WHO WE ARE

Peter Nolle
Chair & Treasurer

Peter is the Founder and Director of a specialised consulting firm Treadstone, specialising in tax rebates and government grants for innovative technology businesses.

His extensive business and financial management experience was gained from a career spanning over 17 years in engineering, finance and information technology industries, working both in the UK and more recently, Australia.

Peter’s background includes managing a technology spin-off business which developed a prototype mobile phone/email platform for international markets from 2007 to 2008.

He works with a wide range of innovative and exciting Australian technology companies.

Connect with Peter on LinkedIn.

Toby Norgate

Secretary

Toby is a Partner at Colin Biggers & Paisley lawyers in Melbourne.

He enjoys working with growing companies to establish sound legal structures, negotiate good commercial deals and acquire and grow new businesses. More and more of his clients are relying on or grappling with emerging technologies.

Toby has over 19 years legal experience including four years co-managing the legal and market supervision teams at the New Zealand Stock Exchange (NZX), three years as a finance sector regulator and time on secondment in the legal team of Australia’s largest Telco.

These roles, and his day to day client work, have given him close involvement and insight into the issues being faced by today’s businesses.

Connect with Toby on LinkedIn.

Michele Playfair

Michele is an Executive Director at YOW! Conferences, a not-for-profit organisation whose mission is to build the next generation of IT leaders and encourage excellence and innovation amongst the APAC software development community. 

Michele is a consummate software development generalist, having successfully performed in roles ranging from pre-sales and business analysis, through design, development and testing, to production support and training/coaching. She is also a qualified high school I.T. teacher. 

Having started her career as a consultant on large scale retail banking implementations for major US and NZ banks, and then working within Agile product development environments back in Australia, these days Michele is focused on continuous improvement through education. She gets excited about learning, teaching and using collaboration for the greater good.

Connect with Michele on LinkedIn

Gretchen Scott

Gretchen has a passion for encouraging and supporting diverse people in technology. After completing a Bachelor in Operations Research she applied these skills in a variety of industries, from agriculture through to plastic surgery and even the World Rally Championships in NZ.

Gretchen is currently the Chief Operating Officer at Linc.sh, a Melbourne-based technology company that have built a CI/CD tool specially designed for frontend development.

Prior to this, she completed a Diploma of IT and spent time teaching web development and working in business development roles. She has been using her technology experience to help make tech a viable career option for diverse people and was pivotal in her organisation receiving a Diversity in Tech merit Award in 2019.

Gretchen hosted a panel at the inaugural Grace Hopper Conference in 2019 and she is actively involved in the tech community having hosted talks at DDD Melbourne’s 10th conference. She is also a Director of Women Who Code Melbourne, which was the fastest-growing chapter of Women Who Code worldwide in 2019.

Connect with Gretchen on Linkedin