(Courtesy/ Mr. Haddock)
Years ago, a history teacher named Mr. Schultz rolled a cannon onto the Academy campus to show his students what one actually sounded like. He loaded it, fired it, and within moments security vehicles came racing across the parking lot to find out what had just happened.
One of the students watching was Chris Sentz’03. More than two decades later, he still calls Mr. Schultz “my favorite person of all time.”
Sentz shared that story on Friday with students in the Viking Shipyard, where he spoke about his path from being an Academy “lifer” to becoming the founder of Vitruvian, a company that 3D-prints houses, and co-founder of VendGuard, which builds age-verified vending machines for stadiums and arenas.
Lou Schultz, who was the Admissions Director at the time, also taught Military History simply because he loved it. His passion must’ve rubbed off, as Sentz went on to minor in military history in college and told students that understanding the history of any field is one of the most important steps to succeeding in it.
Outside the classroom, Sentz swam, and his name is still on the Academy’s record board today, something he admitted surprised him. “Still got it,” he joked.
When asked whether a job during his Academy years shaped him, Sentz laughed that he had worked as a lifeguard, “staring at the water all day.” The real influence, he said, was being surrounded by driven people and always wanting to keep up.
“I was just always hungry,” he said, crediting Academy for feeding that drive.
Surprisingly, Sentz never set out to become an entrepreneur. He started his first company as a college student, and it grew until a buyer from Detroit approached him, pointing out that he was bringing in millions of dollars a year.
“Oh, yeah, I guess it’s a business, isn’t it?” he remembered thinking.
After years in digital marketing and software, Sentz turned to a problem he couldn’t stop thinking about: the housing shortage. His plan was to buy a 3D printer that could build houses, but after talking to nearly every company in the industry, he found that most of their machines worked in a lab and not on a real job site. So he hired engineers from Honda. “I guess we’ll just make a 3D printer,” he said.
Because his background was in business, not engineering, he leaned on his network to learn, which led him to spend about six months at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. There he met Stefano Alva, a young engineer from Costa Rica whom he convinced to move to Athens, Ohio, to help run Vitruvian. Sentz called it “the best sale I made in my whole life.”
His second company, VendGuard, came from the same instinct to fix a problem. Existing age-verification machines had serious flaws, including one that sent users’ ID and biometric data to overseas servers, so Sentz built a better one using technology with military roots. Today his machines are at Ohio Stadium, where he spends game days watching fans use them and asking how to improve.
“If you have a business, you can’t sit behind the screen,” he said. “You have to be out in the field, talking to people.”
Sentz’s most repeated advice to students was to use the CA community around them. Classmates, their parents, and teachers form one of the best networks students will ever have, he said, and being young means they can ask almost anyone for help.
At the end of the session, one student asked what gets him up every morning.
“Impact,” Sentz answered. “I want to significantly impact the world. Like, big time.”
He said the 2020 pandemic, when people couldn’t even find toilet paper on store shelves, was a wake-up call. He wants to help build communities strong enough to provide for themselves, with a goal of putting a Vitruvian hub in communities across the country and beyond.
For a room full of students still figuring out their own paths, his story was a reminder that it doesn’t have to be planned in advance. Sometimes it starts with a teacher, a cannon, and a kid who is always hungry for more.
