There is a moment, in the early life of every great company, when the founder sees something the market does not yet believe. The pitch is rough. The financials are a sketch. The product is held together with a rubber band and two engineers. But the founder has been living inside the problem for years, and the way they describe it tells you they understand something the rest of the world has not caught up to.
The work of investing, at its best, is recognising those moments and being present for them.
The best opportunities tend to emerge in sectors where the gap between genuine insight and market consensus is widest. The bigger the gap, the bigger the opportunity — and the longer the founder has had to live alone with their conviction before someone is willing to fund it. Most early-stage decisions are not about predicting the future. They are about reading the distance between what is true and what is currently believed, and committing capital before the two converge.
I have written first or second cheques into more than seventy-five companies since 2011. The pattern repeats. The founders I back tend to share three things, and none of them are predictable from a deck.
The first is that they have a relationship with the problem that is deep and personal. They are not solving a problem they read about. They are solving a problem they have lived. Their fluency is not analytical; it is biographical. When you ask them to describe an edge case, they answer with a story. When you ask them to describe their TAM, they tell you about a customer.
The second is that they have already decided what to do, and the meeting is a formality. They are not gathering information from investors. They are gathering capital. The question of whether the company will be built has been answered, by them, before they walked into the room. The remaining question is with whom it will be built. That asymmetry is everything. It flips the dynamic of a fundraising meeting from sale to selection. The best founders are picking their investors the way a captain picks a crew: slowly, carefully, and with a clear sense of which seas they expect to sail.
The third is that they have a high tolerance for being wrong about details and a near-zero tolerance for being wrong about the shape of the problem. They will rewrite the product three times. They will not rewrite the thesis. The distinction is what allows them to learn from the market without being moved by it.
Pattern recognition is the wrong phrase for what this work actually requires. It implies that the patterns repeat exactly, and that experience is a kind of filing cabinet. The truth is closer to taste. The same instinct that lets a musician hear when a chord is one note off lets a builder feel when a thesis is one assumption off. Most of the work is sitting with the discomfort of not yet being able to say why a deal feels right or wrong, and trusting the discomfort enough to act on it.
The hardest part of running on insight rather than consensus is that you are often early. Sometimes early by years. Wise was a pre-revenue company when I backed it. Cazoo was a deck. Tide had not yet been founded. Bitcoin was an idea I first encountered in 2012, when most of the global financial system was treating it as a curiosity. Each of those felt like a stretch at the time. The distance between the insight and the consensus was the whole point.
The risk in this approach is well known: you can be wrong, expensively, and the market does not always come round to the insight. The discipline that separates good early-stage investing from bad is the discipline of asking, at every cheque, what would have to be true for this to work? — and then asking how much of that does the founder already understand, and how much of it are they relying on the rest of us to figure out? The answer is usually a mixture. The mixture has to be honest.
The dust road is the metaphor I keep returning to. The roads of southern Africa are unpaved, uncertain, and the only way to get somewhere no one has been. Founders who are willing to walk the dust road do it because they are sure of where the road is going, even when they cannot prove it to anyone else. The investor’s job is to recognise that conviction, distinguish it from ordinary stubbornness, and back it before the road is paved and the rest of the market arrives.
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.