I'm Nicolas Hoban. I build things on the internet from Melbourne.

I didn't start in tech. I started in law, working as a paralegal in Melbourne before moving to The Hague to support trial teams in the Office of the Prosecutor at the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Preparing evidence for war crimes trials teaches you a lot about detail, pressure, and doing work that matters.

Then I caught the startup bug and never looked back. I spent nearly three years with Slush, the Helsinki conference that gathers 15,000 founders and investors, and worked across other global events like Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and Startup Fusion in Madrid, hosting pitch competitions that featured companies like BitMEX. I helped bring that energy home too, establishing Slush Downunder, which grew into Australia's Myriad conference.

Back in Melbourne I started building my own things. Studychatr helped university students collaborate and find graduate roles. In 2019 I co-founded Wicked Sites, a studio that designs and builds for Australian businesses including Tennis Australia, the RACGP, Travel Massive, and Allocator. And when COVID hit, we built Crisis Heroes, which won a global Devpost innovation award and grew into Kindly, a kindness marketplace that connected more than 20,000 volunteers across Australia.

Today most of my focus is Petal. Our open source component library has been downloaded more than 1.4 million times and runs in production at billion-dollar companies like Woolworths and NFI Industries, while Petal Pro gives developers a production-ready foundation for Phoenix apps. Petal and Wicked Sites both sit under Everfree, the company we've bootstrapped from nothing to more than $1M in revenue. Lately I've been all in on AI and how it reshapes the way products get built.

I think of myself as a technologist more than a specialist: happiest working across product, business, and code to turn an idea into something real. Outside of work I'm a family man with my wife and two sons, and you'll usually find me running, at the gym, on the golf course, or at home on the guitar or piano.