Mentorship plays a huge role in all our lives. A good mentor shapes our professional and personal journey. Sarah Haggard is an engaging speaker, writer, and mentor who loves to tell stories, and share her most rewarding (and challenging) moments as an Anthropologist turned Product Marketer and now pioneering entrepreneur.
Sarah went to school for anthropology and sociology with the hopes of being a humanitarian. At 24, she ended up at Microsoft by fate. She realized pretty early on in doing some of the social work that she wanted to make an impact on people’s lives in a way that helped them have economic access and opportunities to rise above some of the challenges that they would have.
Today, Sarah is the Founder and CEO of Tribute. She founded Tribute after 10 years working at Microsoft and struggling to find a mentor. The Tribute came to life because Sarah is passionate about the power of human connection, and using storytelling as a means to find that connection. She states that when we feel connected, we feel empowered, supported, and most importantly capable of achieving our most aspirational goals. Sarah holds a Master’s degree in Business Administration from Seattle University and a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and Business Administration from Augustana College in Rock Island, IL.
Sarah is a proven business leader who has led multiple startup initiatives within her decade-long career in product marketing at Microsoft, raising $40M to scale her last business. She is an expert in P&L management, enterprise software, and GTM strategy. Sarah’s tenacity and drive for results led to her being widely recognized as a turnaround expert and new business incubator. Her leadership style is engaging and authentic. Impactful leadership to Sarah means being in service. She believes in leading from the front, being transparent, over-communicating, and walking the talk. She personally prefers being a servant leader. Her superpower is her ability to spot patterns, create high-performing teams and activate the right people at the right time to deliver results.
Upholding Culture of Growth, Inclusivity, and Belonging
Tribute is a mobile and desktop app, available on both the Slack and Teams marketplaces. It is perfectly positioned for a post-pandemic world to build and nourish virtual relationships by sharing stories, lived experiences, and wisdom. Tribute is not an average mentorship app. It is built by curious creators looking to disrupt traditional mentorship programs. They lead with social psychology, beautiful UI, and simple UX to facilitate the art (and science) of better connections.
Tribute believes in bringing one’s authentic self to work and that sharing stories and experiences is key to creating a trusted and diverse culture centered around growth, inclusivity, and belonging. What’s great about Tribute is once you sign up, it’s a 30-day commitment. It’s a very short, time-bound engagement that each party can get into without having to make these lifelong commitments, thus, it allows you to go in and have multiple different types of mentors for shorter engagements over Teams.
Creating an Empowering Mentorship Experience
Tribute believes stories inspire action and everyone’s story matters. It is a platform that goes beyond traditional, top-down structures of most mentorship programs, amplifying the stories of everyone and thus making mentorship more accessible. By combining modern technology with the ancient art of storytelling, Tribute creates an empowering mentorship experience that breaks down the barriers between individuals, bridging differences and building better connections. It builds technology that supports autonomous choice with a mentorship platform that works seamlessly across one’s company.
Building Next Generation Learning Experience Platform
Tribute is not afraid to be the leader. The future of work will look radically different than today. It is redefining mentorship for a future based on distributed team effectiveness, inclusion, and belonging. Tribute has a team of business leaders, strategists, marketers, designers, and more. What brings its team together is its shared mission and vision for improving mentorship experience for both employers and employees using the transformative power of personal stories and Shared Life Experiences™ to create next-gen learning experience platforms.
Befitting Women in Cloud Accelerator Program
Sarah narrates that the Women in Cloud Microsoft Cloud Accelerator has helped her personally to communicate in a way that is compelling. Since graduating from the Women in Cloud Accelerator, Tribute went on to win the Seattle Angel Conference XVII pitch competition, tripled its revenue, successfully raised its first investment, expanded its team, been featured in Geekwire and King5 as well as added customers like Zillow and the University of Washington to its growing list. And Sarah says they are just getting started!
The Women in Cloud Accelerator elevated Tribute’s brand awareness on a national level, and connected it with a rich network of business leaders, entrepreneurs, advisors, and investors. In addition, at the conclusion of the program, Tribute launched a 2020 mentoring initiative together that had over 300 participants and 45 mentoring pairs connected. After her journey, Sarah advises female entrepreneurs to trust themselves and advises them to apply for the Women in Cloud Accelerator if they already have a working prototype. She says that it is a great first step as Women in Cloud turns ideas into great businesses.
Bridging More Connections Across World
Sarah hopes to have several more Tributes in — to keep on being an entrepreneur. She hopes to build more startups post-Tribute around the core theme, belonging. She is interested in building products and services that help human beings feel a greater sense of belonging and connection with their other fellow human beings, and not necessarily people that just look like you or live in your neighborhood. Thus, bridging connections across the world is something that Sarah really is passionate about and wants to continue to build technology around.
Sarah sees 2021 as a great growth year for Tribute. With its Teams and Slack apps, Tribute aims to be the de facto mentoring app for Fortune 500 companies. That is its vision.
