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.