Overview of Practical Founders Podcast #204
In this episode of the Practical Founders Podcast, host Greg Head interviews Matthew Bullis, founder and former CEO of RapidWorks, a vertical software platform for subcontractors and site-service companies in construction. Matthew shares how he bootstrapped the business from a very narrow niche—concrete pumping—into a multi-vertical platform serving cranes, hydrovacs, portable toilets, roll-off bins, and more. The conversation centers on founder flexibility, the decision to sell a majority stake to growth equity firm WaveCrest, and how Matthew transitioned from being the all-in-one founder to a strategically valuable part of a larger leadership team.
What RapidWorks Does
RapidWorks is essentially a vertical ERP / operations platform for subcontractors that send people, trucks, equipment, and machines to job sites.
Core use cases
- Quoting and winning jobs
- Dispatch and scheduling
- Job-site ticketing and workflow management
- Billing and getting paid
- Managing labor, equipment, and field operations
Customer focus
The company serves businesses that:
- Work in construction-adjacent field services
- Rely on dispatchers, drivers, operators, and assets
- Need to replace paper-based workflows with a unified operational system
Expansion beyond the original niche
RapidWorks started in concrete pumping / concrete placement, then expanded into:
- Cranes
- Hydrovacs
- Portable toilets
- Roll-off bins
- Other site-service verticals with similar operational complexity
Matthew Bullis’s Founder Journey
Matthew’s background is unusually scrappy and shaped by hardship:
- Born and raised in a mud-brick hut without running water or electricity in a small South Korean island village
- Lost his father young, later moved to Seoul
- Adopting into the U.S. at age 11, with no English
- Developed a strong drive to succeed because of early scarcity and instability
Earlier startup experience
Before RapidWorks, Matthew co-founded an early shopping cart software company during the dot-com era:
- The business reached meaningful revenue
- It received a $56 million cash offer
- The founders declined, thinking the upside was even larger
- Matthew was the only one who voted to sell
How RapidWorks started
His brother worked in concrete pumping and later in operations/dispatch. When that business’s legacy software had declined to roughly $20,000/year, Matthew took over around 2014 and rebuilt the company with a new thesis:
- Start with one painful niche
- Build deeply for that workflow
- Expand outward into adjacent verticals
Early build process
- He initially outsourced development, but the result wasn’t usable
- He then taught himself enough to build the product directly
- The first product was a Windows desktop application with hosted back-end infrastructure
- RapidWorks launched its modern software around 2016
- Early pricing started around $30 per user per month to make it easy for customers to say yes
Growth Through Customer Intimacy
A major theme in Matthew’s story is that he won by being close to the customer.
How he learned what to build
Instead of just asking users for feature requests, he:
- Sat in customer offices
- Watched workflows in real time
- Asked “why” repeatedly until he got to the root problem
- Looked for ways to solve an entire process, not just a single feature request
Operational impact
This approach helped RapidWorks:
- Increase dispatcher productivity significantly
- Move from a few dozen jobs per dispatcher to 60+ jobs, and in some cases 4–5x the old workload
- Become mission-critical to customers who were previously handling chaos manually
The Growth Equity Pivot and Leadership Transition
By 2022–2023, Matthew saw the company needed more capital, more expertise, and more bandwidth to expand beyond its original vertical.
Why he raised growth equity
He recognized:
- The business had dominated its initial niche
- Expanding into new verticals would take more resources and senior experience
- He could not scale multiple markets fast enough on his own
Why WaveCrest
WaveCrest brought:
- Capital
- Operating experience
- A senior leadership team
- A pathway to scale beyond founder-only execution
The tradeoff
Matthew knowingly gave up majority control because he wanted:
- The business to survive beyond him
- A more durable company with professional leadership
- More speed and less founder bottleneck
Role change
After the transaction:
- He stepped out as CEO
- Took on a strategic role, effectively Chief Strategy Officer
- Also filled in where needed, including temporary leadership work in product and engineering
- Continued to be a key contributor because of his deep industry knowledge and customer insight
What Surprised Him About Giving Up Control
Matthew expected that once a seasoned CEO and executive team came in, his role would shrink quickly. Instead, he found that his value remained high because he was willing to:
- Stay flexible
- Solve problems wherever needed
- Speak up when he saw issues
- Act as a partner rather than a threatened founder
His core mindset
He believes a founder’s real value is:
- Surviving anything
- Solving any problem
- Creating value for others
That mindset made it easier for him to earn trust from the new leadership team and continue adding value after the transition.
AI and the Future of RapidWorks
Matthew sees AI as both an internal operating challenge and a product opportunity.
Two sides of AI
He frames AI as:
- AI utilization — how the company itself uses AI to build better software faster
- AI productization — how AI becomes useful to customers in their actual day-to-day workflows
Key perspective
- AI will improve how software is built
- But AI also needs to be practical for blue-collar users in the field
- RapidWorks is focused on making AI real, not just “AI for marketing”
Strategic concern
Matthew believes point solutions are increasingly vulnerable:
- AI can spin up small apps quickly
- But the hard part is integrating workflows across an entire operation
- That gives broader platforms like RapidWorks an advantage if they become the core system of record
Key Takeaways for Practical Founders
1. Build from deep customer intimacy
Spend time with users in their real environment. Understand the workflow, not just the feature request.
2. Solve the whole problem, not just the surface request
Keep asking “why” until you find the true bottleneck.
3. Be willing to evolve your role
Founders do not always need to stay in the CEO chair to remain valuable.
4. Give up control when it unlocks more growth
A good partner can bring capital, experience, and speed that a solo founder may not be able to match.
5. Flexibility is a founder superpower
Matthew’s view: your value is not your past glory—it’s your ability to survive, adapt, and solve.
6. Enjoy the journey
His advice to founders:
- Nothing is as bad as it seems in the moment
- Nothing is as good as it seems in the moment
- The real job is to keep solving problems and keep moving forward
Notable Insight
“People like people of value.”
That idea captures the heart of Matthew’s journey: once he stopped defining his worth by title and started adding value wherever the business needed it, he remained indispensable—even after giving up control.