We know that entrepreneurs across the United States – women, men, Black, Latine, Veterans, LGBTQ+ and more – are contributing enormously to the success of our economy. But do we know how much? And how many more jobs could they have created or raised capital with equal access to resources? 

Do you want to know? And do you want your community to get the recognition and respect it deserves for its hard-earned achievements? Then please participate in this important project. 

All entrepreneurs with U.S. based startups are invited to participate. You can easily complete the survey in 2-4 minutes on this link. Participation is voluntary and all responses are held in strict confidentiality as only aggregated and anonymized insights are shared publicly. 

It’s like voting, get counted HERE!

Why It’s Important 

We at StartOut and Socos Labs are excited to team up with 500 Startups. This applied D&I research project reflects our joint emphasis on the power of an inclusive economy – especially as we all want to help jumpstart it after Covid-19: Create jobs, innovate, be successful – and give back.  

The Indexes’ first iteration – covering female, all, and LGBTQ entrepreneurs – is live and you can gain some powerful and certainly surprising insights there – and marvel at some super fancy visualizations.  The second iteration of the indexes will deepen and broaden the view, covering additional underrepresented communities and introducing intersectionality.  

Every founder who has contributed to the U.S. economy counts. We are thus grateful to 500 Startups for offering their broad reach and passion for their entrepreneurs and helping us count as many entrepreneurs as possible. The goals are first to have enough insights to get a reliable picture of where we are today – always an important starting point! – and second to understand what programs and policies may help remove systemic barriers to success – with your participation in close to real-time. 

Check out the U.S. Inclusion Impact Index MAP

How We Started

Socos Labs collaborated with non-profit StartOut to launch the first iteration of the Inclusion Impact Indexes, the StartOut Pride Economic Impact Index (SPEII). It provides insights on All, Female, and LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs’s economic impact to quantify the economic value of under-utilized LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs. The goal of the SPEII is to identify the unrealized potential of “out” high-growth LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs, for the benefit of the US economy at large. Now we want to do the same for other communities. 

The research was initially funded by JPMorgan Chase as part of its $150M Small Business Forward philanthropic initiative to invest in underserved entrepreneurs with additional support from Ogilvy, Google, Crunchbase, Reaching Out, and the Movement Advancement Project.   

To give you an example from the current SPEII, all LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs based in San Francisco have raised over $5B over the last 20 years, while their counterparts in New York have raised only $700M. And other areas of course much less. So there’s a great imbalance that investors in NY can address. There are so many more LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs in NYC who provide a great investment opportunity. 

Check this out for yourself. The Inclusion Impact Indexes cover all the metropolitan areas with at least 50 high growth entrepreneurs, no matter from which community. You can explore our insights in many different ways. 

Going Forward

The purpose of the next iterations of the Index is to understand the broader impact of economic inclusion on the lives of everyone by all entrepreneurs. It is simultaneously a dataset, an algorithm, an economic model, and a website, revealing the underappreciated impact of marginalized entrepreneurs. 

Free for anyone to view and dynamically updated at least monthly, the current Index map encompasses data from volunteer founders, Crunchbase, Pitchbook with data from the US Patent Office, the Census Bureau, and numerous other sources. And most importantly, self-identified metrics from YOU!

With much gratitude for your participation,

Andres Wydler
Executive Director
StartOut

About StartOut:

Founded in 2009, StartOut, a national 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, is the largest national organization to support LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs with 17K members nationwide.  Its mission is to increase the number, diversity, and impact of LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs and amplify their stories to drive the economic empowerment of the community. StartOut helps aspiring LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs start new companies; supports current entrepreneurs as they grow and expand their existing businesses; and engages successful entrepreneurs as role models and mentors, on its online portal and through targeted events nationwide. For more information, please visit www.startout.org.

About Socos Labs:

Socos Labs was created by Dr. Vivienne Ming after a career founding companies and nonprofits to overcome challenges in education, the workforce, and health. Socos Labs is a mad science incubator that explores messy human problems. Socos experiments with whole new visions of work, education, innovation, and inclusive economies to inform more human-centered policy. To learn more about Socos Labs, email us at info@socos.org.

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