As a CTO, Dan Manges led two tech startups from a handful of software developers to hundreds – and looking around the industry, saw everyone in his position faced the same headaches.
RWX, the latest startup from the co-founder of Root Inc., is building software to cut out the inefficiencies that bog down engineering teams as they grow and the tech stack they're building gets larger and more complex.
So after building software for huge companies in e-payments and digital auto insurance, he's built a team to help other growing software development teams.
"Building dev tools is like selling shovels and pickaxes in a gold rush." Manges said in an interview. "There is a lot of potential here.
"We think we can have a lot of impact on how engineers write software."
Columbus Inno named the serial entrepreneur's new venture a Startup to Watch for 2023.
An Ohio native, Manges was founding CTO for nearly five years at Chicago-based Braintree, which PayPal acquired for $800 million in 2013.
Two years later, he joined actuary and insurance industry insider Alex Timm to start Root Insurance Co. – using the capabilities of the latest iPhone operating system to set auto premiums according to driving habits measured by the phone. Root Inc. had Ohio's largest ever IPO in October 2020, valued at nearly $7 billion. Manges stepped down from the following June.
"I spent a lot of time with my kids (three, today ages 10 and under)," he said. "I took them to the pool. I coached their baseball teams."
But he kept thinking about the challenges he'd experienced at not just those two startups but other high-growth tech companies. Every change to one part of software requires running automated tests to ensure the edit doesn't break something else. That's not so bad with the first versions.
"This becomes a very important part of the engineering feedback loop," he said. "The faster an engineer can get feedback, the faster they can iterate.
"As the business gets more complex – as the software powering the business gets more complex – the feedback loop slows down."
The tests can get "flaky" – working intermittently – or redundant. Often that's not the engineer's fault – if a test proceeds to the next step before waiting for a response from a slow web server, for example. Or the system tests every step from the start of an e-commerce transaction even if the change only applied to checkout.
"You’re paying to run all these cloud computing servers to run tests for things that couldn’t be affected at all by the change the engineer made," Manges said. "At large scale, you could easily have a company spending $1 million or more on (computing power) that they wouldn’t have to be spending,"
RWX, short for ReadWriteExecute Inc., has software that identifies and "quarantines" the tests bogging down the build process. Manges quietly formed RWX in Columbus in January 2022, and started making online posts about it and building the team midyear. Since fall it's grown to nine people.
Co-founder Tommy Graves previously was principal engineer at Huckleberry, which has a Columbus office, and worked with Manges as a senior engineering manager at Root. When the two debate, Manges said, the decisions always come out stronger.
"Tommy also has tremendous insight into developer resources," he said. "He was one of the best people I could possibly find to start his company with."
It's not making revenue yet, working with a group of test customers. The target client base is companies with about 50 to 250 engineers, he said – any larger and they have in-house efficiency tools.
"One of the fun things about building things for engineers … is we can use the products ourselves," Manges said.
The company has about three years’ worth of operating capital, he said. The backing comes from his own resources and undisclosed outside investors.
