Matt Watson

Matt Watson taught himself to program on a Commodore 64 in elementary school, and he spent his childhood working at his parents' flea market, which taught him more about running a business than any classroom ever did. At 22, a college dropout with more curiosity than capital, he co-founded VinSolutions, an automotive CRM he bootstrapped from a manual photo-upload side project into a business doing over $30M in ARR, with no venture funding. AutoTrader bought it for $150M in 2011, and VinSolutions is still the #1 CRM in the automotive industry today.

He went on to found Stackify in 2012, a developer-focused application monitoring platform. After years of hearing offshore horror stories from other founders, Matt hired developers in the Philippines to solve Stackify's own hiring problem, grew that team past 20 people, and watched it actually work. That's the real reason Full Scale exists: solving his own hiring problem is what showed him other founders needed the same thing. Stackify sold to Netreo in 2021.

Matt co-founded Full Scale in 2018 with Matt DeCoursey, who was running into the identical hiring wall at his own company, Gigabook. Neither of them set out to start a staffing business. They built a model that solved their own hiring problem first, other Kansas City founders started asking for access to it, and that demand turned into a company. Full Scale hired its first 100 developers within a year. In December 2023, Matt bought out DeCoursey to become sole owner and CEO. Today Full Scale has 300+ engineers across the Philippines supporting 200+ tech companies with embedded development teams that work as part of the client's own team, not a separate vendor.

Not every company he's started turns into a decade-long business, and that's fine. In 2022, he also co-founded At Capacity, a lead-management platform for home-service businesses like plumbers and HVAC companies, and sold it about a year and a half after launch. Matt is the author of Product Driven (2025), a leadership playbook for engineering leaders whose teams are busy but not building what matters. He also writes the Product Driven newsletter and hosts the Startup Hustle podcast, which has surpassed 6 million downloads over hundreds of conversations with founders, operators, and investors.