Sarah haggard microsoft

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.

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.

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! In addition, at the conclusion of the program, Tribute launched a mentoring initiative together that had over 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.

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. 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.

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. 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. 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.

She wasn't even some top executive that I thought, "Oh, I need to go to the top of the ranks to find a mentor to succeed here. She would just give me that space, I would say, to ask questions in meetings and get to know my own point of view on things enough where I felt confident to ask questions and take more risks.

I think that was the beginning of our relationship. We've now known each other for 13 years, and she's almost become a mother figure to me. In that time, she's just really changed my life because she cared. She cared, she was kind, and she spent time with me in a variety of different ways, really working more on my soft skills than anything.

Jun Love Young: Sometimes mentorship to me can become really transactional, but you're describing it in a very human way. It's about caring, and paying attention, and slowing down, and being present. Sarah Haggard: I think there's a misnomer that in order to achieve the outcomes transactionally with a mentor, that the relationship has to be transactional.

That's the difference. I think relationships with mentors, even if it's a micro-mentor for a moment, it doesn't have to be a lifelong mentor.

They still need to be grounded in our shared humanity with each other, and they still need to be grounded in a sense of connection and caring for one another, because learning by nature is scary, change is scary and growth is scary. It's hard to do that in a transaction with somebody. When you have a connection and somebody really cares about your success and getting you from point A to B, then the transaction part of mentorship just feels easier to step into.

Jun Love Young: Sure. Yes, because you're addressing the whole self, not just the tasks and the things that need to happen, but also just the emotions around transitions or even starting in a new spot and feeling like an imposter, their emotions around that. If your mentor isn't available for that, I can see that not being as helpful.

Sarah Haggard: Yes, if you care about the person, you will mentor the person first, as you said, and that will help them make that transactional change or learn that new skill. I think that's what Tribute really aims to do, is flip mentorship on its head a little bit. Yes, we are here to help you learn new skills, problem-solve, grow both personally and professionally, but we do it from a starting point of connection. I think that's what makes us unique.

Where does your change story begin? Sarah Haggard: Yes. My change story begins about 10 years into my career at Microsoft, waking up one morning and realizing that all of a sudden, overnight, as it seemed, that purpose was something that was driving me more than financial success status, anything else, and realizing, "Oh no, I'm not in alignment with my purpose.

I might need to make a change. You were at Microsoft for 10 years. I remember you back then, you were really successful. What seemed off to you? Sarah Haggard: What's so interesting about that question is that I think on the outside, it did look like, "Oh, I'm super successful, I'm on this hugely visible role and I work at a company like Microsoft. That's what I wanted to do, I wanted to help people. I didn't want to work with technology, as I famously told them at eight years old, I was not going to work with computers, I was going to work with people.

Just in context, I'm an elder millennial, so working with computers back when I was eight was not a very people-first or people-driven thing. Today, that's very different. There's a lot of anthropologists working in technology today for a lot of good, but back then that wasn't the case.

Fast forward, I'd been at Microsoft for 10 years and I realized that when all that success and all of the noise faded away when I asked myself, what is my purpose here? Is the work I'm doing when I wake up in the morning every day to do this work, the work that I'm meant to do on this Earth? The answer was no.

That really scared me because that meant for me I was going to have to make a hard decision to walk away from all of that success, and not sure what my family would think.

Not sure what my friends would think, not sure how I would pay the bills. It was pretty scary to come to that realization. Jun Love Young: Did you know what you were going to do? Sarah Haggard: Absolutely not. Jun Love Young: Wow. Over the next few months, I did take some time off. I did a lot of journaling, a lot of running, a lot of meditation-- all my self-help tools that I go to. Ultimately a couple months later had written down the initial thesis for what is today tribute.

My initial thesis was I believe that mentorship is broken inside of the workforce, like inside of companies. It doesn't address the root cause of what makes a mentorship successful, which is a spark of connection.

Jun Love Young: Take us back to the moment where you realized that that was your purpose. How did you feel? What was the insight? Sarah Haggard: January of , I was drafting this thesis sitting on this Adirondack chair kind of looking out.

I felt a lightness of being that I cannot describe. It just felt right. It felt like this is it to what I'm here to do because I didn't know why I ended up at Microsoft. It was a bit by accident. I'd moved to Seattle because my dad had moved here and a friend of a friend had said, "Hey, come work for Microsoft. I'm this anthropologist over here that wants to, I don't know, be a project manager somewhere.

Sarah Haggard: -is because I get to have this-- Now I get to have these two worlds come together and build a technology product that actually humanizes the enterprise and humanizes us at work.

That is my purpose. I'm guessing that when you went to bed that night, it must have felt good. Sarah Haggard: It did. It did. What's so wonderful about being in alignment with your purpose is it really does surpass any fear that you feel now. It does not mean and I'd love to talk more about this and I'm sure your listeners have all had this, but it doesn't mean fear won't creep in [laughs] in the process of making that change or going through that transition. When you can have a really solid foundation of purpose and your why, it is the best antidote to fear.

You can do anything in the world, you really can. Take us back to the moment that you decided to quit your job, and you were going to become a full-time entrepreneur. Tell us about the fear around that. Sarah Haggard: January of , I write the thesis.

December of , I drive into Microsoft. It's a wintery day, I'm like walking in again feeling surreal in my body to tell my manager after 10 and a half years that I'm going to be leaving. I did have a ton of fear. I had fear around money. I had fear on reputation, and what my friends and family were going to think. What if Tribute doesn't work out, will they take me back?

Am I making the biggest mistake of my life, or am I making the most courageous one? I think practically speaking, I address that fear by saving, and planning, and doing things like that.

Ultimately, going back to my mentor, Eileen, she really taught me this idea that you just have to leap and let them not appear.

So much of fear isn't that you can de-risk all of it or that you can make it go away is acting even with the fear. I walked in and told my manager that day, "Hey, I've got to go, I've got to go pursue this thing. This idea is too big. It's too important and I've got to go do it. You can always come back.

Sarah Haggard: -I could come back if it didn't work out. Jun Love Young: How kind. You are making this leap and there it is, he provided a net. Sarah Haggard: He did exactly. Jun Love Young: Walk us through then how you ended up creating Tribute. Sarah Haggard: I put my two weeks' notice in-- this part of the story I just have to tell because you can't make this up. Two weeks before my end date, I take my new boyfriend and now he's the husband and father of my kids to go skiing at Crystal Mountain.

On the second run of the day, I get wiped out by a snowboarder and my right knee just gets obliterated. I tear my ACL, my meniscus, my posterior lateral corner.

I cannot get back up. I get to bogging down. It's my right knee. Jun Love Young: Oh my goodness. Sarah Haggard: I live on a houseboat, a two-story houseboat. I have to move out of my home. I can't drive. I can't go to the grocery store. I'm completely debilitated. This is two weeks before I'm supposed to make the most like major move of my life so far.

It just was again, one more obstacle in the road of like, do you really want to do this? Jun Love Young: I remember that. Sarah Haggard: It was crazy. I was like you cannot make this up, and I had all these speaking engagements in March. Jun Love Young: I remember you were preparing for some speeches.

You came over and helped me write this speech that I had to go do, I remember, oh my gosh, that's totally right. Before I get to building Tribute, I'm now managing this major life medical event and I get the surgery, six days after my surgery is my first pitch for Tribute.