Of Coral and Currents: From the Dominant System to What's Emergent

FEATURE POST BY

Jennifer Brandel

CEO, Hearken Media

Coralus Member & Founder of The Interstitium

Looking back at my inbox, I feel a blush of shame: messages from Coralus (formerly SheEO) dating back to 2016, unopened, unseen. Why didn’t I follow the scent sooner? I can speculate—wrong season, too many other rhythms pulling me—but instead, I choose to trust timing. Because when I finally did step into Coralus, I didn’t encounter a fledgling organization, but a growing, living ecosystem.

For context: I’m a serial entrepreneur, systems shifter, and co-founder of Zebras Unite, a movement built in contrast to the monoculture myth of the “unicorn”. I’ve spent the past decade trying to answer the question: what might business look like if it were in right relationship with life?

Coralus feels like a long-lost sister—maybe even a fraternal twin—asking the same question in a different key. What we’ve both discovered is that you can’t just swap out metrics. You have to swap out metaphors. And you can’t just graft a new goal onto an old culture, you need to start with the seeds of something else entirely. Enter: the Two Loops Model of Systems Change from the Berkana Institute. It’s the map I carry in my back pocket, and Coralus lives at its edge—where the dominant loop of extractive capitalism is composting, and something tender and luminous is taking root.

The current dominant loop the Western world is stuck in—patriarchal, transactional, addicted to growth—is fraying. We see its unravelling in every alarming headline. But what the headlines don’t show is the other loop: the one Coralus has been weaving quietly for a decade. This emergent system isn’t powered by exits and ego; it flows through relationship, reciprocity, and inner alignment.

Where old systems hoard capital, Coralus circulates it. Where legacy structures extract, Coralus nourishes. Where startups seek to scale up, Coralus roots and scales deep.

I was welcomed as an outside observer into the Coralus universe in June 2025, spending two days digesting the past 10 years of this experiment with founder Vicki Saunders, Venture guide, MJ Ryan and portfolio CEOs Erin Millar and Chenny Xia.

This is perhaps the only group where I would be welcomed to bring my tarot deck and copy of the Thanksgiving Address as well as the requisite sharpies, sticky notes, and questions about performance and product-market-fit. I felt like I could just be my full self here and not bifurcate into the “professional” version and the me longing to be seen just as I am. It’s a remarkable feeling I can only describe as wholeness.

And that recognition of inseparability—the acknowledgement that we are in an always evolving, interdependent relationship with the worlds within ourselves and all other life is both the radical, and once-you-think-about-it obvious, groundtruth that Coralus is built upon.

As our two days unfolded between deep downloads on the couch and snacking, I couldn’t resist the urge to notate the variety of ways that Coralus’ model, process, and values bucks the startup funding world norms.

Like most startup founders, I’ve been swimming upstream in the traditional column, against most odds in getting a company to be profitable and hit the 10 year mark. But it’s cold comfort: these norms have led to most companies failing, and created massive wasted potential and crushed dreams in the process.

How many ideas and companies that tanked in the dominant loop’s structure could have thrived in the Coralus environment? What state could my company (and myself) be in had I joined this community earlier? Those thought experiments are like being served a spicy combo platter of rage, grief, and sadness. I hold on to the hope and belief that it simply can’t continue to be this way for those coming up behind me.

The Currents and Currencies of Coralus

Try to pin down Coralus as a fund or accelerator, and it wriggles free. It’s more of a magnetic field than a model—an ecosystem where ventures, activators, and ideas cross-pollinate. In this living meshwork, value isn’t fixed but flows.

Capital here is not solely money; It is trust in motion, made concrete in the formats of energy, encouragement, and a well-timed introduction. Creativity and reciprocity lives in every member, sparked by questions, experiments, and sharing one another’s dreams. And care is not an afterthought. It’s the sacred infrastructure.

There’s a version of me (just a few years before this current model) that would have had to wave my hands a bit using the kind of language above, to show that “hey, I get this sounds a little woo woo” to the kind of folks I’m not sure “get it.” But what I love about Coralus, and Vicki in particular, is the full-throated embrace of the power of care, and dreaming, and supporting one another with utmost sincerity. It’s what we all long for, so why be embarrassed to just say what’s bold and true?

This has been a refrain from other founders I met, like Erin Millar, Chenny Xia, or Rebecca Percasky and Kate Bezar. When they joined Coralus, they didn’t just get a cheque and some hours with successful advisors to guide their businesses. They stepped into a community that can see the power and potential the market has been blind to, uphold their core beliefs, and hold them through uncertainty. And to those acculturated to the broken systems, that felt … strange, verging on uncomfortable.

For Chenny, “It was disorienting at first. To be seen not just for my outputs, but my integrity. Coralus is the only space where my inner work is part of my business model.”

In Erin’s words, “Everyone told me to sell. To take the exit and be done. But something in me refused to collapse into the logic of burnout. Coralus gave me the field to metabolize my exhaustion and dream again.”

When Erin Millar joined Coralus, she was fresh from years of relentless entrepreneurial survivalism in a famously impossible sector: journalism. Leading The Discourse and founding Indiegraf, a networked media company supporting independent news publishers, she’d spent more than a decade proving new models in an environment that leans toward rejecting innovation. Through various fundraising rounds and near-death bank balances, Coralus supported Erin to retain control of her company and her integrity.

Through consistent, creative acts of care, Coralus also made possible a much bigger act of imagination—Erin helped reshape the Canadian news ecosystem. Amid chaos around the Online News Act and Google’s $100 million distribution deal, she founded a digital news media company reimagining the community newspaper. She was emboldened to lead a ragtag coalition of indie publishers, Indigenous broadcasters, and nonprofit media organizations to build an alternative, transparent proposal for the distribution of a massive amount of capital to Canadian news media organizations. What started as an outside chance and a symbolic protest became a success story; this fledgling organization was awarded the task of setting up and administering a half-billion-dollar fund—an unprecedented shift in power. Through tears, attacks, legal nightmares, and funding delays, Erin kept returning to one thing: “How do we do this differently?” Coralus gave her a dependable homebase for that question, and she’s now midwifing a more just, transparent, and community-rooted future for journalism in Canada.

When Chenny Xia founded Gotcare, she entered the homecare sector with a steely resolve to make dignity non-negotiable. As the daughter of a single mother devalued by that very system, Chenny’s mission was simple but radical: pay living wages, center people, and reimagine care as relationship rather than transaction.

What began as her answer to the basic injustice of undervalued caregivers—largely women and immigrants—has become one of Canada’s fastest-growing social impact startups. Today, Gotcare serves over 100 remote communities, growing from $100K annual recurring revenue to over $4M, not by chasing disruption, but by designing with reciprocity. Clients and caregivers are matched with intention. Technology is used to restore relationships, not replace people and human connection. Care is the product and livelihood is the outcome.

Beneath that structural transformation is Chenny’s own healing: the willingness to interrogate her family’s story, metabolize generational pain, and move through it with clarity and courage. Coralus didn’t just fund Gotcare—they created containers where inner and outer change could evolve together.

When Rebecca Percasky and Kate Bezar cofounded Better Packaging Co., they weren’t trying to start a revolution; they were just trying to do things better. What began with mutual respect and morning coffees quickly turned into a shared mission to radically reduce the impact of e-commerce packaging.

Rebecca, who came from the tech side of online retail, had seen the scale of the problem; every item was shipped wrapped in layers of virgin plastic, bubble wrap, and polystyrene.

The scale of waste was staggering. It didn’t sit right with either of them. So they started with a question: What if packaging could be part of the solution – not the problem? That question led them to create certified home compostable courier mailers, and it wasn’t long before their ‘Real Dirt Bags’ went viral. Demand exploded. Supply couldn’t keep up. That’s when Coralus entered the story.

Becoming a Coralus Venture brought more than capital – it brought courage. As Kate puts it, “We were voted in by this extraordinary community of women which gave us the confidence to say, yes, we belong here.” Funding gave them the breathing room to scale, and the Coralus community gave them something even more vital: PR support, customer connections, legal advice, storytelling coaching – and sisterhood. Since then, Becs and Kate have never stopped innovating. In 2021, Better Packaging launched its most ambitious project yet: POLLAST!C, a range of packaging made entirely from recycled Ocean Bound Plastic. Not only does the POLLAST!C Project prevent plastic from entering the ocean, it creates jobs and raises living standards in some of the world’s most polluted coastal communities.

Their mission today is as bold as it is urgent: to use packaging to combat pollution, poverty, and climate change. Their vision? A world where plastic doesn’t pollute our oceans because it’s too valuable to waste, always repurposed and kept in the loop. It’s an audacious goal, but companies like Australia Post, Knix, Quiksilver, and Carrefour are already on board. And so is Coralus.

The Currents and Currencies of Coralus

When I asked Vicki what kind of founders she’s been looking for and attracting, she has a ready answer of seven criteria that’s born from her career plus the ten years cultivating Coralus.

Recognized as a leader in ecosystem
Consistently been doing inner / outer work
Pivoting and learning as you go
Identifying open doors
Moving capital to others in ecosystem and not keeping it all
Here to transform a system
Holistic worldview / strategy
Venture readiness
Ownership control

Living Data, Living Proof

These examples of visionaries fitting this pattern, and their companies are just a few case studies for how Coralus has already unlocked immense, critically needed impact. So let’s talk numbers, because Coralus has them: 268 ventures funded across five countries. A 95% repayment rate on 0% interest loans. Over the past 10 years, 7,000 activators have put capital into flow.

But to understand Coralus, we have to jailbreak our psyches from what author and activist Rebecca Solnit calls “the tyranny of the quantifiable” – in which, “what can be measured almost always takes precedence over what cannot: private profit over public good; speed and efficiency over enjoyment and quality; the utilitarian over the mysteries and meanings that are of greater use to our survival and to more than our survival, to lives that have some purpose and value that survive beyond us to make a civilization worth having.”

With that lens, the most powerful metrics for Coralus are essentially unmeasurable: founders who don’t burn out because they’re tended to; ideas that migrate across borders through a shared conversation; a culture where failure isn’t waste but rich compost.

Transformation is not a byproduct here—it is the product. Coralus has capitalized on an insight that no other fund or incubator dares: inner work as a lever for outer change. Venture development guides like MJ Ryan don’t just coach strategy. They tend to soulsoil. They help leaders confront the inner blocks that keep them from becoming the stewards that their companies—and this moment of the sixth great extinction—require.

What a massive failure of imagination the traditional models have had—thinking success only comes down to balance sheets run by capable operators with an offering at the right place at the right time. There is an abundance of alchemical potential waiting, ready to be unleashed with the ancient, aligned worldview Coralus embodies, paired with enough tenacity.

The Portal Is Open

Coralus isn’t the future. It’s the now that the future is asking us to notice. This portal, held open by radical generosity and rigorous care is a post-capitalist playground where business becomes a site of healing.

Vicki Saunders asked at our gathering, “What if we added a zero? What if there were 2,000 Coralus ventures instead of 200?”

That question isn’t rhetorical. It’s an invitation.

You may be a founder searching for your people. You may be a funder longing to trust your intuition again. You may be someone who simply knows in your bones that there has to be another way and wants to throw some weight behind something worthy.

Here it is. It’s called Coralus. And it’s already happening. Are you IN? I am.