanting to be a teacher. That's how I was going to change the world and particularly like black youth and give me more access. And then I got in the classrooms and very quickly realized that even the best principals and the best teachers were totally restricted by laws, regulations, et cetera. And so I was like, I'll be a politician. No problem.
And so I switched my major. I became a poli sci major. I was in student government. And then realized that everyone was influenced by money.
That we all know that now, especially after what's going on. But, and so I was like, okay, well, this is interesting. How do I both help the people that I care about, 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. And so that's kind of started my journey. And then after I graduated from college, moved to Silicon Valley and to Mountain View specifically and worked at Intuit as a product manager. So I went, you know, big culture shock, I think moving from St. Louis to the Bay, but here we are.

**Kat Manalac** (2:32)
So what, what was the original vision? Like at what point did you decide to leave Intuit and start?

**Morgan DeBaun** (2:39)
So that's a great question. I think part of it was I've always been tinkering, I've always been kind of making things.
Blavity is just the first one you've heard of, right?

**Kat Manalac** (2:49)
So you had a bunch of side projects.

**Morgan DeBaun** (2:50)
Tons of side projects, websites. And I think when I was...

**Kat Manalac** (2:55)
Can you tell us about one random one that didn't work?

**Morgan DeBaun** (2:57)
Of course.
Let's see, which do we want, the biggest failure? The one that I think is still a really good idea.

**Kat Manalac** (3:03)
Okay, can you do both really quick?

**Morgan DeBaun** (3:06)
Okay, the biggest failure was... So personal finance. So basically, when you graduate, when you're in college, you have no money, right? Like maybe you have like a couple thousand dollars, but like, you know, you don't really have any money. Then you graduate and you go work at a Google or an Intuit and you're making $50,000 plus like out of nowhere, right? And a lot of people don't know what the allocation should be for savings or spending on rent or if you want to buy a car. And so it was a personal finance calculator. Now, there's like thousands of those. It was like there's no differentiation or anything. So it was a good idea, but like not really a business.
And then the one that I still think is a really good idea, I did in college with two other of my friends. One is now my CTO and the other one has gone on to raise millions of dollars in manual Banffo.
And it was called Quad Connect. And so it was basically you could find free food on campus. So this was before Facebook events really were a thing. So we were scraping all these campus calendars and then aggregating it. And because at the end of the semester, you run out of food, meal points, and so you're trying to find all these free food events. No one's done it.