Blavity's Morgan Debaun Is Pregnant: a New Book and Baby on the Way

Be present, but be productive. Sleep when the baby sleeps—but don’t fall behind. Prioritize your kids—but don’t forget your career, your partner, your self-care, your sanity. If you’ve ever felt crushed by the unwritten (and often contradictory) rules of modern parenting, Morgan DeBaun has a message: Break them.

Never one to follow the rules, DeBaun shook up the media industry in her twenties by launching Blavity and becoming one of the first Black women to raise over $1 million in venture capital. That vision to amplify Black voices has grown into a $40 million media-tech powerhouse and AfroTech, one of the largest tech conferences in the US. Now, 35, she’s channeling that same fearless drive into motherhood, business and self-care—and in an exclusive interview with The Bump, she reveals her next big chapter: baby number two is on the way this fall!

“We are just over the moon. This baby decided that they wanted to show up,” she says with a laugh. “So I say, ‘You’re coming on tour with me, whether you like it or not.’ I love it. I’m looking forward to welcoming a new life very soon. ”

The tour she’s referring to? It’s for her brand-new book, Rewriting Your Rules, a guide for anyone who’s realized the path they were told to follow no longer serves them. “This is a book for anyone who wants to define life and success on their own terms,” DeBaun explains. “This is a book that gives you the methods and the tools to be able to do it for yourself—especially for moms and parents.”

For DeBaun, rewriting the rules started with letting go of the pressure to do it all. “We’re taught that you have to do it all, and you have to be all things. You have to be a fantastic mom, a fantastic wife, a fantastic business owner,” she says. “And it’s like—how? There’s not enough time in the day to build that kind of capacity.”

Her new approach is all about presence over perfection. She’s focusing on alignment—not just productivity—and prioritizing what matters most: her relationships, her son, her baby on the way, and the work that fuels her purpose. “You’re going to be good at three things right now,” she reminds herself. “And you can always change those three things—but it’s okay to be bad at something.”

Of course, that clarity didn’t arrive overnight. Like many new parents, DeBaun was caught off guard by the intensity of postpartum life. “I had a beautiful birth experience, but I wasn’t prepared for the level of sleep deprivation or what it would do to my hormones and ability to be rational.” These days, with more sleep under her belt, she laughs, “I’ll take negotiating with a toddler any day—as long as I’m sleeping eight hours a night.”

Long before the sleepless nights began, though, DeBaun had already started reshaping her relationship with work. “When I was in my early twenties, my priority was me and my ambition, and I was completely okay with that,” she says. “But there was a point when I said, ‘Wait a minute—my company is not going to love me back.’ So how am I going to create a balanced, more holistic approach to my life now that I’ve had some level of success so that I can actually be successful in multiple areas of my life?”

That realization led to one of the boldest moves of her career: stepping back. She put Blavity into “maintenance mode,” brought in experienced leadership, scaled profitability and embraced her role as a visionary—not a micromanager. “For any entrepreneur, that is ultimately the dream,” she says. “That your business is able to run without you and you’re able to step back and really focus on being a CEO.”

Today, DeBaun is redefining what CEO energy looks like—pregnant, powerful and proudly charting her own path. Her message is simple: You don’t have to do it all. You don’t have to do it the way anyone else does. You can rewrite the rules—and still thrive.