On July 3, 2023, Matthew Lu was preparing for a barbecue when the sort of message that respects neither charcoal nor federal holidays arrived. Reserv, then a 17-person insurance technology company, had won a large account. To serve it, the team would need to recruit, hire and train 40 claims adjusters in 60 days. It would also need 20 call-center representatives. And software that did not yet exist.
Lu laughed when he later told the story. “Oh, well, there goes my July 4th,” he remembered thinking. The joke is economical because the work was not. Reserv had to behave like a much larger firm before it had time to become one. There were people to find, devices to ship, permissions to assign, training to design and an enterprise client waiting at the other end of the clock.
The team made the deadline. Its competitor took twice as long. Reserv went on to earn a larger share of the client's work, then repeated a version of the same rapid ramp five more times. Lu has a rueful line for that pattern: the only reward for good work is more work.
A generalist in a hurry
Lu's title today is SVP of Strategic Services and founding team member. In Reserv's early days, the more accurate title might have been the person currently holding the wrench. He worked across sales, go-to-market strategy, finance, compliance and legal. He also became the person responsible for IT, HR and payroll, despite having no formal IT background. Startup job descriptions are often aspirational fiction; Lu's was more like a crowded airport departures board.
He asked a friend who had gone through Y Combinator how three people could do the work of 30. The answer was to automate the repetitive pieces and keep the humans available for judgment. Device requests, app permissions and employee onboarding became workflows rather than memory tests. At one point, he remained the single person running several corporate functions while Reserv's workforce expanded across the United States and United Kingdom.
That arrangement was frugal, but Lu's argument for automation is not mainly a sermon about thrift. During difficult moments, he has said, the last thing a person needs is to remember which button to press next. A well-designed system returns attention to the human element. The machinery should handle the clicks. The person should handle the person.
“This network of infrastructure gets done without any of us having to think about it. And that frees us to focus on, how do we hit targets?”Matthew Lu on building lean operations
The useful lessons of combat, minus the combat
Lu periodically returns to Warfighting, the U.S. Marine Corps' doctrinal manual. This is not the usual reading recommendation from an insurance executive, a class of people traditionally associated with actuarial tables and sensibly bound documents. He reads it for its account of tempo: an outnumbered organization can still learn, decide and move faster than its rival.
The doctrine also favors being “pulled from the front.” The people closest to a problem possess tactical information that distant leaders do not. Senior leaders set the objective and its boundaries; the front line decides how to get there. For Lu, the corporate translation is practical. Give clear strategic guidance. Put authority near the live problem. Resist routing every meaningful choice through the founding team.
The quiet bar matters. Lu says rest becomes the priority when the urgent problem recedes.
There is a catch, and it is the most interesting part of his interpretation. Tempo does not mean keeping everyone at maximum velocity until the bearings smoke. When there is no crisis, or only a lower-priority problem, Lu says rest and recuperation become the priority. “You have failed the idea of tempo if you don't rest.” The point is readiness, not exhaustion dressed up as commitment.
This makes his operating philosophy less macho than its source material suggests. Hurry when hurry matters. Recover when it does not. The distinction demands judgment, which is precisely what indiscriminate urgency erases.
The long paddle out
Lu compares joining a founding team to surfing. Half is the effort required to paddle out. Half is the luck of occupying the right patch of water when a wave arrives. His own route to Reserv contains both, although the serendipity had years of preparation underneath it.
He attended Deerfield Academy, then studied government at Dartmouth College, graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 2013. A JD followed at the University of Chicago Law School in 2016. His early professional chapters included capital-markets work at Skadden and M&A and fund formation at IAC. Then came strategy consulting at Boston Consulting Group, followed by Snapsheet, an insurance technology company.
The connective relationship was with David Tyson and CJ Przybyl. Tyson had worked with Przybyl on the early version of a new SaaS business inside Snapsheet. When Tyson moved on, he recruited Lu from BCG to take his place. Lu built on those foundations, and the business went from zero to $10 million in annual recurring revenue over three years.
Trust survived the handoff. Przybyl remained a mentor. Tyson and Lu later began exploring a difficult insurance problem with him before Reserv formally existed. Venture capitalists were circling the same territory, and the project became a company in 2022. Four people formed the founding group. The wave arrived, but it recognized familiar paddlers.
“The real secret is that the ‘effort’ is entirely about being kind and generous with your time and consistently delivering great work.”Matthew Lu on earning a place on a founding team
Before claims, a different kind of conversion
A much earlier Lu project reveals the same instinct for organizational redirection. In 2011, while at Dartmouth, he started Philanthropic All American Rush. Greek houses already knew how to compete. Lu's idea was to point that energy toward charitable giving during the pledge period.
The houses raised money for the Children's Hospital at Dartmouth. Positive Tracks agreed to match the total, and the effort passed $100,000. Lu called the result beyond his wildest dreams. He hoped the project would do more than repair a reputation. He wanted successive classes of students to find philanthropy genuinely exciting.
The college project and Reserv are separated by a law degree, a consulting career and a very different balance sheet. Yet the method rhymes. Begin with energy already present in a system. Build incentives and infrastructure around it. Give competition, technology or ambition a destination worth reaching.
The tidy professional arc should not make Lu sound entirely laminated. On his personal site, alongside the interviews and school names, he lists photography, martial arts and video games among his interests. He introduces the old Dartmouth television clip as something from “a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far away.” It is a small flourish, but a revealing one. The operator who speaks in deployment schedules and decision rights is also willing to poke fun at the fossil record of his own résumé.
Kindness under load
Reserv's public numbers are now large: more than 600 colleagues, roughly $100 million in annual recurring revenue, nearly 200 insurance clients, and a $125 million Series C led by KKR in May 2026. It aims to increase capacity from about 500,000 complex claims a year to 30 million within four years. Numbers at that scale can make a company story sound like a spreadsheet discovering the gym.
Lu brings the discussion back to claims. Reserv combines technology with the people who administer property and casualty claims. Its software can structure incoming data, triage work and surface decisions. Adjusters still encounter the consequential part: somebody's business has been interrupted, property has been damaged, or a routine day has acquired an unwelcome plot.
“We're in the helping people business,” Lu has said. Faster care for people in a bad situation produces happier claimants and happier clients. It is a plain sentence, useful because it survives contact with all the AI vocabulary surrounding the company.
The same plainness appears in his view of teams. Ideas are plentiful; execution is scarce. Execution depends on trust and cohesion. Those qualities, he argues, emerge from repeated acts of kindness and generosity, especially when pressure makes both inconvenient. He credits BCG mentors Sara Codella and WuDi Wu with demonstrating that habit and unlocking his own development.
There is no soft-focus contradiction here. Lu also talks about grit, imperfect decisions and metaphorical live grenades landing inside a company. His claim is that high standards and generosity reinforce one another. A team can move quickly because its members trust the blind pass. In describing a Bain consultant who joined Reserv temporarily, Lu used exactly that football image: the company could throw Oscar Truong a blind pass and know he would carry it forward, however ambiguous the task or compressed the schedule.
That may be the quiet mechanism beneath the ruined barbecue, the hiring sprint and the improbable deadline. Speed looks individual from a distance. Up close, it is social. Someone has built the workflow. Someone has earned discretion. Someone believes the colleague receiving the ball will know what to do. Urgency gets the headline. Trust makes the deadline.