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What Haggard said remote fundraising changed
In an Aug. 24, 2020 report, GeekWire’s Lisa Stiffler profiled Sarah Haggard, founder and CEO of Seattle workplace-mentoring startup Tribute. Haggard said she had raised an investment round remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. She did not disclose the amount.
Haggard said video calls allowed her to build meaningful, trusted relationships while saving the time and money she would otherwise have spent traveling. She also said she raised while pregnant without pregnancy becoming a point of conversation—or, in her experience, a discriminating factor. She cautioned that women still faced a double standard in fundraising, particularly when pregnant.
That is the basis for describing remote fundraising as “discrimination-busting” in her case: the format changed what came up in her own investor conversations. Her account does not establish that virtual meetings improved her funding outcome or reduced bias compared with an in-person process.
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Who Haggard was, and what Tribute did
Before launching Tribute in January 2018, Haggard worked for more than a decade as a senior product marketing manager at Microsoft, according to GeekWire. Tribute was a workplace mentoring app designed to help employees connect with colleagues who had encountered similar professional or personal challenges.
Users could share experiences, find potential mentors and mentees, and take part in either a single, real-time micro-mentoring session or longer-term mentorship coordinated through the app. GeekWire named Microsoft, Zillow, and the University of Washington as Tribute customers at the time; that 2020 list does not establish the company’s current customer base or operating status.
Keep the funding milestones separate
Haggard’s remote investment round was undisclosed. Separately, in June 2020, she won the top prize—$140,000—at Seattle Angel Conference XVII. The award was not the amount of the remote round.
GeekWire also reported investors in Tribute included Tapas Capital, 5H Values Capital (Geraldine Chin Moody and James Chin Moody), and Barry Russell, then Qumulo’s senior vice president of cloud. These details describe the company’s financing context as reported in 2020, not a complete account of its funding history.
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Does virtual pitching reduce bias for women founders generally?
Haggard’s experience is a useful example of how remote meetings can affect the setting of a fundraising conversation, but it cannot answer whether online pitching reduces discrimination more broadly. Other evidence from the pandemic period points to a more complicated picture.
Experimental findings varied by context
In “Discrimination in the Venture Capital Industry: Evidence from Field Experiments,” researcher Yanbo Zhang reported that investor responses varied with founder identity and startup circumstances. The paper’s summary says investors implicitly discriminated against female and Asian founders when evaluating attractive startups, while favoring them when evaluating struggling startups. It also reports a temporary increase in discrimination against Asian founders during the COVID-19 outbreak that began to fade after April 2020.
Those experimental results do not test pregnancy, Haggard’s experience, or whether video meetings change gender bias. They show why a single founder’s account should not be treated as a general causal finding.
An investor saw no immediate new tailwind
In an August 2020 TechCrunch interview, Anu Duggal, founding partner of Female Founders Fund, said she was investing without meeting founders in person. Asked whether the changed environment was creating new tailwinds for female founders, she replied, “I wouldn’t say we’re seeing new tailwinds yet,” while saying there was reason to be optimistic.
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Contemporaneous figures showed unequal access
David Hall, managing partner of Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, gave a prepared statement for a 2020 U.S. Senate hearing. Citing NVCA and PitchBook for the geographic figures, he said about $133 billion in U.S. venture capital went to American startups in 2019 and about 73% went to California, New York, and Massachusetts. His statement also said less than 10% went to women-led startups and less than 1% to Black or African American founders, pointing to outside references for those demographic claims.
These are figures Hall cited in 2020 about 2019 funding, not current statistics or independently verified estimates from the hearing record. They provide context for the access concerns Haggard raised, but do not measure the effect of remote fundraising.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What the account can—and cannot—tell founders
For Haggard, remote meetings removed travel and made it possible to build trusted investor relationships by video. She also experienced pregnancy as less present in the conversation. The available account does not establish whether remote fundraising caused a better result, changed investor decisions, or would produce the same experience for another founder.
It also does not establish Tribute’s present-day status, features, or customers. The report is a dated profile of a founder’s experience in 2020, not a current company update or a controlled comparison of online and in-person fundraising.
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