Morgan DeBaun founded Blavity in 2014, and as AfroTech opened its tenth annual conference in Houston on Monday, November 2, 2026, she said the point was never a seat at somebody else’s table.
“We’re not here to help people get a seat at someone else’s table,” DeBaun said. “We spent a decade building a room of our own. Now it’s about what we build inside it.”
DeBaun is the founder and chief executive of Blavity Inc., which has raised more than $12 million in venture funding since 2014 and now runs AfroTech, 21Ninety, Home & Texture, Travel Noire and Shadow and Act. AfroTech, which the company launched in 2016, has grown into a community the company counts at more than 500,000 people. This year’s conference runs through Friday, November 6, at the George R. Brown Convention Center, with more than 300 speakers across 15 tracks and 11 stages.
The argument she brought to Houston is about valuation rather than visibility. “Black audiences are one of the most valuable and most undervalued markets out there,” she said. That gap is the business case Blavity was built on, and it is the reason the company owns its audience rather than renting it from a platform.
Her sharpest line was about what happens next. “Our reporting shouldn’t just train someone else’s technology,” DeBaun said, naming the fight over who profits when Black media’s work is fed into products Black media does not own. It is the same problem in a new form: the work is valuable, somebody else is collecting on it, and the people doing it are asked to be grateful for the exposure.
She has spent more than three years running 21Ninety and Home & Texture alongside the rest of it, and the company says it reaches an average of 100 million consumers in Black and multicultural communities each month. The advice she gave on the way out is the sentence to keep.
“Think bigger. Much bigger than the opportunities people have told us are available,” she said.
