The Disruption Lab

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.

The Disruption Lab is a society podcast hosted by Kevin McGinnis, with 84 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Kevin McGinnis hosts The Disruption Lab, a society show with 84 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #85

  She Ran a $14M Beauty Department, Then Watched It Shut Black Founders Out

  Aug 18, 202640 min

  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.

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  Episode #84

  You Can't Eat IRR: Why Venture Capital's Economics Are Broken

  Aug 13, 202644 min

  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.

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  Episode #82

  Easy To Work With

  Aug 6, 20268 min

  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.

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  Episode #79

  The Chemical Keeping Your Fridge Cold Just Got Banned; Here's What Happens Next

  Jul 30, 202644 min

  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.

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  Episode #80

  The Judge and the Data Scientist Rebuilding Justice From the Inside

  Jul 29, 202641 min

  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.

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