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.
“I had a lot of dates with amazing men who were so much fun,” she said. “But with the guys I was in conversation with, it didn’t feel like it was something that was going to lead to a potential life together.”
So in 2020, with the world and Blavity drastically slowed down for Covid, she went on a 30-day sabbatical to Costa Rica to plot a way forward.
“Like everybody else, I was rethinking my life,” she said. “I needed to decompress and hang out with the rainforest.” Blavity, which is a platform and professional network for Black millennials and Gen Zers, was going strong. Ms. DeBaun had by then raised $12 million for the company, which had more than 100 employees and occupied two floors of an office building in downtown Los Angeles.
But after Costa Rica, “I knew from a personal life perspective I needed to get out of L.A.,” she said. Her parents had moved to Nashville years earlier. In January 2021, she moved in with them. For a few months, with Blavity by then fully remote — it is still fully remote — she worked out of their closet. Then she bought a house in Nashville and started piecing together a social life.
“I spent the summer doing dating apps, trying to get the lay of the land in Nashville, which is very, very date-y,” she said. When a friend from college who was then in medical school nearby, Nelson Nwumeh, reached out asking for a meet-up, it came as a relief.
“By then I thought, let me just meet people through friend groups,” she said. But when Mr. Nwumeh showed up at Stateside Kitchen that August with Mr. Shaw, she was surprised. He hadn’t mentioned bringing a friend along.
Mr. Shaw, 37, is a Nashville native and the founder and director of Modern Innovation Production, a company that makes marketing videos for businesses. His parents, Audrey and Joseph Shaw, still live in Nashville; he has a younger sister. In college at the University of Alabama, where he won a scholarship for playing trombone, he studied marketing but withdrew before finishing his bachelor’s degree. He started the video company three years later, in 2011.
When he met Ms. DeBaun, he was going through a divorce and rebuilding his social life. Mr. Nwumeh was a relatively new buddy from the gym. He didn’t know anything about Ms. DeBaun’s background or businesses, but Mr. Nwumeh thought he and Ms. DeBaun would hit it off.
“He said, ‘She’s in media, y’all might have some similar interests,’” Mr. Shaw said. At dinner, he didn’t have a chance to find out. “I was basically the third wheel,” Mr. Shaw said.
Mr. Nwumeh, both said, had a lot of questions for Ms. DeBaun about her life and businesses. At first, Ms. DeBaun treaded carefully.
“I felt weird about answering all of Nelson’s questions at the time because I didn’t know Josh at all,” she said. But after a round of cocktails, when someone suggested slipping over to the speakeasy next door to go dancing, she was game.
That is where Mr. Shaw picked her up, literally. “A guy I didn’t know started talking to me, and Josh could see I was uncomfortable,” Ms. DeBaun said, so in he swooped with his arms. After he set her down in a safe zone, he offered to drive her home. Later that night, he sent her an OpenTable invitation for a date the following week at O-Ku, a sushi restaurant in Nashville.
“I thought it was super bold, but I liked it,” Ms. DeBaun said. “He was direct and clear and a gentleman, and that’s what I was looking for.”
At O-Ku, “it wasn’t us talking about what she did or who she was,” Mr. Shaw said. “It was just good vibes.” It wasn’t long before they had a weekly standing date.
Ms. DeBaun was still traveling to Los Angeles regularly for work. Mr. Shaw would pick her up and drop her off at the airport. “It was always, ‘See you next time,’” he said.
In October, he boarded a plane with her to Napa Valley. “Goldman Sachs does a Top Innovators Conference for 100 founders,” Ms. DeBaun said. That year, “I had the opportunity to bring a plus one.” Attending high-profile events alone had given rise to an empty feeling.
“I told myself, I go to all these gorgeous places, but I’m alone,” she said. “I’m an introvert as well.” Mr. Shaw is the opposite. “Everyone loves Josh.” By the end of the conference, she thought she might love him, too.
A vacation to the Great Smoky Mountains two weeks later confirmed it. There, “I was like, I’m kinda done” with dating, Ms. DeBaun said. “This is great.”
For Mr. Shaw, the clouds had parted. “You know how when things are blurry and you put on glasses and it feels like everything comes into focus?” he said. “That’s how I felt about Morgan. I would often say, ‘Man, it feels like no one really understands me.’ She understood me. She knows what I’m trying to say even if it doesn’t make sense.”
In January 2022, he moved into her house. A year later, “we were rewriting our own rules, like Morgan’s book says,” Mr. Shaw said. For Ms. DeBaun, marriage didn’t necessarily guarantee the stability she prized. “To me, the officialness of it didn’t really matter that much,” she said. “It was more about how we operated as partners, as a couple. So, yeah: baby first.”
Their son, Langston, was born Nov. 1, 2023. The baby was with them on June 23, 2024, in Paris, where they had stopped for a few days after attending the Cannes Film Festival, when Mr. Shaw proposed. Marriage still felt largely unimportant, but Ms. DeBaun had acknowledged before her instant “yes” that it was a milestone that came with benefits.
“It’s a signal of our love that’s public and external, that helps people understand our level of commitment,” she said. She thought a wedding band might limit her encounters with the type of guy Mr. Shaw rescued her from at the speakeasy, too. “It kind of felt like, thank you for putting a ring on my finger so I can continue to live the life of integrity I want to live.”
This spring, Ms. DeBaun and Mr. Shaw put down deposits for a late-August wedding for 100 at El Mangroove, a boutique hotel in Costa Rica. In April, the planning skidded to a halt.
Ms. DeBaun was about to go on a book tour when she started feeling unwell. “I was going up some stairs and I had Langston in my arms and I felt so weak I almost couldn’t carry him,” she said.
Mr. Shaw joked that she needed to work on her endurance. But still sapped of energy days later, she bought a pregnancy test. The evidence was not faint when it came back positive.
“This line was like, ‘Girl, you are very pregnant,’” Ms. DeBaun said.
The couple is expecting a daughter in October. They are not expecting to recoup their deposits for the Costa Rica wedding, or to reschedule. Ms. DeBaun had been feeling overwhelmed by wedding planning even before the pregnancy.
“I wasn’t one of those brides who had a Pinterest board,” she said. Also, “being seven months pregnant in 95-degree Costa Rican sun didn’t sound appealing.”
On April 19, Ms. DeBaun and Mr. Shaw were married before 10 guests — seven adults and three toddlers — at the Hermitage Hotel in Nashville. Ms. DeBaun wore what she called “a big white dress and simple shoes.” Mr. Shaw wore a black tuxedo.
A friend, the Rev. Jeremiah Parks, the senior pastor at Mount Calvary Baptist Church in Owensboro, Ky., officiated a ceremony that checked every box the couple deemed important: Ms. DeBaun’s father walked her down the aisle, their parents and siblings and son were all there.
“Everyone had their role,” Ms. DeBaun said. That included the bride and groom, who played the role of happy couple authentically. The wedding “was exactly enough for us,” Mr. Shaw said. “It was beautiful.”
ON THIS DAY
When April 19, 2025
Where The Hermitage Hotel, Nashville
Tres Chic Though the wedding was simple, the couple didn’t take a rain check on style. Glamsquad did Ms. DeBaun’s hair; a stylist friend made her veil. The European-style hotel was done up in florals with potted trees in the background.
Family Affair After the ceremony, the couple and their guests headed to Ms. DeBaun’s parents’ house for a dinner catered by Condado Tacos, a local favorite. The newlyweds spent the night with the DeBauns, then took Langston and his cousins to the park the next morning.
Back to Normal Ms. DeBaun had pushed past her first-trimester fatigue, but she was still glad she chose a small, relaxed ceremony. She has advice for anyone considering something similar. “Go elope,” she said. “Live your life. Focus on the thing that matters most.”
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