The Disruption Lab

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 question is design, not attraction. The smartest regions solve the problems the infrastructure creates — and export the solutions.

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 where retention sits at 96%, an almost unheard-of number in the industry.
In this episode of the Social Venture Studio Founder Series, Reda and Elvis unpack the difference between "giving access" and actually powering people: interest-free car loans, same-day emergency support, English lessons on the clock, and a wage ladder that's taken workers from $14.84 to $25 an hour. They also dig into Reda's next invention: a construction material made from recycled plastic, and what it means to build a company on trust instead of contracts, then have to learn contracts anyway.

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 Beauty, a platform working to democratize retail access for underrepresented beauty founders. What started as a marketplace and evolved into something more fundamental: a data and technology company that tells brands exactly what "retail-ready" means, and gets them there.
In this conversation, Montré breaks down what it actually costs to launch a beauty brand, why chemical safety is a structural issue and not a marketing choice, the pivot that 6X'd AMP's revenue, and why she chose Kansas City, not LA, as the next chapter of AMP's growth. This is a story about access, infrastructure, and what it takes to change who gets to be seen on the 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 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 vintages aren't returning capital to their investors, and "you can't eat IRR."
In this conversation, Johnny breaks down why he's betting on pre-seed startups instead of chasing the mega-rounds making headlines, how AI is compressing the cost and time it takes to build a company, and why he thinks the venture industry's own structure: more funds, more capital, more competition, may be working against it. He also gets candid about what founders get wrong when raising money, why rejection from an investor is rarely personal, and why "not all money is good money."
This episode blends hard-won portfolio strategy with a bigger question about what's broken in how startups get funded and what a more grounded, founder-first model could look like, built not from Silicon Valley, but from Kansas City.

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 adults, those couch-surfing, living in cars, or in storage units while working or in school facing "hidden homelessness". In this conversation, she opens up about blowing up her finances as a day trader, the accidental path into real estate development, securing project-based vouchers with the Housing Authority of Kansas City, and why she's building toward 500 homes in the next decade. It's a conversation about lived experience becoming infrastructure and what it takes to convince a system built for scale to make room for community.

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 BeAligned Pro.
This conversation is about more than a startup. It's about funding a nonprofit through years of legal-practice debt, getting turned down by the same accelerator three times before getting in, and the moment a dying father and a grieving mother finally saw each other in her office because the system gave them no other way to.

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 into why 90% of refrigerants leak into the atmosphere, why the industry is racing toward a 2029 supply cliff, and why captured refrigerant has become one of the most smuggled substances in the country. Along the way, Tony and Casey explain how a consortium of universities and industry giants like Chemours, Carrier, and Trane are working to close the gap between lab discovery and market impact, and what it will actually cost consumers when their AC breaks down.
It's a conversation about climate policy, supply chains, and innovation infrastructure hiding in plain sight.

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, Cerner, and CVS Health before joining Courtney to build MAGIS: a platform combining speech recognition, AI analysis, outcome tracking, and grant management for courts. In this episode of The Disruption Lab, part of the Social Venture Studio Founder Series, Kevin McGinnis talks with Courtney and Thaddeus about what it takes to build technology inside one of the most cautious, high-stakes systems in the country: the courts. They dig into racial bias in AI risk-assessment tools, what it actually means to sell software to a judge, and what changes for the person standing in front of the bench when the system finally has the data to see them.
This is a conversation about power, trust, and what happens when the people inside a system decide to rebuild it from within.

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 rebuilding identity, the five years it took Brandon to hug his wife again, and a staggering gap in care: 85% of people leaving therapy want help with relationships or sexual health, but only 5% ever get it from a therapist. Between 60 and 80% of relationships don't survive a disability.
Beyond This is built to change that math — using a workbook, a certification model, and a metaphor framework called "Levels of Spice" to help couples rebuild connection after a life-altering injury. This is a conversation about grief, love, co-founding with your spouse, and building something that found you before you found it.