Coral joined the team in 2022 to help tell the stories of Madrona and its portfolio companies.

Journey to Madrona

Coral covered business news in the Seattle area for seven years. At the Seattle Times, Coral covered the Port of Seattle, T-Mobile, and various other business news topics. As a Business Reporter who covered breaking news on the weekends, Coral was part of the team to receive a Pulitzer Prize for the Seattle Times’s coverage of the tragic Oso landslide that struck Saturday, March 22, 2014. At the Puget Sound Business Journal, Coral covered health care and retail, which included writing about companies like Starbucks, Nordstrom, Costco, Juno, and Seattle Genetics, as well as the work coming out of the Fred Hutch and the University of Washington. Coral partnered with another reporter on a year-long project to document the cost of homelessness in Seattle, receiving a Sigma Delta Chi award from the Society of Professional Journalism for that coverage.

Lessons learned

Telling your story can be very difficult but going through the process of putting it into words provides so much clarity. Every founder — everyone in a company, really — should be able to tell the founding story and the problem a company is solving in a way everyone — even the non-technical —can understand.

When she’s not in the office…

As an Alaskan who grew up in a small fishing village in Southeast Alaska, being on the water is in Coral’s blood. You can often find her taking advantage of the area’s quick access to the Puget Sound, the coast, Lake Union and Lake Washington to jump in her kayak, head out on the boat to go crabbing, or driving to Westport to go clamming during an opening. Coral also loves camping, hiking, and bouldering.

Noteworthy

Coral graduated from Western Washington University with a bachelor’s in journalism in 2009. In 2013, she graduated from Columbia University with a master’s in journalism. Coral is most proud of her time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras.