Here is what the data says about LGBTQ+ founders in the United States.

According to the StartOut Pride Economic Impact Index, which has tracked nearly one hundred thousand U.S. companies that raised at least $250,000 between 2000 and 2022, LGBTQ+ founders raised 0.5 percent of the $2.1 trillion in startup funding deployed during that period. The U.S. population that identifies as LGBTQ+ is roughly 7.1 percent.

That gap is the headline. It is not the story.

The story is what those same founders did with less capital. They created 36 percent more jobs than the average founder. They generated 114 percent more patents. They produced 44 percent more exits. All while raising 16 percent less funding.

Read that again. We outperform on every output metric the market claims to value, and we underperform on the one input metric we do not control.

Source: StartOut Pride Economic Impact Index, startout.org/index.

Beekman 1802 is a global lifestyle brand built on a goat farm by two men who married each other, who refused to hide who they were while raising money, and who built a customer community that became the strongest moat in the business. Look at the StartOut numbers again. Brent and Josh did not defy the data. They are the data.

The mistake most coverage makes is treating queer founders like outliers. They are not outliers. They are a pattern. The pattern is just being studied at one-tenth the resolution of the patterns that get covered in business school case studies.

I want to be honest about what the research also shows, because I have built my career on telling leaders the truth even when it complicates the headline.

A 2024 study published in Small Business Economics, drawing on Swedish population register data from 1995 to 2020 and covering more than nineteen thousand individuals in same-sex unions, found something more textured than a clean win. Sexual minority men were 7.8 percent less likely than comparable heterosexual men to be entrepreneurs. Sexual minority women were 4.8 percent more likely than comparable heterosexual women to be entrepreneurs. Firms founded by sexual minority women failed more quickly than observably similar firms founded by heterosexual women. There was no significant survival difference for firms founded by sexual minority men.

The story is not queer founders win. The story is queer founders win on some measures, struggle on others, and the field of inquiry that should be helping us understand why is barely paying attention.

Source: Small Business Economics, 2024. Sexual orientation, entrepreneurship, and firm survival.

There is a second cost in the data that does not show up in capital allocation tables. It shows up in identity.

StartOut's earlier research found that more than a third of LGBTQ+ founders in the U.S. choose to keep their sexual orientation to themselves while trying to raise investment. A 2023 survey from Proud Ventures in the United Kingdom found that 75 percent of LGBTQ+ startup founders and 79 percent of LGBTQ+ investors conceal their sexual orientation or gender identity from their professional peers.

Three out of four of us are still hiding parts of who we are in the rooms where capital decisions get made.

I have written before about the cost of running a smaller version of yourself at work. The cost is not abstract. It is in the cap table. It is in the conversations that did not happen because someone decided it was safer not to come out to a prospective investor. It is in the businesses that did not get built because the founder calculated that the closet was cheaper than the disclosure.

The data on outperformance is real. The data on the hiding tax is also real. Both can be true at once, and both deserve more rigorous study than they are getting.

In a Similar vein, I am concerned about employee engagement overall. Let me tell you a story.

In 2017, I sat in a conference room on the 20th Century Fox lot during the early stages of the Disney acquisition. The dashboards were green. The decks were tight. The cross-functional alignment slides looked beautiful.

The room was not aligned.

People were nodding at things they did not believe. Smart people were saving the real conversation for the parking lot. The data said one thing. The eyes in the room said another. I remember walking out and thinking: we have never had more tools to stay connected, and we have never been more disconnected from what's actually happening.

That gap has a name now. It's the engagement paradox.

More tools. Less connection. More meetings. Less alignment. More data. Less clarity.

Every leader I work with feels it. Most cannot name it. So let's name it.

Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report just put numbers on what your gut already knows. Global employee engagement fell to 20 percent in 2025, the lowest level since the pandemic. The cost: an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity. The sharpest decline was not among frontline workers. It was among managers, who dropped from 27 percent engagement to 22 percent in a single year. (Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026.)

Microsoft's Work Trend Index, drawing on Microsoft 365 telemetry across 31 markets, found that knowledge workers are interrupted every two minutes during core hours, 275 times a day, by meetings, emails, and chats. Forty-eight percent of employees and fifty-two percent of leaders describe their work as chaotic and fragmented. (Microsoft, Breaking Down the Infinite Workday, 2025.)

We did not arrive here by accident. We built it.

Three things are driving the paradox.

That third one is the one that matters most. It's the one I write about in Ask for An Answer, the next book. It's also the one most leaders avoid, because it asks something harder of us than any tool does. It asks us to stop performing.

Here's the move for this week. One move.

In your next meeting, ask one question you genuinely do not know the answer to. Not a leading question. Not a question with a preferred answer baked into the phrasing. A real question.

Then do not fill the silence.

Most leaders fill silence in three seconds because silence feels like failure. It isn't. Silence is the sound of people deciding whether you actually want the truth or whether you want the version that gets them out of the room alive. Hold the silence. Count to ten in your head if you have to. The room will tell you something you did not know.

This is the Surface move in the ASK framework. Approach. Surface. Keep. The middle one is the hardest. It's also the one that closes the engagement paradox at the table where you actually have control.

You will not solve $10 trillion in lost productivity. You will not fix what 31,000 surveyed workers across 31 markets are feeling. You can change one room. That's the whole assignment.

Your silence has a cost.

So does theirs. The difference is, yours is the one you can do something about today.

This issue is the diagnosis. Next issue is the prescription.

In two weeks, I am going to name the five business schools I believe should be leading the research on LGBTQ+ entrepreneurship in the United States, and are not. Three of them I am naming for their institutional weight. Two of them I am naming because I have personal ties, and I refuse to ask of others what I will not ask of my own.

If you teach at one of those schools, if you sit on a board there, if you fund research at any of them, this is your chance to get in front of the conversation rather than be named inside it.

And if you are a founder reading this who has hidden parts of who you are to raise money, I see you. The data sees you. The work I am about to ask the academy to do is for you.

In Community and Conversation,

Jim

Field Notes is published every other Tuesday. Next issue: An Open Letter to Five Business Schools, dropping the final Tuesday of June.