About Me
More about my business and technology journey.
Personal Life
I live in Dublin, Ireland, with my wife and three children.
I love sports, and was once-upon-a-time lucky enough to play minor football for Kildare, and professional rugby for Leinster. These days I can be found most weekends on the side of a sports field cheering on my kids.
Business Life
I like to consider myself a generalist.
Curiousity and opportunity has meant that I have worked in a number of different roles and industries. This variety has helped me get a broad education in various business disciplines across commercials and operations, as well as technology.
While my expertise lies in software development, I have always wanted to learn as much as I could about building and growing businesses. This has led me into multiple roles across operations and leadership roles, as well as various sized companies including startups and enterprise.
Working as a consultant allows me to get bring this broad experience and expertise to created connected strategies across not just technology, but the wider business.
My Journey
Not sure what I wanted to do, I decided to study Mechanical Engineering in Trinity College Dublin. It didn't make me want to become an engineer, but it did give me a great foundation in problem solving and solution building.
It was just for one year, but it was a fantastic year. I got to play with world-class players and it opened my eyes to what the 'next level' could look like.
My first business venture was as part of the founding team behind a Maori rugby sportswear brand called Taiaha Sportswear. I learned a huge amount as part of this venture straight out of college.
For my final year project in university I taught myself to code and built an award winning learning tool. It still took me until 2010 to realise I should do it as a profession.
In 2015 I co-founded a travel technology startup called Dynamic Reservations, focused on the retail travel trade. I learned a huge amount through this journey on building a product from scratch, fund-raising, customer development, customer research and much much more. We raised funding through private investment and Enterprise Ireland to bring Dynamic Res to market, but unfortunately this venture ended in 2018.
In 2018 an opportunity arose to help bring an innovative construction business to market in Ireland. Skystone was a modular construction company based in the US and my very interesting role involved the certifying of this impressive technology.
In 2020, keen to learn more about marketing, I took on a role as part-time Operations Director with VROOM where we helped move the team from in-office to remote while expanding the business.
During COVID, I co-founded a technology platform that helps companies to compliantly assess their remote staffs' workstations. All Set Workplace is still growing as the platform has evolved to meet the demands of enterprise clients.
In 2022, I began as a fractional CTO for a fintech startup out of the US called Finray which tackled the complex world of data Product Control within the banking industry. This role grew into a full-time role managing a remote development team using a variety of data-focused technologies and on-premise focused product delivery.
In 2024 I began focusing on offering fractional CTO services and general technology consulting services to the startups, scaleups, and enterprises.
The emergence of AI has brought about new opportunities and challenges to businesses all over the world. My broad experience helps to understand how and when to implement this new technology.
Testimonials
Some kinds words with companies I have worked with in the past.
Daragh came in as a fractional CTO initially as we were building out our MVP of Finray prior to raising our seed round. Daragh helped to strategically align our product team and deliver a complex data solution for on-premise deployment.
Daragh remained onboard for over 18 months as he helped implement our MVP with our team.
Eoghan O' Griobhtha
Daragh helped us to better adopt AI tools to improve our productivity and customer service. His advice and insights were invaluable and game-changing for us.
We plan to continue to evolve our AI adoption with Daragh as the technology evolves.
Diarmuid Curtin
Daragh was hired to help us to improve some internal collaboration tools and was able to rapidly develop a solution that was used company-wide.
Our teams were delighted with the robust and usable interfaces that greatly improved our decision making and productivity and the tools he built were easy to adopt and to maintain.
Greg Thompson
Daragh helped me to custom-build a tool in Coda that implemented my UX framework for handling complex business processes.
He has great ideas and suggestions, and has expertise that allowed me to get a solution turned around very quickly.
I am very happy with the consultation and partnership.
Rob Manzano
Daragh put in place some tools and processes that has allowed us to serve even more clients faster.
As a busy MD with little time on my hands, this was exactly the kind of help I needed to give me the confidence to grow VROOM Digital.
Daragh is passionate, smart, and reliable. We've continued to work with Daragh on a number of projects following the scucess of our first engagement.
Shane Curtin
I hired Daragh to consult on our Fintech startup, because of his experience in startup land: raising funding, building an MVP and working with Enterprise Ireland.
His lean and agile approach to our startup really helped us to formulate the best way to get our MVP built using existing technologies in the fastest time.
I woud have no hesitation recommending Daragh.
Ruairi Gough