Hello Kind and Curious Leader,
Two weeks ago I laid out what the data shows about LGBTQ+ founders in the United States. We outperform on jobs, patents, and exits. We raise less than one percent of available capital. Three out of four of us hide our identity from investors. And the field of research that should be helping the country understand why is doing very little of the work.
Today I am writing the letter I should have written a long time ago.
It is addressed to five business schools.
Why These Five
Harvard Business School. The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Stanford Graduate School of Business. Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. Goizueta Business School at Emory University.
Three of you carry the institutional weight that shapes how American business education thinks about founders, capital, and growth. Your case studies are taught everywhere. Your research sets the agenda for the field. When you study a question, the rest of the academy follows. When you do not, the question stays in the dark.
The other two I am naming because I have a personal stake. Kelley is my alma mater. I am an Indiana University graduate, I sat on the IU Foundation board through this past spring, and I will not ask other schools to take a question seriously that I have not first asked of my own. Goizueta sits in the city I now call home. I spoke at the John Lewis Good Trouble Summit on the Emory campus this April, and the seriousness of that gathering told me Goizueta has the institutional appetite for the kind of work I am asking for.
I am not naming these five to embarrass anyone. I am naming them because real change requires specificity, and because a letter addressed to nobody changes nothing.
What I Am Asking For
I am asking each of these five schools to convene faculty, doctoral researchers, and industry partners around a focused research agenda on LGBTQ+ entrepreneurship in the United States. Five questions that need rigorous answers. Five gaps that StartOut, Proud Ventures, and a handful of academic outliers have begun to fill but cannot fill alone.
The capital allocation gap. Why does measurable outperformance on jobs, patents, and exits fail to translate into proportionate access to venture and angel capital? What patterns of decision making inside investment committees explain it, and what interventions actually change those patterns?
Same-sex co-founder couples as a distinct category. The academic literature on couple businesses has been studied for decades and remains, by its own admission, biased toward heterosexually married couples. Brent and Josh have built a global brand together. So have many others. We do not know, with rigor, what they have to teach the broader field of co-founder research.
The hiding tax, measured in dollars. We have survey data on how often LGBTQ+ founders conceal their identity from investors. We do not have a credible estimate of what that concealment costs, in valuation, in funding rounds raised, in time-to-exit, in firm survival. The cost is real. It deserves a number.
Long-term firm survival in the United States, properly sampled. The strongest survival data we have on LGBTQ+ founder firms comes from Sweden. That is a starting point, not an endpoint. The U.S. has the population, the data infrastructure, and the policy variation across states to support a meaningful study. It has not been done.
The geographic concentration problem. StartOut data shows that 85 percent of LGBTQ+ founder funding goes to only five U.S. metros, with San Francisco raising six times what New York or Los Angeles do, and twelve times what Denver or Austin do. What happens to queer founders building in the other 43 percent of metropolitan areas that have no identified LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs at all? We do not know. We should.
What I Am Offering
I am not writing this letter from outside the building. I am writing it as a USA Today bestselling author on leadership, an executive advisor to Fortune 500 leaders, the host of a leadership podcast in its second season, and a queer business leader with thirty-five years of operating experience across Disney, 20th Century Fox, DreamWorks Animation, Gap Inc., and Claire's.
I have the platform. I have the founder relationships. I have the willingness to put my name on the work and to keep showing up for it after the news cycle moves on. What I do not have is the research infrastructure, the doctoral programs, and the academic credibility to do the studies myself.
That is your part. This is mine. I am offering to convene, to introduce, to host, to amplify, and to fund where I am able. I am asking each of these five schools to bring what only a serious research institution can bring.
Accountability
I want to be clear about what I am putting on the record.
In June of 2027, in this same Field Notes space, I will publish a follow-up. I will report on which of these five schools responded, what was proposed, what was funded, what was published, and what was not. I will name the work that got done. I will also name the silence.
This is not a threat. It is a commitment. Public scorecards change the cost of inaction, and I have spent enough years in C-suites to know that what gets measured gets managed. I am measuring this one.
To the Reader Who Is Not at One of These Schools
If you are reading this and you teach at, fund, or sit on the board of a business school I did not name, the absence of your school from this letter is not an exemption. It is an invitation. The list of five is where I am starting. It is not where the work needs to end.
If you are a queer founder reading this who has felt the data in your own fundraising, your own cap table, your own decision about who to come out to and when, please know that the next twelve months of this work are for you. Brent and Josh are for you. The research I am asking for is for you. And the next time someone tells you the data is not there, you can send them this letter.
In Community and Conversation,
Jim
Field Notes is published every other Tuesday. The June 2027 follow-up, A Year Later, will report on the response from each of the five schools named here.
