The go-slow strategy: The Aussie tech company rejecting 95% of approaches

Devika founder Ken Kencevski has spent the past decade building software that helps ambitious companies successfully launch their blue-sky ideas.

In a tech environment obsessed with churning out endless streams of software, Devika builds deliberately, and doesn’t apologise for it.

“Everyone in the industry sees the unicorns like Canva, but no one talks about the work underneath,” says Devika founder Ken Kencevski.

To keep those foundations rock-solid, the Wollongong-based firm accepts only 5% of its monthly project inquiries, delivering an average of 18 highly targeted digital products a year. This strategic selection is paying off: Devika has guided clients from zero to $60 million in revenue in 18 months.

For Kencevski, the reasoning is simple. Lasting success requires painstaking execution. His team tackles the complex problems that stall big ideas and sometimes leave entire companies stranded on the runway.

Devika stays with its partners until the product launches successfully, with one recent day-one result generating $1 million in revenue.

That diligence has attracted international heavyweights, including Hertz, Coachella, Dell, and HP, as well as banks Westpac, ANZ, and St. George, and the University of Wollongong.

With an outcome-focused outlook, Kencevski knows exactly what it takes to turn a good idea into a commercial reality.

“Besides the software, you have the go-to-market strategy, capital raising, getting a product that doesn’t yet exist in front of real people, pivoting and getting customers to pay and keep paying,” he says.

Before founding Devika, Kencevski experienced these hurdles on the client side, leading a digital overhaul at his family-owned business, Speedmaster. The project lifted the automotive outfit into the top 100 Australian e-commerce retailers, allowing the company to onboard thousands of new customers without a single new hire.

Seeing the market gap for robust software architecture first-hand, Kencevski established Devika in 2016 with a strict mandate: no outsourcing and no bloated offshore hand-offs. Instead, he built a team of talented senior engineers entirely in Wollongong.

This approach breeds loyalty. Byron Papanikolaou, the company’s first hire, remains with Devika today as Head of Product and Services.

A decade on, the agency has earned an AWS AI Services Competency and produced more than 150 digital products, processing over $500 million through its apps. The company’s list of achievements includes launching Devika Ventures, which supports ambitious founders from the get-go, helping them set up and scale from scratch.

“Reaching that 10-year milestone stands out because it encapsulates so much: the people who’ve built their careers here, the clients who’ve stayed with us for years,” says Kencevski. “I’m proudest that we’ve built something our team and our clients want to continue working with us over a longer period of time.”

What exactly was the thing that led you to set up your business, and how did the initial idea arise?

The spark came from my time at Speedmaster. Working in e-commerce and manufacturing, you’re always managing physical inventory and stock control. When I got exposure to startups, I saw how differently software worked, especially as you could onboard client after client without adding headcount for each one. It was that scale, and the impact software can create compared to a physical business, that drew me in.

Which aspect of software development is most misunderstood, and what steps are we taking to change that?

How hard it is. This isn’t just about building a business, but about building a digital product on top of that. Every piece has to come together. We change that perception by being honest about it and walking the journey alongside our clients. It’s harder than people think, but that’s exactly why we’re here.

What major changes or trends do you think leaders should not ignore at the moment in software engineering?

AI, also known as SI for superintelligence, without question, but the real answer has two parts. The first is how leaders implement AI internally: what moves the needle, takes mundane work off people’s plates, and moves teams up the value chain. This is about bringing your people along and not leaving them behind. The second aspect is knowing what won’t change: the fundamentals that technology can enhance but can’t replace, where you need humans to lean in more than ever. The best leaders hold both ideas at once.

What do you think are the main areas with potential for innovation in your field?

The biggest opportunity is the digital modernisation of established, legacy businesses. There are many successful companies that are expensive and inefficient to run on outdated technology. The opportunity is to modernise them and operate far more efficiently with what’s now available. For us, that means combining cloud-native development as a baseline with AI to bring genuinely old systems into the present. It’s less about inventing something brand new and more about unlocking value that already exists.

What effect do you want your work to have, apart from that measured in business terms, on people, communities, or the world?

We’re fortunate to live vicariously through our clients. We build technology for businesses doing genuinely meaningful things across health and fitness, wellness, community and NDIS, and logistics, where optimisation can even reduce emissions. The impact is real. People have collectively lost hundreds of kilos through fitness apps we’ve helped create, and hundreds have been placed into new jobs. Almost every product we build has a positive impact on someone, and that’s what makes the work matter beyond the commercial side.

Which book, idea, or piece of advice has had the greatest influence on your leadership style?

The Open Organization by Jim Whitehurst, the former Red Hat CEO. It grew from the ethos of open-source software, where the contributions with the most merit make it in, and Red Hat built its whole organisation around that. What struck me was that leadership there was based on merit, not title. Even as CEO, Whitehurst had to earn people’s trust before they’d follow him. It reframed leadership for me as something you earn. Rather than a democracy or a top-down hierarchy, it sits in the middle. People defer to whoever has the most merit on a given decision. That idea has shaped how I lead.

What advice would you give your younger self starting out?

Nothing. Ignorance is bliss. If I’d gone back and warned my younger self about everything that was going to happen along the way, I probably never would have started. Sometimes it’s best not to scare yourself out of the journey before you’ve even begun.

Visit devika.com for more information.

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