The Disruption Lab

Kansas City firms helped design 27 of 30 NFL stadiums, every 2026 World Cup venue and nearly a quarter of the world’s power systems. So why is KC’s biggest industry still one of its best-kept secrets? Ashley McDonald, who leads KC Global Design at KCADC, joins Kevin in front of a live audience. They cover how 1,400 architecture and engineering firms made Kansas City a global center for design and...

Kansas City spent years preparing to welcome the world for the World Cup. Jessica Hong arrived as chief curator of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in the middle of it and noticed something the planning missed: the world was already here. The proof ran from Polish Hill to a Nelson-Atkins founded on Chinese art. Her answer was an exhibition of 16 local artists from nine countries, with no socc...

In 1974, Iowa farmers averaged 125 bushels of corn an acre and cleared about $80 on it. Fifty years later, yields are up 60%, and the return is $20. Jason Tatge has spent his career chasing that gap. His grandfather was a farmer who told him never to become one. Jason became a commodity trader instead, then built two ag tech companies to successful exits. One of them, Farmobile, put a box on tract...

When a child gets a life-altering diagnosis, the hospital has a bed waiting. For the parent who drove through the night from Dodge City or Joplin, or got put on a plane with an hour’s notice, there is no bed anywhere in the healthcare system. That is the gap Ronald McDonald House fills, and in Kansas City it still isn’t big enough: last year it had to turn families away nearly 800 times. Tami Gree...

For ten years, Paige Beltowski traveled with her sewing machines in her checked bags. She built costumes for Star Wars, Marvel, 1923, and Super Bowl halftime shows. Almost none of that work is visible. Behind every credit roll, live broadcast, and stadium tour are hundreds of craftspeople, and nearly all of that industry runs through Los Angeles and New York. So why did she just open a storefront...

What happens when a city's entrepreneurs aren't excluded from the economy, just invisible to it? On this episode of The Disruption Lab, recorded live in front of a studio audience, host Kevin McGinnis sits down with Suzanne Gunn. She is a former oncology nurse, med spa owner, couture designer, founder of AfroKC, and co-founder of a planned Fashion and Beauty Innovation Campus in Kansas City. Every...

Troost Avenue is Kansas City's most infamous boundary — a redlining border named for a man who enslaved six people, and the same line congressional maps are still drawn along today. Chris Goode built Ruby Jean's Juicery, now a national brand carried in over 160 Whole Foods stores, out of a promise he made at 14, watching his grandmother die of type 2 diabetes. Eleven years later, that promise has...

In March 2020, John Pryor was standing in a furniture studio he'd just spent a year renovating, watching his business teeter. He launched a face-mask line before he knew how to sew, and sold 15,000 masks in eight weeks. Then the real story walked through his door: dozens of refugee and immigrant stitchers from Burma and Afghanistan, carrying generational craft skills the labor market had never lea...

Infrastructure without application strategy is just real estate with electricity. Sprint launched America’s first 4G network — and still lost the 4G era to the translators. Having the infrastructure first is not the same as capturing the era. KC now has $11B+ of announced hyperscale investment. The economic return depends on the translation: connecting the compute to the compute-hungry industries...

Kansas City is the 33rd-largest metro area in America. It was competing against host cities ranked in the top fifteen nationally and it won anyway. Then FIFA told them they had redefined what a host city does. Cliff Illig, co-founder of Cerner and majority owner of Sporting Kansas City, explains how a decade of deliberate infrastructure investment, not luck, turned Kansas City into a World Cup hos...

Every era of economic growth organized around a connectivity infrastructure — water, rail, air, compute. The cities at the nodes captured generational value. Data centers are the ports of the AI economy. And in Kansas City, the infrastructure is not arriving — it has already landed ($11B+ announced from Google alone, Meta operating, the KC Star press building becoming a 100MW AI facility). The que...

Reda came to Kansas City from Egypt with almost no English and a fear of heights and took a roofing job anyway. Elvis, a Nigerian immigrant and former R&D chemist, walked away from a corporate career to join him. Together they built what is now Amina Design Build (formerly RK Contractors), a construction company where 81% of the workforce is immigrants, refugees, and second-chance citizens and...

Montré Moore spent years managing a $14 million prestige cosmetics department at Neiman Marcus watching brand founders get shut out by red tape, gatekeeping, and unspoken rules about who gets shelf space. Then a night out in downtown LA, searching for a single hair product she couldn't find within 45 minutes of a major metro area, became the moment that changed everything. That search became AMP B...

Venture capital loves to talk about returns, but what happens when the returns stop coming? Johnny, a venture investor who has deployed capital inside a $20 billion corporate fund, a top-quartile independent fund, and now a first-time fund backed by a $500 million Kansas City real estate platform, has seen the industry from every angle. And he's not afraid to say the quiet part out loud: many fund...

Rosana grew up in Kansas City's Lykins neighborhood, where she experienced housing insecurity as a single mother working double shifts to keep her kids afloat. Today, she's going back to that same neighborhood, this time to build on it. Through her nonprofit Embrace Your Shine and its development arm, Micro Living Midwest, she's converting shipping containers into affordable housing for young adul...

The difference between having standards and settling. Ecosystem building looks like collaboration from the outside everyone aligned, everyone winning together. This episode is about the part nobody discusses.

Trina spent nearly two decades as a foster care social worker, then an attorney, watching families get "finalized" by the court system and then abandoned to figure out co-parenting alone. So she built BEH2O: an operating system for divorced families, borrowed straight from entrepreneurship frameworks like EOS. Then she went further, training an AI on her own decision-making process to build BeAlig...

There's a chemical in nearly every building, car, and grocery store in America and the world just agreed to phase it out. On this episode of The Disruption Lab, host Kevin McGinnis sits down with Tony and Casey from EARTH, an NSF Engineering Research Center led by the University of Kansas, to unpack the massive, mostly invisible transition happening in refrigerants and cooling technology. They dig...

Courtney hears 200 domestic violence cases a day. She has six months to work with, structurally, the maximum sentence her municipal court can impose, and she's spent over a decade building intervention programs, wellness courts, and a first-of-its-kind Fathers for Change program inside that constraint. Then she co-founded a startup with a data scientist. Thaddeus built data systems at Amazon, Cern...

Brandon has survived 12 strokes. Lindsay has been his care partner for 15 years. Together, they're the founders of Beyond This — a company that didn't exist 90 days ago and is already reshaping how the healthcare system handles disability, intimacy, and relationships. In this episode of the Social Venture Studio Founder series, Kevin McGinnis talks with Brandon and Lindsay about losing and rebuild...

After building some of advertising's most iconic campaigns — Sonic's "two guys," Southwest's "Now Free to Move" — Brian walked away from agency life to become the client. Eleven years later, he's still there, having built Garmin's 110-person in-house creative team from the ground up inside a famously engineering-led company. This conversation goes past the campaign highlight reel into the real ten...

Nadia trained in haute couture at the Paris American Academy, the kind of centuries-old, precision-driven craftsmanship the fashion world has run on for generations. Then she came home and started growing textiles out of algae and kombucha. On this episode of The Disruption Lab, host Kevin McGinnis talks with the founder of Biospoke about the unlikely path from traditional tailoring to biomaterial...

Why do the most promising innovation programs inside big companies keep getting killed — even when they're working? Host Kevin McGinnis shares the story of Hack Friday, a hackathon program he helped build inside Sprint that grew in popularity month after month, only to be shut down for not producing a "shippable" solution fast enough. In this solo episode, Kevin argues that story isn't unique — it...

Most people hear "Kansas City" and think warehouses and highways. That's about 10% of the real story. In this episode, Kevin sits down with Chris Gutierrez, President of KC SmartPort, who has spent 23 years building the case for why Kansas City is one of the most strategically positioned regions in North America — five Class I railroads, all four modes of freight transportation, and the only singl...

Everyone keeps saying nuclear is "having a moment." But Kevin McGinnis has heard that before — and this time, the pressure isn't coming from where you'd expect. In this live taping of The Disruption Lab, Kevin sits down with Jason Pottorff of Deep Fission, the company drilling reactors a mile underground outside Parsons, Kansas, and Dr. Amir Bahadori, who rebuilt Kansas State's nuclear engineering...