Randy Boldyga wanted to run his own company. Then he had to learn how to stop running every part of it. The distinction took years to become comfortable, which is a rather inconvenient timetable for a founder hoping that hiring a few executives will free up Thursday afternoon.
He had built RXNT around independence. Beginning in 1999, he chose a financing path that would let him retain control over its direction. As the business expanded, however, ownership presented a second question: how much of the working day should still depend on him? The right to make a decision and the need to make it personally were becoming separate matters.
That tension makes Boldyga an interesting character beyond the founder’s title. His story includes federal computer systems, an unexpected destination, a rented house, an early lesson in payroll taxes, and an employer whose kindness he remembered decades later. Underneath those episodes sits a fairly practical ambition: build something of his own, and find people he can trust to help it grow.
A job ends. A lesson stays.
Before he was the person making employment decisions, Boldyga experienced the uncertainty of having someone else make them. In his late twenties, he worked as a government contractor at a Black & Decker subsidiary. His division lost its contract. Employees faced a choice between taking terms offered by the incoming employer and leaving without a job.
What he remembered was the response around him. The company offered other opportunities and assigned an HR manager to help affected employees find positions elsewhere. A commercial arrangement had ended; the effort to help the people involved continued.
Writing about the episode in 2024, Boldyga connected it with the way he wanted his own executives to treat employees. The experience gave his views on compassion a particular starting point. He could remember being on the receiving end of a decision, waiting to discover how much consideration would accompany it.
Founders often tell stories about the person who gave them their first chance. Boldyga also has a story about people who helped when a chance was disappearing. It is a useful addition to the usual entrepreneurial scrapbook.
The destination was Little Rock
Boldyga was born in Annapolis, graduated from Annapolis High in 1984 and earned a mathematics degree at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in 1988. His working education took him into information technology, including consulting assignments for the Department of Defense, Department of Energy and FBI. He also held IT leadership roles at UAMS and The Columbia Bank.
One assignment came with an unusual recruitment detail. He says that when he agreed to consult for the FBI, he did not initially know where he would be sent. After committing, he received tickets to Little Rock, Arkansas. The work involved the Whitewater investigation. In his retelling, the surprise destination earns a cheerful five-word verdict: “Winner, winner, chicken dinner.”
The anecdote has a pleasing gap between its ingredients: federal secrecy, computer infrastructure and a punch line fit for a raffle. His actual contribution was technical. Designing and implementing systems for large organizations gave him experience he would later bring into his own business.
The office came with a landlord
RXNT began in May 1999. Its early office occupied the lower level of a house Boldyga rented in Anne Arundel County, partly below ground and partly above it. He later moved the business into space on West Street in Annapolis as revenue made that possible.
The rented house is a small but clarifying detail. Entrepreneurial origin stories tend to make their first premises sound inevitable in retrospect. At the time, premises have a more immediate function: they cost money. Working from home allowed Boldyga to keep overhead down while trying to establish a business that could pay for its next stage.
He has described bootstrapping as a choice about autonomy. In his account, remaining outside venture-capital and private-equity financing let him preserve authority over the company’s direction. That preference should not be confused with a claim that the company began without help. His financing history includes investment from friends and family and SBA-backed borrowing.
Boldyga’s early financing included personal connections and borrowing. His stated preference was to retain control over the company’s direction.
His public argument allows room for other choices. He has written about the capital, contacts and mentoring that venture investors can bring. Independence suited what he wanted to build. It also meant accepting the slower, less convenient parts of paying his own way.
The founder learns where the details live
Among the stories Boldyga volunteers about the early business is a payroll-tax mistake. He has recalled discovering that federal employee taxes had accumulated and that the IRS had taken money from the company’s account. The lesson arrived through the bank balance, a teaching method with excellent attendance.
He discusses the episode as a reason to pay attention to operational detail. It sits awkwardly, and usefully, beside the romance of starting a company. A founder can have a business plan, a product and customers while still overlooking an obligation that matters immediately.
His own description of the traits that helped him succeed is similarly grounded: “I’d say perseverance, adaptability, and empathy.” He has also expressed an affinity for servant leadership. Taken together with the layoff memory, those choices describe the sort of employer he says he wants to be. They are his stated principles, with the work of applying them left to daily management.
Seven people between an idea and a decision
As RXNT grew, the habit of handling every problem became harder to sustain. In his writing on delegation, Boldyga describes a transition that took years: accepting that capable people needed room to make decisions in their own areas. The company had felt like an extension of himself. Sharing authority could therefore feel personal.
By late 2024, he described seven executives reporting directly to him. Preparing them involved time, communication and explaining the reasoning behind the company’s decisions. A title could establish responsibility on paper; understanding how to exercise it required more work.
His description offers a useful way to read the organizational chart. Each person represents a body of judgment the founder is willing to rely on. If that judgment never gets used without his permission, the boxes on the chart accomplish rather less than their neat arrangement suggests.
Hiring demanded patience too. In a September 2024 essay, he recalled a three-month search for a CFO. Financial expertise mattered, along with familiarity with the business and the ability to work with the existing team. His description makes the search sound like a substantial piece of company building in its own right.
Then the lesson had to travel further. Executives responsible for their own teams faced a version of the same task: passing on knowledge and allowing other people to use it. The founder’s adjustment would be incomplete if every new layer simply created another person reluctant to let go.
“I’d say perseverance, adaptability, and empathy.”
Randy Boldyga, on the traits behind his success
Annapolis was part of the offer
For a software company with customers across the United States, Annapolis might invite the question of why it stayed. Boldyga’s explanation is practical. He says recruits found the town attractive, with Washington and Baltimore nearby and the beaches of Maryland and Delaware within reach. Candidates from established technology centers could picture living there.
His hometown connection also took an institutional form: he served on the local economic development board from 2014 to 2016. The company’s national reach did not require erasing its local identity. Recruiting, in his telling, involved offering a place to live as well as a place to work.
RXNT appeared on the Inc. 5000 in 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022. Those dated entries provide useful markers of the business he was managing while working through his own changing role. They record company growth; they leave the personal adjustment largely out of view.
The holiday still has an inbox
Boldyga describes a family life that includes traveling with his wife and three sons, summer cruises and winter skiing. He also acknowledges that vacations were among the sacrifices of the company’s first decade. Leaving the office could still mean receiving questions and problems that required his attention.
There is a modest correction here to the promise of being your own boss. You may acquire the freedom to choose the direction while finding that the day follows you onto the boat. Developing a trusted team gives that freedom a better chance of becoming something you can actually use.
His more recent writing continues to return to trust. In December 2025, he argued for being clear with customers about a product’s capabilities, limitations and price. The emphasis fits the management story: people need enough understanding to make decisions they can own.
For Boldyga, keeping the company’s direction in his hands has involved learning which decisions to place in someone else’s. The founder who began in a rented home has spent years building the judgment around him. Somewhere in that patient transfer of responsibility lies the possibility of a quieter holiday.