AfroTech debuted in Houston, where optimism outweighed uncertainty

AfroTech founder and CEO Morgan DeBaun during the AfroTech Conference 2024 in Houston.

“We got one night only,” a man said as he strode past me with a group of friends; each seemed equally excited in anticipation of the first night of revelry, pitching, reunions, and new connections.

The eighth edition of AfroTech, which lasted four days in Houston, held its place among one of the largest gatherings of Black tech professionals.

Most of the attendees walked away with connections that anchor their experience as one of few Black tech professionals, if not the only one on their teams or at their tech companies. Many were searching for connections that could land early career conferencegoers their first tech job or a branch to pivot to new tech companies or into entrepreneurship.

Several of the attendees said that they were worried about not only what the new administration would mean for them personally but also the impact it could have on the tech companies they worked at or were hoping to join.

The election inevitably came up in conversations I had and those I overheard. Eighty-six percent of Black voters cast votes for Kamala Harris. Her loss didn’t seem to dampen the mood too much, but it has cast doubt and uncertainty as big tech companies line up to kiss the ring of the new administration.

Elon Musk, who has been appointed a role in the incoming administration, also came up, but only one of his companies, SpaceX manned a booth on the career expo floor.

“We’re not going to get into what happened with Twitter,” Alex Oladele, a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) at IBM, said during his presentation on compassionate code reviews. Though his quip was met with a roar of laughter from the crowd, many seemed to mourn the pre-Musk X, as conferencegoers took to LinkedIn, Mastadon, and Bluesky to post about the conference.

“We are sunsetting over time our media brands posting on X and increasing our company’s presence on Reddit and Spill,” Blavity Media Group and Afrotech’s founder and CEO Morgan DeBaun told B-17 via email.

Blavity Media Group, which produces the AfroTech Conference, is slowly sunsetting its official accounts on X, because the platform is no longer “useful”, according to an employee who asked not to be named as they are not authorized to speak to the press.

The employee also noted that issues of brand safety are particularly concerning given the company’s mission to be a safe space and inclusive space for Black people.

For many attendees, this was their chance. Apt and timely lessons, like how to test code in the Golang programming language, were woven in with a chance to blow off steam as official and not-so-official parties, networking events, and gathers cropped up throughout Houston. But that’s not the only lure of AfroTech.

Each year — my third in-person, AfroTech seems to grow significantly. The number of first-timers, who ranged from students to middle managers to executives, speaks to this growth. Lesley Bellow, a first-time attendee and a travel nurse who signed on to work as a talent wrangler for the conference, got involved after hearing Afrotech founder Morgan Debaun on a podcast, over a year earlier.

“Morgan started this as a way to make connections after she left Silicon Valley. That search for community while advancing your career and insisting that you can have both is what spoke to me,” Bellow said. The goal of making connections was met as 37,500 attendees, up from 30,000 in 2023, flocked to the 2 million square foot George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston.

“The city has been really welcoming,” BMG Manager of Branded Production Joshua Pinkay said.

He wondered what the world, and the much smaller microcosm of the conference, would look like in a year from now, well into Trump’s second term.

“Gratitude is the opposite of anxiety,” Pinkay assuredly said.