A special live guest workshop hosted inside Coral: “Becoming World-Class Connectors,” led by Jon Moorehart of Praxis. Some people collect contacts; a rare few build genuine connection — the kind that opens doors, moves ideas across the world, and turns a room of strangers into a community. This hands-on session was about becoming the second kind of person.

About the guest: Jon Moorehart is a Partner at Praxis, where he leads Experiences & Partnerships and has spent over a decade supporting venture-building ecosystems around the globe. He built and led Praxis Academy, a program that has reached hundreds of young entrepreneurs from more than 160 universities across 20 countries. Before Praxis he spent seven years at a Fortune 100 company, where he helped launch one new venture and revive another as part of a turnaround. He’s a founding board member of 100cameras, a nonprofit that empowers youth to create change through photography, has mentored startup incubators, and has taught entrepreneurship at The King’s College in New York. Praxis itself is a New York–based venture-building organization built around “redemptive entrepreneurship,” with accelerators, fellowships, and a global community of values-driven founders and investors.

Coral brings in outside experts for live, hands-on workshops like this one, alongside its regular member corners.

In the session, Jon reframed the poet Mary Oliver’s “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” as instructions for connecting. A few of the highlights: the “connection bank,” where trust is built from character (integrity + intent) and competence (capabilities + results); the shifts from scarcity to abundance, extraction to generosity, and self to others; attention as “the rarest and purest form of generosity”; the difference between shallow “networking” questions and deeper “relating” ones — what’s taking up your headspace, what brought you here, a surprise joy or grief you’ve had lately, what you’ve been thinking about that has nothing to do with work; storytelling as the strongest connection between people; and a practical toolkit for follow-through — keep simple records, close loops even when the answer is no, make time to think about where you can add value, honor people with double opt-in introductions, and make it easy with a “self-contained forwardable email.”

Inside CORAL shares recaps of sessions and events from a private, application-only community for people who work for themselves — founders, operators, and creators. Not a member yet? Apply to join at coral.vip.

A show-and-tell session from Coral's Tech & AI Corner, where members walked through the AI systems they're actually building right now — and traded honest notes on what's working and what isn't.

A few of the builds that came up: an autonomous setup that checks a creator's social channels every morning and emails a performance report each week; using AI to stand up a nonprofit pitch website in about twenty minutes, and to generate newsletter concepts and a full brand guide from nothing but a few color and type preferences; a workflow for relaunching a media-heavy personal site using “interactive artifacts” — temporary, self-updating checklists and previews that keep a long build on track; and a deep dive into a months-in-the-making custom coaching platform that handles payments, contracts, and goal tracking, drafts pre-session briefs from intake forms, pulls meeting transcripts automatically, and even generates an “integrity score” that grades client follow-through and nudges the coach on their own habits.

The group also swapped practical tactics: which AI models to reach for when you want speed versus deeper reasoning, how to keep an always-on agent actually running, a fast pipeline for turning a recorded call into ready-to-post “best quote” clips, and generating usable contracts without paid tools. It closed with the group mapping out future formats — “agent deep dives” to break down the different kinds of agents, and hands-on “labs” where everyone builds one together, live.

Inside CORAL shares anonymized recaps of sessions from a private, application-only community for people who work for themselves — founders, operators, and creators. Not a member yet? Apply to join at coral.vip.

A summary of a recent Executive Coach Corner session with a different format: one member volunteered for the hot seat, coaching the group live while everyone observed and then delivered structured feedback. First comes a genuinely useful framework for giving feedback that sticks — ask permission, align it to the person's vision, be specific, keep it subjective ("here's how it occurred to me"), invite curiosity so it becomes a dialogue, offer a suggestion, and land on a clear agreement (without that last step, nothing actually changes). Then the craft lessons, drawn from the live coaching: why "how are you feeling?" as an opener can anchor people in their feelings instead of the work ("what are we here to do — let's go"); how to push past "where are you at?" to "what would clarity look like — get clear right now," then mine whatever resistance shows up; and why leading questions like "could both be true?" are small foxes that quietly cost you respect, so stay in real curiosity. It closes on a simple habit that compounds: watch your own game tape. Inside CORAL shares summaries of the live sessions our members get every week. CORAL is a private, application-only community for people who work for themselves — founders, operators, and creators. Not a member yet? Apply to join at coral.vip.