kansas-city
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Jayson Kuti and the value of showing up
The Kompass Kapital co-founder puts teams and giving back at the center of his investment philosophy. From Kansas City to British broadband, the practical question is how to make that belief survive growth.
Sean Hogan and the Work Before the Welcome
At Kansas City agency DMH, Sean Hogan helps brands find their footing. His life beyond the brief offers another way to think about belonging: somebody has to do the work before people can join in.
Tessa Fisher Knows the Recipe Is Only Half the Lesson
Before she taught readers how to trust an unfamiliar flour, Fisher learned to rehearse, counsel, coach, and explain. Salted Plains is where those disciplines meet the mixing bowl.
Andrew Feagler Built a Business for the Things Nobody Wants to Do
The Kansas City funeral professional saw a gap between ceremony and everything that follows. Laurel is his answer: calm, practical help before, during and after a death.
Michael Hopkins Knows Every Brand Promise Eventually Meets a Real Person
The VINCUE chief marketing officer has spent his career moving between software systems and human experiences. His useful obsession is making sure the promise survives the handoff.
Josh Harbert Built a Career Turning Technical Complexity Into a Story People Can Act On
The Couchbase CMO began as a programmer, learned to speak both product and pipeline, and now carries that translation habit into enterprise AI and sustainable technology.
Brian Cody Is Making the Invisible Work of Payments Feel Human
The Basys executive arrived in payments by way of code, campaigns and augmented reality. His operating idea is plain: speed matters only after people agree where they are going.
David Barone Is Turning Banking Strategy Into a Team Sport
The former Syracuse rower built a career around coordinated motion - first in advertising, then in financial services. At Nymbus, he is making the case that modern banking wins through accountable partnerships, focused growth and technology that can carry its share of the load.
Irit Gillath Knows How to Sell the Systems Nobody Sees
An industrial engineer turned marketing executive, Gillath has spent more than two decades translating technical systems into reasons to care. At Alacriti, the subject is money in motion - instant, intricate and mostly invisible.
Vince Koehler’s Long Game: Make Marketing Answer to Sales
From early digital agency work to healthcare software, Vince Koehler has kept returning to one stubborn idea: useful marketing earns attention, proves its value, and helps sales close the loop.
David Embry Bet Small Businesses Deserved Better Insurance - Then Built the Machine to Prove It
Mylo began with a stubborn question: could software make small insurance accounts worth serving well? A decade later, David Embry's answer is a business built around better recommendations, patient iteration and the enduring value of a human conversation.
Carl Wasinger Put a Warehouse in Your Browser - Then Kept Building
A western Kansas farm kid saw companies tracking inventory by fax and phone, imagined something closer to online banking, and built Smart Warehousing around one durable idea: the boxes and the data have to move together.
Jay Kim Built a Security Company From an Elevator Introduction
A chance meeting in Korea gave Jay Kim an idea. Nearly two decades later, his Kansas company is still trying to make serious encryption feel ordinary.
Nick Smith
Nick Smith is the President, CEO and Founder of Sailes, a New York-based AI company that builds personality-driven autonomous Sailebots to handle B2B prospecting for Fortune 1000 enterprise sales teams. A former sales leader at CBS Corporation and iHeart Radio, he sketched the idea for Sailes on his iPhone at the Lake of the Ozarks on July 4, 2018.
Kyle Vogt
Kyle Vogt is a Kansas-born serial entrepreneur and robotics pioneer who has founded three billion-dollar companies before age 40. He co-founded Twitch (acquired by Amazon for $970M), founded Cruise Automation (acquired by GM for $1B+), and currently leads The Bot Company, developing AI-powered household robots. Starting as a teenage BattleBots competitor who built his first self-driving car at 14, Vogt left MIT to pursue entrepreneurship, becoming one of the rare founders to create multiple unicorns across live-streaming, autonomous vehicles, and consumer robotics.