Chris Schmidt is a Winnipeg, Manitoba-based serial entrepreneur who builds companies at the intersection of consumer behaviour and scalable technology. He has founded and exited two ventures, in arboriculture and digital media, and now leads an AI company.
I spent 21 years growing Schmidt Tree Banding, a tree service company I started at age 10. After completing a Bachelor of Science at the University of Manitoba, I walked away from a traditional path in medicine to build Geofilter Studio, which produced custom Snapchat filters. I currently run Pluto Ventures, an AI technology company.
On paper, these companies appear unrelated. However, each venture is built on the same thesis: understanding an early consumer trend and leveraging technology to scale the solution.
My superpower has always been persistence. Innovation is a gruelling, uncertain process, and there is no playbook for building a new venture in an unproven industry.
With Schmidt Tree Banding, I noticed an overpriced commodity service and undercut it, running the entire operation solo for over a decade before building the systems to scale it. With Geofilter Studio, I moved first on a new Snapchat feature, growth-hacking my way to a company processing an order every four seconds. With Pluto Ventures, I set out to solve a data problem nobody else had cracked. What began as a six-month roadmap stretched into a three-year R&D marathon. Solving it meant going beyond the data itself—I had to build Parallel, a social commerce platform, to prove that the idea and technology worked in the real world.
The best part was never the outcome; it was the people who made the tough journey enjoyable: a tree banding crew that ran like a family, a Geofilter Studio office so cramped and chaotic it felt electric, and a Pluto team who stayed together because they believed in the work as much as I did.
To build a successful business, you need to solve a problem, have domain knowledge, be persistent, and assemble a great team. Technology is never the idea itself—it is simply a multiplier.
Whether you are automating invoicing or training a neural network, the blueprint remains the same. True innovation belongs to those who understand human behaviour, spot shifting patterns, and meet consumers exactly where they are headed next.
