Incubane co-founder on choosing freedom over title, and betting big on other people's potential.
Emma Coppin
Multimedia Content Lead, Thought Leadership and Customer Stories
Workday
Matt Komendolowicz, co-founder of Incubane, grew up in Warsaw, Poland, in the early years of the country's democracy. His family was lucky enough to be living that chapter of their lives in a free state. That freedom for Komendolowicz meant access to books, and, around the age of six, access to a computer. He was, in his own words, always a nerd, and those early years were spent playing video games and figuring out what the machine could do.
Early access set him on a path that would eventually look, from the outside, like the definition of success. Komendolowicz took the classic route through strategic consulting and then IT consulting, rising through the ranks until he was named a global vice president of a large organization at 30. The title, the team, and the salary were his.
However, as Komendolowicz reflects back at that time, "it didn't bring me the joy that I thought it would bring me."
So together with his friend Rick, he stepped away from the security and prestige to launch Incubane, a Workday innovation partner. "We were not walking away from money or titles," Komendolowicz says. "We were walking towards freedom."
"We were walking towards freedom."
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The pull toward software started early. Komendolowicz is clear that hardware never interested him. "I'm still kind of afraid of it, honestly, till this day."
Software, on the other hand, offered the ability to build something that benefited someone else. "It always amazed me that you can create something that easily. And someone else can use it."
That amazement hasn't worn off. Komendolowicz still talks about the thrill of it in almost physical terms—the idea that you could "be at the desk in the middle of nowhere or sit at a beach in Bali and create an application that's used by millions of people.” Such outsized reach, he says, "is only possible with software."
He'd eventually chase that feeling into Incubane. The company runs on three stated values: innovation, quality, and fun. Of the three, fun is the one Komendolowicz insists matters most. “If you're not having fun while doing all of it, then why are you even doing it? Life is very short, right?"
For Komendolowicz, that means posting what they want on social media, wearing 'crazy t-shirts' to conferences, and taking on projects because they're interesting rather than because they're the safest business bet.
It also means being selective about who they work with. "It's completely fine to work with the people you want, and that's it," he says—a boundary he holds without apology.
Asked about his professional superpower, Komendolowicz shares that he’s at ease sitting in meetings with people who don't understand software but understand exactly what their business needs, and he can turn that conversation into something real.
Sometimes reading people means recognizing when someone else is capable of incredible things, and doing your best to foster that potential. Years ago at a different company, Komendolowicz worked with a developer based in India — someone he describes simply as "a fantastic developer." He made the case to hire the developer, and to relocate him and his family to London. "He risked a lot," Komendolowicz says. "He changed the company, he changed countries, he moved continents."
That developer is now, in Komendolowicz's estimation, among the top five Workday Extend architects in the world, and "the superstar of our ecosystem." Seeing him at DevCon, years later, still gets to Komendolowicz, who is evidently proud and happy for him.
What stays with him isn't the outcome so much as how little control he had over it. "It felt like it was their success, but it felt like I was part of it," he says. "I think when someone else succeeds and they don't expect it, but you kind of thought, ‘this person will be really good at it’ – I think it brings you way more joy."
Ask Komendolowicz for his favorite piece of developer tooling, and the answer skips the software entirely: "My absolute favorite dev tool is community." It's consistent with how he defines the job itself. "A great developer is not someone who writes the perfect code," he says. "It's someone who listens to other people."
"A great developer is not someone who writes the perfect code. It's someone who listens to other people."
That belief shapes how he talks about Workday DevCon, and what he thinks the event is actually for: not the sessions, not the product announcements, but the people in the room. "The real value here is meeting people," he says. The community, he believes, works because it shares freely, innovating together.It’s why he keeps coming back: in this community, no matter how much you know, there is always more to learn from each other."
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