Why I Invest on Dust Roads

There is a road outside Klerksdorp that I grew up on, and another in northern Botswana that I keep returning to. Neither is signposted. Both are passable only by someone who has already decided where they are going. The GPS gives up an hour before either road begins. The map shows a kind of grey wash where the road is supposed to be. You drive it because somewhere, at the other end, there is a thing worth finding — and because the people who waited for the road to be paved will not be the ones who find it.

I have been investing in companies the same way since 2011. Seventy-five-plus first or second cheques, three companies of my own founded along the way, and a single pattern that repeats so often I have stopped pretending it is anything else: the cheques that compound are written before the road is paved.

Before the road is built

The pattern is older than venture. A founder sees a problem nobody else has named. The market is shaped wrong. Regulation has not caught up. The category does not exist on a slide. What you are looking at is not a deck — it is a person who has lived inside the problem long enough to be impatient with everyone who has not.

Wise was that, pre-revenue, in 2011. A small team in a London office with an idea about international money transfer that nobody serious in financial services believed could clear regulatory friction at scale. The cheque went in before the unit economics were defensible, because the founders had lived the problem so completely that they were no longer arguing about whether it mattered. They were arguing about how to build it.

Tide was the same in 2015, when I co-founded it as a small-business challenger bank in the gap between PSD2 and the first wave of incumbents waking up to what open banking would mean. Cazoo was a deck in 2018 — a category, online car retail in the UK, that several investors I respect privately told me was an impossible-margin business. None of those bets was obvious at the time of writing. That was the point. The cheques would not have been available at later valuations because the people writing later cheques would be writing them on different information — they would be writing them after the consensus arrived, at the prices the consensus produces.

The pattern compresses to a sentence: opportunity lives in the gap between insight and consensus, and the gap closes the moment somebody else can see what the founder is seeing.

What the track teaches you

The Kalahari does not tolerate pretension. Neither does an early-stage investment. If the founder cannot explain the problem in language a driver could understand on a long stretch of empty road, the bet is too clever. If the team is performing rather than doing, the wheels will spin out at the first soft patch. If the cap table looks like a press release, somebody is paying tourist prices.

What the track rewards is preparation that does not announce itself, judgement under conditions that do not improve, and a willingness to keep moving when the surface gets unpredictable. Those are the same properties that separate the founders who get a company across the early years from the founders who burn capital trying to look like they are getting it across.

The other thing the track teaches you is that distance is mostly silence. The conversations that matter happen between the noisy ones. A founder who is constantly broadcasting is rarely the founder who is solving. The signal is in what someone does with the empty time. We try to write cheques to people who use the silence well.

The compounding asset is conviction

The structural reason early-stage investing works is unglamorous. Founders with real insight have a head start on the rest of the market that compounds while the market is still deciding the problem matters. Time alone inside the problem is the only asset a pre-revenue company has, and it is the only asset that cannot be copied with capital.

The compounding asset, then, is not the technology. It is the founder’s conviction, the unique shape of which determines what the product becomes. The investor’s job is to recognise that conviction in the first conversation, distinguish it from stubbornness in the second, and back it before anyone else has had to choose.

Cheques written after the consensus arrives are bets on a different game. They are bets on execution against a known thesis at known multiples. There is money in that game; it is just not our game. Our game is the cheque that gets written when the only available source of information is the founder, the problem, and the slow accumulation of evidence that a thing is real before the world is willing to call it real.

What we bring when we arrive early

The cheque is only one part of what arriving early means. The other part is the operator experience that comes with it. Hiring decisions that need to be made before the founder has done the maths on what kind of company they want; regulatory questions where the answer is “do not pick a fight you cannot afford to win, even when you are right”; board dynamics in the first 24 months where the wrong director will eat hours that should be spent on customers. We have been on the other side of all of those, more than once.

The Tide co-founder seat taught me the version of these problems you only see when the regulator is also in the room. The Wonga chair taught me the version you only see when the company is the centre of a public argument and the operating team has to keep shipping anyway. Supply Chain Connect taught me the version you only see when the cycle turns and the cheque you were counting on for the next round does not arrive. None of those is in a textbook. They are the miles on the clock.

Where we go next

The dust road is not a metaphor we picked for a brand exercise. It is the actual landscape that shaped how we think, the place we return to when the noise gets too loud in London, the terrain that taught us what useful preparation looks like and what performative preparation looks like. The investment philosophy carries the same shape: arrive before the road is paved, judge the founder by what they do with the empty stretches, and back the conviction before the consensus catches up.

Insight is local. Consensus is collective. They diverge by definition.

Most of the work, in a life of building and investing, lives in the long distance between them. We are looking for founders who have already started walking that distance — and who would prefer the cheque that arrives in the dust to the one that arrives once the road is paved.

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