The Disruption Lab

Kevin McGinnis

Step into the world of innovation with The Disruption Lab live podcast, where groundbreaking ideas and strategic insights come to life. Hosted by Kevin McGinnis and filmed in front of a live studio audience at Keystone Sessions, each episode brings you face-to-face with the visionaries reshaping industries and pioneering new paths in entrepreneurship. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, innovator, or professional eager to fuel your growth and unlock strategic collaboration, The Disruption Lab delivers the tools, stories, and wisdom from top industry disruptors and founders. Join us as we explore the minds of industry leaders to inspire and equip the next wave of disruptors.

  1. 6d ago

    Ideas Are Cheap; This Is What Actually Builds a City

    Jeff spent fifteen years inside one of America's most celebrated startup ecosystems. Then he left Austin for Kansas City — to run a program handing out $20,000 grants. On paper, a step back. In practice, a bet on a different way of building. In this live taping of The Disruption Lab, host Kevin McGinnis sits down with the new steward of Digital Sandbox KC — the 13-year-old program that's turned early proof-of-concept funding into more than $243 million in follow-on capital. They trace an unlikely path: a 4,500-mile charity bike ride from Texas to Alaska, building cancer-care software at Epic, founding companies of his own, and arriving at a conviction that the coasts don't own the blueprint for innovation. The conversation moves from the culture of how cities build, to what actually separates fundable founders from everyone else, to why deep domain expertise is quietly overtaking raw technical skill in the age of AI. It's a clear-eyed look at community, capital, and the systems that decide whose ideas get built — and whose don't. Society. Business. Technology. One founder rethinking where the next wave of companies gets made.

    44 min

  2. Jun 5

    Doing Well by Doing Good: The Lesson That Took 15 Years to Land

    This is a different kind of episode. Every solo I've done has been about a framework — a thesis, a system, an argument. This one is about a person. Dan Hesse was my CEO at Sprint and became my mentor. He taught me that business and community are not separate things. I understood it as a value. It took me fifteen years to understand it as a design principle. This is the story of what I watched Dan build, what happened when it was taken away, and how losing it shaped everything I'm building now — from Keystone to the Social Venture Studio. The written version lives in my Field Note on Substack. https://substack.com/@kevinmcginnis101/note/p-199455241?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=539sc6

    11 min

  3. May 29

    The Kids Who Never Got to Practice: How VR Is Teaching Social Skills Schools Forgot to Teach

    For decades, social skills training in schools meant one thing: a teacher singling out a student in front of their peers to practice something they don't yet know how to do. Dr. Amber Rowland spent over a decade building a better answer. VOISS — a virtual reality and simulation platform developed at the University of Kansas — gives students with autism and social-emotional learning needs a private, low-stakes space to practice the skills that determine whether they'll get a job, keep a relationship, and navigate the world. No audience. No humiliation. Just repetition, confidence, and data. In this episode, host Kevin McGinnis sits down with Dr. Rowland and co-founder Paul Epp to explore what happens when a decade of peer-reviewed research collides with the brutal realities of commercialization — ed-tech procurement cycles, university IP licensing, the race against a ticking tech-transfer clock, and the challenge of turning $11-in-savings-per-dollar outcomes into a business that can actually scale. This is a conversation about dignity, systems change, and what it really takes to get life-changing research out of the lab and into the hands of the kids who need it most.

    46 min

  4. May 22

    The Hidden Influencers: What Analysts Know, What AI Just Changed, and What It Really Costs to Build Something Worth Stepping Away From

    Andrew Hsu spent more than a decade building Spotlight, a market intelligence and analyst relations firm that helped some of the most recognized names in enterprise technology figure out how to be understood, not just seen, in the markets they were trying to shape. But this conversation isn't about the company. It's about the systems behind the company: the hidden infrastructure of industry analysts who quietly dictate which technologies win, how AI is rewriting the rules of market influence in real time, and what it costs, personally and strategically, to build something worth stepping away from. Andrew and host Kevin McGinnis dig into why the most dangerous thing a founder can do is get distracted, what the correlation between your Glassdoor score and your stock price tells us about leadership, and why the 50-year-old version of Andrew understands something the 32-year-old version refused to believe: that listening is a strategy, not a weakness. This episode is for founders, operators, and anyone who has ever wondered who actually shapes what the market believes and whether that system is about to change forever.

    40 min

  5. May 15

    The Corporate Antibody: How Big Companies Kill Innovation (And What Actually Works)

    Every Fortune 500 company says they want to work with startups. Almost none of them actually can. The problem isn't intention. It's infrastructure. When a corporation scales, it builds immune systems—legal, compliance, IT, procurement—designed to protect the core business. Those same systems treat startups like viruses. A startup can build a prototype in the time it takes a corporation to schedule the meeting to discuss building one. The corporate entry point is procurement. The startup's frame is survival. The risk profiles don't align. The cadences don't match. And after 25 years of watching this pattern repeat, the infrastructure to make it work simply doesn't exist. Until now. In this episode, Kevin McGinnis sits down with a corporate innovation veteran who spent years inside Sprint driving open innovation strategy, building accelerator programs, and watching promising startup relationships die in legal review. But more importantly: he's spent the last several years designing the actual infrastructure that makes corporate-startup alignment work at scale. He reveals why "sponsored happy hours" and "innovation challenges" fail. Why the entry point matters more than the intention. And why one structural change—a reverse pitch, where corporations bring real problems instead of startups pitching solutions—completely transforms engagement from transactional to transformational. This is systems design thinking applied to one of the region's biggest untapped opportunities: corporations and startups learning to work together.

    12 min

  6. May 8

    The Quiet Revolution: Why Animal Health Is America's Overlooked Superpower

    Most people don't realize that the food on their table and the medicine keeping their pets alive flow through a system few understand. Kim Young, President of KC Animal Health Corridor, has spent 15 years at the center of that system building Kansas City's Animal Health Corridor into a $90 billion global industry hub while the rest of America wasn't looking. Animal health isn't about farmers or veterinarians. It's about infrastructure, capital allocation, regulatory strategy, and how disruption actually spreads through systems that have existed for over a century. It's about innovation that touches AI, biotech, satellite technology, and protein security—all while competing against a region obsessed with whatever's shiny and new. In this episode, Kim reveals why the most sophisticated biotech companies in America are clustering in Kansas City—not Silicon Valley. She explains the consolidation reshaping the industry, the venture capital blind spot that's leaving early-stage founders underfunded, and why the next generation of talent doesn't want to work in animal health because no one's told them it exists. But more importantly: she makes the case for why Kansas City's greatest economic advantage isn't what we're chasing—it's what we're taking for granted.

    1h 4m

  7. May 4

    The Growth That Counts

    Why high-growth entrepreneurship is a different kind of economic infrastructure — and why most regions don’t have a strategy for it. I recently published an essay arguing that every startup is a headquarters. The data behind that claim is compelling — young firms create virtually all net new jobs, innovation-economy wages run double the national median, and every one of those jobs generates five more in the surrounding community. But data doesn’t tell you what the distinction between high-growth and small business entrepreneurship actually feels like from inside an ecosystem. This episode goes deeper into the pattern I keep seeing: we talk about entrepreneurship as one thing, fund it as one thing, and measure it as one thing. It isn’t. And until we design for the difference, we’ll keep underbuilding the part that drives regional economies.

    18 min

  8. Apr 24

    They Were Wrong by 50% Every Time — Inside the Invisible Crisis Running America's Food Supply Chain

    Across agriculture, mining, and construction, billion-dollar supply chains still run on a phone call and a guess. Someone walks outside, eyeballs a pile of feed, and tells the truck dispatcher what they think is left. They're wrong by 30 to 50 percent — and that error ripples into spoiled inventory, empty feedlots, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses. Warren Wang and his co-founder Cole built Rebulk to fix that. Using lidar, computer vision, and edge-connected hardware, they're giving operators real-time inventory visibility for bulk materials that have never fit inside a barcode or a box. Their first proof of concept? Packing peanuts from Office Depot dumped on the ground. In this episode, host Kevin McGinnis sits down with Warren to trace the arc from a failed social media transcription startup to a Y Combinator-backed company with Cargill as a pilot customer — all while raising their pre-seed entirely from Kansas City investors. Warren opens up about the identity crisis that nearly derailed the pivot, what it took to build trust inside a tech-skeptical industry, and why he and Cole chose to come back to the Midwest instead of staying in San Francisco. Recorded on the same day Warren became a U.S. citizen, this conversation is about more than supply chain software. It's about conviction, belonging, and building something generational.

    37 min
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5
out of 5
7 Ratings

About

Step into the world of innovation with The Disruption Lab live podcast, where groundbreaking ideas and strategic insights come to life. Hosted by Kevin McGinnis and filmed in front of a live studio audience at Keystone Sessions, each episode brings you face-to-face with the visionaries reshaping industries and pioneering new paths in entrepreneurship. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, innovator, or professional eager to fuel your growth and unlock strategic collaboration, The Disruption Lab delivers the tools, stories, and wisdom from top industry disruptors and founders. Join us as we explore the minds of industry leaders to inspire and equip the next wave of disruptors.

Information

  • Creator
    Kevin McGinnis
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    67
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2024 All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    The Disruption Lab

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