4 days ago
First Came Forbes' ‘30 Under 30.' Then Came Love.
Morgan Rose DeBaun never had a lot of time for pickup artists. Then she went dancing in Nashville and changed her tune.
It wasn't with a cheesy line that Joshua Lamar Shaw picked her up on Aug. 20, 2021, at the speakeasy nightclub Dirty Little Secret. It was with his hands. 'He just picked me up and moved me,' Ms. DeBaun said.
That no man had been brazen enough to do this before had less to do with her immovability — she is a compact 4-foot-11 — than her reputation. Ms. DeBaun, 35, is a founder and the chief executive of the digital media company Blavity and an adviser to brands including American Airlines and PepsiCo. In 2016, two years after she started Blavity, she was on the Forbes '30 Under 30' list alongside Aaron Samuels, her fellow founder. She is now a serial entrepreneur at the head of companies including AfroTech, a platform for Black technology executives, and an author.
This spring, 'Rewrite Your Rules,' her mantra, became a book about the path to personal fulfillment. A rejection of hustle culture for something more authentic is at its foundation. So was the path that led her to go dancing that night in Nashville.
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Ms. DeBaun grew up in St. Louis with an older brother. Their parents, Sandra and Michael DeBaun, raised them with what she called solid Midwestern values. 'Everything at home was consistent and stable,' she said. 'My mom and dad were high school sweethearts, my grandma picked me up from school every day.'
In Los Angeles, where she moved in 2015 to grow Blavity after graduating with a bachelor's degree in political science and entrepreneurship from Washington University in St. Louis, she wasn't meeting men who shared those values.
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