The Basics Of Money Management - Chris Hutchins - #065

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello there, friends. Before we get into today's episode, I wanted to give a big thank you to everyone who has supported the podcast over the last couple of weeks. Earlier this week, the episode with James Clear landed the show in the top 50 podcasts worldwide, which was a lovely thing to wake up to on Tuesday morning. So thank you very much for sharing it. The feedback I've had over the last few episodes has been so fantastic. And yeah, I have to pinch myself every day to realize that I actually get to share oxygen or bandwidth sometimes with literally some of the cleverest people on the planet. With that in mind, I thought I would give you a quick rundown of some of the upcoming guests. So on Monday, Professor David Sinclair from Harvard Medical School, one of Time Magazine's 50 most influential health professionals on the planet, talking about whether or not a human can live to be a thousand years old. Rachel Kleinfeld, who advises the UK and US government on how to govern correctly. Tim Briggs from We Dominate Nutrition. Don McGregor, COO of Social Chain is back again. Theo and Eve from the Social Minds podcast. George McGill, Innovation Lead at Media Chain. But today we're talking all things money management with Chris Hutchins, who is the CEO and founder of Grove. He started a company called Milk, which got acquired by Google in 2012 And then he spent most of his time at Google as a partner, helping startups and investing in early stage companies. So this guy knows what he's talking about. I really enjoyed the conversation. I can't wait to have him back on as well. Please welcome Chris Hutchins.
Mr. Chris Hutchins, how are you?

**Chris Hutchins** (1:56)
I'm great, how are you?

**Chris Williamson** (1:57)
Welcome to the show, man.

**Chris Hutchins** (1:59)
Thank you.

**Chris Williamson** (2:00)
Very, very happy to be here. Very, very happy to have you on. We're talking all things money today, right?

**Chris Hutchins** (2:06)
Yes, yeah, it's been like the obsession of my life.

**Chris Williamson** (2:10)
Well, I think it's the obsession of a lot of people's lives, right?

**Chris Hutchins** (2:13)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's something that causes more stress than anything else for most people.

**Chris Williamson** (2:18)
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. So for the listeners who don't know who you are, could you give us a bit of a background?

**Chris Hutchins** (2:24)
Sure. Where do I begin? You know, my whole life I've been obsessed with money, but more professionally, I spent the last 10 years in startup land. I got my first job at a college thinking I should go into investment banking and management consulting and ultimately got laid off, which gave me this opportunity to take what isn't very common in America, but effectively was like a gap year later in life, where I took seven months with my now wife and we traveled, came back in about 2011 and was like, this is the industry I'm going to work in and have been working in Silicon Valley for tech companies, starting tech companies, sold a company to Google, spent some time at Google investing in startups and have basically lived my entire last decade immersed in Silicon Valley.

**Chris Williamson** (3:15)
That must be pretty crazy. It seems like such a fast paced, very quickly moving environment.

**Chris Hutchins** (3:22)
It is definitely that. It is a wild place to be. You know, companies are growing. You know, I look back to, you know, I tried to pick the hottest company to work at when I first got back from my trip and it was a company called Simple Geo that ended up not working out. And my wife took a job at a company that neither one of us were all that convinced at the time, you know, would be the biggest company, you know, possible. And, you know, now it's, it grew into Lyft and she's been at Lyft for nine years. And so it's one of those kind of crazy adventures where you never know what's going to happen. You know, it might be six people in a small room that, you know, now is a 5,000 person company.

**Chris Williamson** (4:02)
Yeah, totally. I was reading an article recently about the electric scooter, Bird and the, is it Lime? Is it Lime scooters?

**Chris Hutchins** (4:12)
Bird has them, Lime, Spin, Scoot, Lyft has some.

**Chris Williamson** (4:17)
Uber's getting into it as well, right? They're trying to buy someone and they've already, I think-

**Chris Hutchins** (4:22)
Yeah, they bought a company called Jump that has bikes. And I don't know what their scooter plan is, but it's, yeah, it's crazy. You know, I was in LA this weekend and there were so many scooters everywhere. It was crazy.