Matt Knott’s children knew, in the way children know a parent’s occupation, that their father worked on hunger. Then the family volunteered at a local soup kitchen. The abstract description acquired people, a place and a task. Knott later recalled how much the visit opened their eyes. He had experienced his own version of that discovery after joining Feeding America in 2008.
“The magnitude of the issue was a surprise to me,” he said.
He had come from a company whose products were familiar enough to require little introduction. Gatorade. Tropicana. Quaker. Propel. His new work concerned people for whom getting food was a daily uncertainty. The distance between those two worlds is the interesting part of his career. Both involve food. Both depend on organizations capable of moving resources. They ask very different questions about what a successful day looks like.
Today, Knott is President & Interim CEO of Builders Vision, where investment and philanthropy share an organization. Food and agriculture remain part of the assignment, alongside energy and oceans. His route there runs through financial consulting, consumer brands and a national food-bank network. It is a career that makes the supposedly dull word “operations” rather harder to dismiss.
A marketing career changes its destination
Knott began as a financial consultant at Arthur Andersen. He studied finance at Notre Dame, graduating in the Class of 1992, and earned a master’s degree in management at Northwestern’s Kellogg school. Those are the conventional opening lines of an executive biography. What follows gives them some texture.
He spent twelve years at PepsiCo. His responsibilities included financial analysis, brand management, strategy, performance assessment and product development. By the end of that stretch, he was Vice President of Marketing for Gatorade. His experience also encompassed Tropicana, Life cereal and Propel. These were jobs concerned with products, customers and the decisions that help a business grow.
A brand is the public face of a complicated organization. Behind a familiar name sit budgets, choices and measurements. Knott’s subsequent career makes those less visible parts worth attending to. When he changed institutions, planning and performance remained prominent in his work. The purpose changed; several of the tools traveled.
In June 2008, he joined Feeding America as Vice President of Planning. By February 2010 he had become Senior Vice President of Planning and Analysis, and that July he was named Chief Strategy Officer. The responsibilities included developing the strategic plan, assessing results and helping member food banks with their own planning. In May 2011, he became Chief Operating Officer.
The national office had to be useful
Feeding America created a president’s position for Knott in June 2013. The assignment was unusually clear: lead the national office’s efforts to support member food banks and shape its priorities around their needs. His remit covered food and supply chains, network development, compliance, capability and information technology. A worthy cause still has to answer the telephone and keep its systems working.
Then-CEO Bob Aiken praised Knott for “a collaborative style.” The wording is revealing because a network cannot be run as though every local organization were simply another department. Its national leadership has to help people doing different work in different places. The member food banks were central to the description of his job, rather than an afterthought beneath the title.
Knott had already served as interim President and CEO in 2012. That year’s strategic plan, developed with member food banks under his leadership, set an ambition to secure a billion additional meals annually by 2018. The emphasis was on extending the network’s capacity: recovering food, strengthening organizations and turning public concern into participation.
The distinction between a target and an outcome matters here. The billion was a planning ambition. The 2018 annual report recorded the network providing 4.3 billion meals that year. Those meals belonged to the work of a nationwide network, its donors, volunteers, employees and partners. Large totals can hide that many hands. They can also show why coordination matters.
A network result, during Knott’s presidency.
There is a temptation to treat corporate experience and charitable work as distant categories. Knott’s appointments show how close their practical questions can become. How do you assess a result? Where does support make the most difference? How can the national organization help the local one? The stakes change the answers, but they do not remove the need to ask.
Food comes home
The soup-kitchen visit offers a smaller scale for the same story. Knott and his wife, Agnes, brought their four children to volunteer. A parent’s job became something the family could encounter together. There is no need to improve that anecdote with imagined dialogue. Its force is in the ordinary act of showing up.
Knott and Agnes raised their children in Chicago’s northwest suburbs. His professional life has taken him into large organizations; this part of the story brings it back to neighbors and family. The relationship between those scales is worth keeping in view. A national mission is experienced locally. An executive title can be explained at home with an afternoon’s work.
The continuity in his career is especially visible in his commitment to affordable food. His work at Feeding America sought to expand access, and his later position put him in an organization investing in food and agriculture. The institutions differ in purpose and method. Food remains a practical concern connecting them.
Building the organization behind the capital
Knott joined Lukas Walton’s organization in 2019, before Builders Vision’s public launch in 2021. Walton had established the investment firm S2G Ventures and the philanthropy Builders Initiative in earlier years. Builders Vision brought investment and philanthropic efforts into a broader platform. Knott helped develop the organization from its inception.
That work included people, processes and systems: planning, human resources, finance, accounting, technology, communications and office administration. It is the sort of list that readers glide over until one item stops functioning. Office administration rarely gets a cinematic entrance. Everyone notices when it exits.
The platform’s premise gives those functions a particular job to do. Builders Vision can deploy capital ranging from grants to market-rate investments. Different instruments bring different expectations. Putting them in one organization creates opportunities, along with a demand for people who can understand one another’s decisions.
The choice of capital is consequential. A grant and an investment are commitments with different terms, rather than interchangeable labels for money leaving an account. An organization using both has to be clear about what it expects and why. The same broad ambition can require different judgments in different situations.
In March 2024, Knott accepted Loyola University Chicago’s Parkinson Award for Purpose and Profit on Builders Vision’s behalf. At the Leading for Good conference, he also joined Haven Leeming of Builders Initiative and Arthur Chow of S2G Ventures for a discussion about food and agriculture. The award recognized the organization’s approach to connecting commercial purpose and social aims.
That occasion placed Knott in familiar territory: food, organizations and the usefulness of resources. It also provided a public marker for an operating assignment that is usually less visible than an investment announcement. Someone has to make a collection of tools into an organization capable of choosing among them.
An interim title, an existing responsibility
The 2026 leadership transition made that operating role explicit. Walton moved from CEO to Executive Chairman and announced that Knott would serve as interim CEO. He credited the leadership team led by Knott with advancing investments, partnerships, organizational growth and culture while he had stepped away from work.
The announcement described a handover grounded in work already underway. Knott was being asked to lead an organization he had helped build. Lisa Forbes, the General Counsel, would take on strategy and innovation as interim Chief Strategy Officer. Walton said he would focus on finding the next CEO and recruiting a board.
“Interim” is a small word carrying a large practical assignment. The organization still needs direction, resource decisions and attention to performance. Knott’s current remit covers those responsibilities in partnership with the Executive Chairman and leadership team. The appointment puts the organizational builder at the center of its next phase.
His public language continues to focus on bringing other people into the work. At Climate Week NYC in 2025, he described capital structures that could draw more participants into the market. In September 2026, he again called for mobilizing investors around food and agriculture, energy and oceans. The aspiration extends beyond the resources of one institution.
The credit travels outward
In September 2026, Builders Vision announced its twelfth-place ranking on Crain’s Chicago Business’s Best Places to Work list. The organization’s colleagues span investing, philanthropy, engineering, data, measurement, communications and advocacy. That variety makes cooperation a daily operating concern.
“This recognition belongs to them.”Matt Knott, on his colleagues, September 2026
Knott’s response assigned the recognition to the team. It is a modest closing detail for a career spent in sizable institutions. His work has involved familiar brands, millions of meals and several kinds of capital. The practical unit underneath those scales remains a person doing a task with other people.
The family’s soup-kitchen visit makes that visible without a diagram. People came together and did useful work. Years later, Knott’s responsibilities are broader, but the question that runs through his career is still intelligible at that scale: what has to happen between having resources and making them useful?