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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
