Mike is the Director of Innovation Strategy at Kansas City’s digital powerhouse VML. You may also know him as the founding curator of TEDxKC. Going on it’s 7th year, the annual event is consistently one of the largest independent TED gatherings in the world. Let’s start with the origin. How did you get involved in bringing TEDx to Kansas City? The TEDx program was announced in 2009 at the TED Conference -- there were about a 100 of us that first year from all over the world that committed to bringing TED to their respective communities. We held our first event five months later on a budget of $5,000 at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. My friends and colleagues John Mulvihill and Frank Jurden (along with a number of other VML’ers) have been along for the ride from the very beginning. We could have never predicted TEDxKC’s growth any more than TED could have predicted the success of the TEDx program (x = independently organized TED events). Today there are over 2,500 events per year in
