Matt Lupi

Who is Matt Lupi

Matt Lupi is a local business owner in Austin, which is exactly why he fits this room. He is not running a fund or a tech company. He is running a real operation with real logistics, coolers to fill, gyms to service, athletes to feed, in the same market where this mastermind meets.

He came up through sports rather than through food. At Temple he studied sport and recreation management and ran operations for the lacrosse program while also coaching it. He worked game days for the Philadelphia Eagles. He made Eagle Scout in 2016. He is still studying, working on a master's in sport management at LSU while running everything else.

What he runs now

He owns and operates Simple Plan Austin, a high-protein meal prep business. Simple Plan is not his invention and he does not pretend otherwise: it started life as Midwest Meals in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and began franchising before he brought it to Texas. He is described by the parent company as the driving force behind the Austin location, which he launched with a partner, Zach Wolfe, who has since gone on to open his own Simple Plan location in Minneapolis.

The model is built around gyms. Coolers and micro-markets sit inside partner fitness facilities so members can grab prepared meals on the way out, alongside online ordering and local delivery, across several pickup points around the city. It is a distribution idea as much as a food idea, meeting people where they already are instead of asking them to make one more stop.

His own pitch for it is pure operator math rather than nutrition talk. Cooking a chicken, sweet potato and broccoli meal yourself runs an hour and a half to two hours once you count the shopping, the cooking and the cleaning. He will give you your next order free if you can prove he was slower than doing it yourself.

The athlete angle

In January 2026, Simple Plan Austin was named the preferred meal-prep partner for XPE Sports' NFL pre-combine training program in Austin, supplying meals to athletes preparing for the draft under a performance coach. As Lupi put it, elite athletes need their nutrition dialed in, and the business was built to deliver exactly that.

Where he came from

The path into it ran through the business side of sport. Since 2021 he has been at Grady Sports Agency, starting as a pro operations intern and scouting consultant and moving up to director of business operations and NIL agent, which means representing college athletes on name, image and likeness deals. That is where the relationships with pro and draft-level athletes come from, and it is why a meal prep company in Austin ended up feeding combine prospects.

The other two jobs

Since June 2023 he has also been assistant general manager at The Kollective, the Austin performance club. That is not a coincidental detail on this site. The Kollective is one of the venues this room is hosted with, so when Matt Lupi talks about servicing gyms and standing behind a counter, he is describing a building most people reading this have already walked into.

And he hosts The Define Success Podcast, which has run past 200 episodes since 2021, with guests ranging from bestselling leadership authors to a two-time lead on The Bachelor to Olympic trials swimmers. His own bio describes him as an ordinary dude with extraordinary goals, which is roughly the register of the whole show.

His coaching session at the room

On August 21, 2026, Connor Cullip brought Matt up on stage at Network of Directors for a live coaching session with Mike Chu, the business coach who spoke that night. Matt had three weeks to get Simple Plan Austin from about 450 meals a week to 750 or lose his production kitchen, and Mike worked the problem with him in front of the room: repeat the post that worked, reward buyers for sharing, ask every customer about the subscription, and track the ask. It is on film.

Watch the coaching session