Five Years In: A Letter from the Blavity Inc. Founders

5 years ago, we launched what would become Blavity Inc. We didn’t know much about fundraising, managing an office, or building a sales team.  And we had no idea what to expect from the journey upon which we embarked. But even back then, we believed in certain truths.  

We believed that Black people investing in one another sows benefits for the entire community. 

We believed that, unlike prior generations, people who grew up with technology (Millennials and Gen-Z) engage with content differently: over-indexing on social media and curated digital spaces.  

We believed in honesty and transparency–never hesitating to hold our leaders accountable in politics, entertainment, or business.  

And most importantly, we believed in each other; knowing that, by creating a culture of love and trust between us, we could one day grow a team that reflected the way we wanted the world to operate.  

Now, 5 years later, we reach over 30 million people each month.  We have over 80 full time employees across offices in Los Angeles and Atlanta. And we curate large scale conferences and events in cities like San Francisco, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, and New York.  

We understand that our generation is multicultural and fast moving, so we built a company that reflects these characteristics.  We built our home at the intersection of the digital and physical worlds.  

But most importantly, at each step along the way, we have challenged ourselves to keep doing this work with integrity and alignment with our vision. 

So we are proud and humbled.

Our Editorial and News teams continue to keep a pulse on important issues in our community; whether by taking bold risks in our coverage of Green Book, or by documenting the 2018 midterm election cycle that featured the most Black candidates in the history of our country. 

Our Events team, recognizing the lack of funding for Black entrepreneurs, created pitch competitions at AfroTech and Summit21 to directly connect underrepresented founders with investors.  

Our Operations and Alliances team created global partnerships with the Tourism and Innovation Summit in Haiti, and World Travel Market in South Africa to broaden our impact across the global Afircan diaspora.  

Our community holds us accountable to live by our values.  

But this work does not take place in a vacuum.  

As proud of and amazed by our team as we are, we recognize that we couldn’t have done this work without the support of our investors.  To New Media Ventures, GV, Knight Foundation, Harlem Capital Partners, Plexo Capital, DeAndre and Dev Levy, Merline Saintil, Baron Davis, Michael Rothman, Comcast Ventures, Nas, Macro Ventures, Cross Culture Ventures, Wayne Jordan, Maria Jobin-Leeds, Tigmera, Kapor Capital and so many more — thank you for believing in us, fighting for us, and speaking our names in rooms we can’t even access yet. 

To Washington University in St Louis, the John B. Ervin Scholars Program, Dean McLeod, and the early communities that modeled radical love and support: thank you.  

And most importantly, thank you to our audience, newsletter subscribers, and the broader Black community for reading, engaging, debating, connecting, and supporting. We put our community and audience first in everything we do. And we are committed to creating better experiences just for you.  

While we are proud of the work we’ve done, we also see that we have so much more to do.  

Our world is more connected, more digital, and more multicultural than ever before.  And simultaneously, we are increasingly more ideologically polarized and economically stratified.  As a media company, we have to constantly grapple with this duality by seeking to celebrate the successes while also fighting to change the injustices.  

The work is vast and incomplete.  

As we approach the 2020 elections, the need to mobilize an informed and engaged Black electorate is greater than ever before. 

And while the most venture capital in history was invested over the last 5 years, only a tiny fraction went to women and racial minorities. We need to create access to capital for underrepresented founders.  

We can’t continue to discuss the pipeline problem for getting new people of color in technology, without simultaneously creating programs to retain and support senior professionals currently in the field.  We need to do both. We need to do more.  

And just as creating access to information and opportunity applies to politics, finance, and technology, it equally applies to entertainment, education, health & wellness, and beyond. 

We have dreams.  

And over the past 5 years, we have had the privilege of having our dreams expanded instead of being deferred.  But as a result, we have bigger dreams. We believe in creating a world where all Black People are Happy. And we believe that version of the world will benefit everyone.  

Follow us on LinkedIn and all of our social channels, and subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date. 

We are excited for what comes next and hope you join us for the ride.  Thank you for your continued support.

Sincerely,

Morgan DeBaun, Aaron Samuels and Jeff Nelson