Pride Edition 🌈🌈🌈

Happy Monday! This past Friday afternoon, I ate a sad desk salad and processed the day's news. In need of a pick-me-up, I thought it was time to get celebratory with the gayest month of the year, Pride Month. Rather than cast our logo in rainbow colors, we’re looking at the data and sprinkling your inbox with the queer-led and -founded brands you should know.

LGBTQ+ leadership and ownership is a tough data point to track. Not everyone leads his or her company's ‘About Us’ section with a note about sexual orientation or gender expression. Luckily, Pride celebrations are about just that, pride--pride in identity, expression, and love for a group that remains marginalized in spite of incredible progress in the last 50 years. We’re looking at some out & proud business leaders bringing queer representation to the pages of Forbes and the Wall Street Journal.

By the numbers
Though difficult to quantify, the NGLCC worked with the SBA to come up with the following estimates on LGBTQ+ businesses. As of 2022, there are an estimated 1.4 million LGBTQ-run companies in the U.S., accounting for $1.7 trillion a year in revenue. One former beverage salesperson used his travels across 42 states to devise the “Everywhere is Queer” map, pointing out queer-owned businesses from coffee shops to hair salons.

Fortune 500 Leaders
Let’s start with Apple. Tim Cook came out in a 2014 Bloomberg op-ed. He credited activists before him with paving the way for him to come out without fear of recrimination. SiriusXM creator and founder and CEO of United Therapeutics Martine Rothblat came out as a transgender woman in 1994. She became the highest-paid female CEO last year, taking home $38MM, and was named one of Forbes Magazine’s “greatest minds” of the past 100 years.

For more Fortune 500 leaders who happen to be a member of the LGBTQ+ community, check out this article. 

For private companies, here are a few of our favorites:

🌈 Bokksu is a Japanese subscription company that pairs teas, candies, and magazines in gorgeous monthly deliveries. The company raised $22MM at a $100MM valuation in January.

🌈 Equator Coffee has been “out & proud since ‘95”. It's a very popular San Franciscan retailer of finely crafted coffees.

🌈 Madison Reed is a hair-care and dye company made without harmful chemicals. It raised $33MM at a $700MM valuation in April.

🌈  For dating & hookups, there are queer apps like Lex and Grindr which will go public in a $2.1BN SPAC deal, as announced in May.

Happy Pride!