LGBTQ advocacy with Tim Gill
As a member of the queer community, should you focus on business or LGBTQ advocacy? Should you first ‘make it’ in your career to have the means to give back later? Or, is it best to put your efforts into LGBTQ activism today?
Hear Gill share his experiences in career and LGBTQ advocacy:
Tim Gill on career and LGBTQ advocacy
Tim Gill is a software entrepreneur and philanthropist based in Denver. He created the Gill Foundation in 1994 to advance equality and support nonprofits that serve the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. Since its inception, the foundation has invested more than $335M in programs across the country. Tim is also the founder and former chair of Quark, Inc., a company that revolutionized desktop publishing with innovative page-layout software. Today, he works in the artificial intelligence space, co-founding the smart home technology startup JStar in 2015.
Tim shares the story of Quark, discussing the challenges he faced in the early years—packing boxes and answering tech support calls from bed at 2 a.m.! He explains why he never had the sense that being gay held him back as an entrepreneur and how he developed the confidence to out himself in public. Tim speaks of Colorado’s Amendment 2 in 1992 as the impetus for his LGBTQ advocacy, offering insight around the Gill Foundation’s work to support anti-discrimination legislation and his approach to ‘smart philanthropy.’