TRISTAN DARGAY
Tristan is the Founder and Group CEO of VirCru and TAD Electronics as well as holding an interest in PID Systems and The Smartwater Group. Tristan is a serial entrepreneur having worked for himself, setting up successful businesses, since leaving Birmingham University in 2005 .
Tristan has been passionate about engineering since a young age. His mum, a Professor of Economics at Oxford and Leeds University, was a highly influential figure in his working life. An early interest in computer science and software engineering led to Tristan developing and selling software from the age of 13. This early interest in entrepreneurship set the tone for the rest of his career leading to Tristan setting up his own businesses as soon as he finished full time education.
Ironically, the first product that Tristan designed was for the marine industry. Unfortunately, it seems the marine industry wasn’t ready for him at that stage so the next 18 years were spent successfully designing and manufacturing products for industries as diverse as security, civil engineering and aviation.
As an enthusiastic boat owner, there were three things that kept Tristan up at night… Whether the isolator was off, if he’d closed the sunroof (who fits carpets in boats? They do at Janneau apparently…) and would the fridge be cold enough. Tristan knew that he could achieve all these with products that he already designed and sold with some modifications specifically for the marine industry and that, along with a desire to make the best value and best products on the market, was how VirCru was conceived.
TREVOR ANTELL
Trevor is amongst other things Quality Manager for VirCru but perhaps more importantly, brings a wealth of marine industry experience to the team having run his own businesses successfully in the marine industry for over 15 years as Managing Director of Accordant Marketing UK Ltd. Accordant Marketing are the sole European Agent for the highly respected Myerchin Range of rigging/sailing knives which are widely used by the US Military but also by both commercial and leisure sailors globally. Prior to running Accordant, Trevor had a successful career in the Ministry of Defence, most recently as Head of Operations for a site with over 400 staff.
Trevor’s interest in boats started at a young age in Weymouth, following in his dad’s footsteps as an enthusiastic dinghy sailor. Since then he has owned Mirrors, Enterprise and Lasers and still regularly sails everything from Mirror 16s to Drascomb Luggers. In addition to this, he has been volunteering (since 2004) at Dorset ‘Lowland’ Search and Rescue (DorSAR), currently Search Lead having previously served 4 years as Chairman, 8 years as Operations Officer and 3 years as Operations Coordinator. DorSAR is a 100 volunteer strong organisation specialising in the emergency searching for vulnerable missing people.
Despite this marine heritage, Trevor has managed to submerge speedboats, terrify his partner and beach multiple dinghies. Like all the VirCru team, he intends to continue to do so.
ROB WHITE
Rob is the Engineering Manager of VirCru and is responsible for herding the passionate engineers into some sort of control. Having had an interest in engineering from early days, with more of a mechanical bias than electronic leading to a degree in Mechanical Engineering, Rob has known Tristan our founder from childhood. That’s what you call teamwork!
Rob has a wealth of experience in electronic design and manufacture and a specialisation in low-power electronics, perfect for the VirCru product
Rob is our interface between the Customer and Engineer – the translator, turning valuable feedback into product improvement.
Rob is not alien to boating but openly prefers the ‘Gin-Palace’ to capsizing and getting wet.
SAM STONE
Sam is an electronic design engineer and one of the people behind the keyboard or soldering iron that makes VirCru tick. If you need technical support, there is a good chance you will get through to one of the people that designed it.
After graduating from Durham University in 2016 with a masters in general engineering, specialising in electronics, Sam joined TAD Electronics. He was keen to get stuck in with a smaller company to gain as much hands-on experience developing products from the ground up.
Since then, he has gained a wealth of experience in the design, manufacturing and programming of embedded electronics.
Sam has a passion for low-power electronics and relished the challenge of squeezing as much runtime as possible for each VirCru wireless device without compromising its ease of use. It’s his hope that once you install a VirCru wireless device, you will never have to change its battery, although if in ten years you need to it’s easy to do.