Excerpt
Rewrite Your Rules
1The Purposeful Life: Simple, Not EasyAugust 11, 2014. That miserable Monday morning stretched on under harsh fluorescent lights. I strained against the glare of my computer screen, fingers flickering furiously to meet the data cleanup deadline for the leads we were uploading. The shine of start-up land felt dull as I kept toggling to Twitter, hungry for updates.
It had already been two agonizing days since the news shattered my world. Back home, Michael Brown, an unarmed eighteen-year-old, had been killed by police. It made me sick not knowing what was unfolding on those suburban St. Louis streets. Friends posted grainy videos from protests growing restless. Reporters seemed slow, absent. Fear and fury twisted inside me as the office bustle blurred into oblivion.
Black America was on fire, but somehow, no one in the room I was sitting in felt the same emotional gut punch as me. For a moment, visualize the typical sexy start-up office environment in downtown San Francisco: A high-energy scene dominated by Ivy League white boys. T-shirts and jeans. Some zone in on their computer screens, while others pace the floor wearing headsets and tossing stress balls. A few are found in the middle of a beer pong game, and some are caught stuffing their faces with free food while also tending to the dogs they brought to work that day. It’s exactly what you’d expect to see in a start-up-culture movie. Now, close-up on me, sitting smack in the middle of it all. A twenty-four-year-old Black girl from St. Louis, with big natural curly hair and fair skin. On any given day, the one emotion that overwhelms me is loneliness. Don’t they know worlds are burning minutes away from where we stand? I need clarity. Understanding. The closure of truth. But all I find are disjointed fragments of information.
At the time, I worked for Intuit, a financial software company that makes technology for small businesses and consumers. I was one of the few Intuit employees assigned to the sales floor of the business development team at Demandforce, a start-up tech company that they had purchased a few years prior. Professionally, it was at the tail end of my two-year program with Intuit, during which I rotated through different parts of the company, and the time had come for me to make a decision about which division I wanted to join. I had to honestly ask myself three questions: (1) Do I want to stay at Demandforce and build my career here? I would join the fast track and climb the corporate ladder. (2) Do I want to return (and commute every day) to Intuit’s main campus in the southern Bay Area and work on a different product within the Intuit product ecosystem? (3) Am I done with working here and at pretty much any big tech company like it?
To be frank, I had an inkling that I was done with corporate life overall! Working at Intuit’s Demandforce office was my first exposure to a scaled start-up and my first
up-close interaction with the stereotypical tech start-up environment you hear about in the media. The successful entrepreneurs had raised millions of dollars in funding, employed a bunch of their friends to build a distinctive product, and then sold the start-up for more than $400 million. I worked at their company for five months and picked up some pointers: The product was based on community, they had an amazing sales team, and ultimately the staff there were just ordinary people.
Blavity, at the time, was a side hustle. Something I was tinkering with during my nights, early mornings, and weekends. It was growing, but its growth was constrained by the amount of time I spent working a day job. Just months before, I had wrangled my friends from college Jonathan Jackson, Jeff Nelson, and Aaron Samuels to fly into Nashville and have a co-working weekend in my parents’ basement with a goal to launch the first version of Blavity’s product, an online newsletter. My vision, if nothing else, was clear: I wanted to create a platform for the Black community to see themselves and their stories reflected in the media and to feel empowered to effect change. I was serious about what we were building and knew Blavity was something special.
Prior to that weekend, Jeff and I spent roughly seven months brainstorming and building the first version of the site, hiring engineers from Upwork (a site that connects businesses with freelancers), and I had been sending out weekly emails filled with Black-created content. We huddled down and narrowed in on what each of our roles would be to get to the next milestone: Jonathan focused on building our brand, Aaron made our initial business model, and Jeff built the product. We were just getting started on the formation of the company. It lacked our full-time commitment and was still moving slowly. I had no idea that intense, all-encompassing energy would rush through my heart on August 9, only two months after sending out our first Blavity newsletter, and push me into the throes of full-time entrepreneurship.
The death of Mike Brown happened on a Saturday, and there were no tweets, no articles; it seemed there was absolutely
nothing from Black media until Monday. Along with the surge of other emotions that surrounded his death, I felt both confused and disappointed that Black media failed to cover these events in real time. There were white reporters dropping down in my hometown of St. Louis with a
white lens on Black pain. Venture-backed millennial media brands like Mic, VICE, and others were covering the emerging Black Lives Matter movement but I couldn’t find this same coverage in Black media. I couldn’t take it. I was angry! I felt disappointed to see that Black media of the time put most of their focus on following entertainers and celebrities rather than current issues and social justice.
In my cubicle at Demandforce, I felt small in a sea of whiteness, but every evening, when I switched to my personal laptop to work on my passion, I became an energized giant suiting up for war. The stark black-and-white of my emotions during those weeks between August and October 2014 provided the clarity that I needed to quit my job and put all of my eggs in one basket: Blavity.
I’m often asked how I knew it was time to make that shift. I would ask myself, “Where am I uniquely positioned to make the most difference in the world?” I knew that being one of six thousand employees wasn’t the best position for me to make the greatest impact. Similarly, the year 2014 fell amid a period when the media industry was completing the transition to digital, hastened by changes in consumer consumption and the advancement of technology. Magazines were reducing their print schedules and moving online. Local newsrooms filled with reporters who took weeks to write a single piece of content were running out of advertising dollars, which were now being diverted to social platforms like Facebook and Google. Thanks to mobile phones, the entire market for receiving information had changed. And here I was, in the middle of the shift, working in Silicon Valley. I had insight and access to the latest developments.
That, however, was not enough to justify quitting my job. The X factor was this: I was one of a few thousand Black people working in the Bay Area, while Atlanta and New York were the epicenters of Black media. Who else in the universe, at that exact time, could intelligently formulate a space that unapologetically combined Black media and technology with digital content and social impact focused on Black millennials? The odds were slim. We’re talking about fewer than three thousand Black people working in product at a technology company in the Bay Area at the time, only some of whom were part of my generation. And when you narrow down who had the time, the desire, the ability to build a team, the personal resilience to get through it—we’re down to about ten people in that area, at
that moment, who could have created Blavity. So when the idea came to me, I saw my identity all over it. I was uniquely positioned to bring it to fruition, and the possibilities of its success were in plain view.
That Saturday afternoon of August 9, from my desk, I went down a serious rabbit hole while attempting to follow Michael’s story, which proved extremely difficult. This was at a time when Twitter’s algorithm was changing, making it nearly impossible to see everything that was trending. It was tough to come across accurate information. Plus, because I was from St. Louis, I could see the difference between the bit of static information being reported and the real-time experience of people on the ground, many of whom were using Periscope or Vine because Instagram and Facebook didn’t yet have live streaming.
