There is a boarding school in Alexandria, Virginia where a teenager once started a pizza-delivery operation after Study Hall. He didn't have a car. He didn't have a kitchen. He had a captive audience of hungry classmates and a simple insight: the school store was too far away. That teenager was Chris Hutchins, and the instinct - find the gap, fill it cheaply, profit - has never left him.
Fast forward twenty years. He's at the table of a Wealthfront acquisition meeting. Before that, he's at a Google deal closing. Before that, he's at GV writing term sheets for 40-something startups. The through-line isn't tech or finance or media - it's the same reflex he honed between the mail room and the calculus class he lobbied into existence: how do you get the thing you want, cheaper, faster, without the resources everyone assumes you need?
Today, Hutchins runs Hutchins Media and hosts All the Hacks, a personal finance and life optimization podcast that surpassed 10 million total downloads - powered entirely by ads and affiliate revenue, with no courses and no coaching. Not a calculated anti-move. Just a genuine disinterest in selling people things he doesn't believe in.
His career arc looks accidental only in retrospect. Investment banking at Allen & Company in New York lasted less than a year. Monitor Group management consulting - similar. Then in 2011, he co-founded Milk with Kevin Rose, the Digg creator, and a team of people who were quietly building one of the more coveted mobile labs in Silicon Valley. Their first app, Oink, was a location-based discovery tool. It barely launched before Google came knocking.
What happened next became a small piece of startup folklore. Google and Facebook got into a bidding war over the Milk team. Google won. Hutchins spent the next few years working on Google Voice and Google Hangouts, then pivoted into venture capital as a Partner at GV (Google Ventures), where he made over 40 investments across seed and early-stage rounds.
By 2015, he was restless again. He co-founded Grove with Chris Doyle - a virtual financial planning startup that paired Certified Financial Planners with technology to offer accessible advice at a flat fee. The pitch: everyone deserves a CFP, not just people with seven-figure portfolios. Grove raised $8 million. In August 2019, Wealthfront acquired the company and Hutchins joined as Head of New Product Strategy, helping develop the "Self-Driving Money" product vision.
Two years later, he left. In May 2021, he launched All the Hacks. The podcast crossed 55,000 downloads per episode with ad slots sold out months in advance. It generates seven figures annually. The guests include Tim Ferriss, Tony Hawk, Gary Vaynerchuk, Codie Sanchez, and Ramit Sethi - and occasionally, his wife Amy, who co-hosts episodes on the specific chaos of two optimizers arguing about furniture.