There is a moment in every investment decision when you know less than you would like to and more than you can afford to ignore. The pitch deck is thin. The financials are a sketch. But the founder is sitting across from you, and something about the way they describe the problem tells you they have been living inside it for years. That moment is the dust road.
The dust road is not a metaphor I invented for venture capital. It is the actual road I grew up on. Klerksdorp, South Africa — a small mining town in what was then the western Transvaal — sat at the edge of a country that was itself at the edge of something it could not yet name. The roads out of town turned to dirt within a few miles. The wilderness backed onto the family home. You knew where the road was going only by knowing where you wanted to go. There was no signage. The track didn’t announce itself. You had to read it.
I have spent the years since looking for that same condition in investments. The best ones share the same shape: the path is not obvious yet, but the founder has already started walking it. The market has not formed a view, the analysts are not covering it, and the consensus has not arrived. The cost of entry is low because nobody else can see what you can see. The cost of hesitation is high because by the time the consensus arrives, you are no longer the first cheque.
Conviction before consensus
I built three companies before I started writing cheques. Supply Chain Connect in 2000, Wonga in 2006, and Tide in 2015. Each was a dust road when it began. Supply Chain Connect was a hosted, cloud-based B2B procurement platform built from London during the dot-com bust — at a moment when European venture had virtually shut down and most of the people I respected thought the SaaS premise was dead. Wonga was an automated consumer credit decisioning system at a time when every financial services peer in the country was telling me that machine-driven credit was unworkable, regulators would never accept it, and customers would never trust it. Tide was a digital bank for small businesses launched in the narrow window between PSD2 and the first wave of challenger-banking attention — we co-founded it before the regulatory framework was settled and built it into infrastructure used by hundreds of thousands of UK small businesses.
Each of those three businesses was built against a strong consensus that they would not work. Each of them did. I do not say that to claim foresight — I say it because the pattern is the lesson. Every great company I have backed shares a version of this: a founder who sees a path that the market does not, with enough operating intuition to know which corners of the path are real and which are wishful thinking.
Every great company I have backed was a dust road when I first encountered it. The road only looked obvious in the rear-view mirror.
What the Kalahari taught me
I drive in the Kalahari most years — long, slow trips through Botswana, the Makgadikgadi salt pans, the mopane woodland after the first rains. The terrain teaches a kind of decision-making that finance schools cannot. Out there, the signal is sparse. There is no map detailed enough to be useful. The weather can change a track from passable to lost in a single afternoon. The animals are not background — they are the foreground, and they are not curated for your visit. The vehicle either gets through or it does not.
The lesson the bush keeps teaching me is that the right vehicle, the right equipment, and the right preparation will only get you part of the way. After that, you have to read the ground. You have to know the difference between a rut that will hold and a rut that will swallow the wheel. You have to know when to commit and when to back out and find a different line. Most of all, you have to be willing to be uncomfortable for long stretches in service of arriving somewhere worth arriving at.
Investing is the same. The pitch deck is the equipment. The founder is the terrain. The investor is the driver who has to read both and decide whether the line will hold. The best founders I have backed have a quality that takes some time to recognise: they have already lived inside the problem long enough that they know which ruts will hold. The pitch is just the language they have learned to translate the lived experience into. The conviction is older than the deck.
Why I do this with permanent capital
Dust Road Ventures deploys permanent family capital. There is no fund cycle, no LP committee, no deployment pressure. That structure is not vanity — it is the only structure that lets me make these decisions the way I think they should be made. The best founders are not always ready to raise on the calendar a fund needs them to. The best companies often need an investor willing to sit through a quiet two-year stretch where nothing is working and nobody is paying attention. Permanent capital lets me be patient when the market wants me to be busy.
I write first or second cheques at seed stage in fintech, AI, health-tech, and enterprise software. The cheque size is small. The conviction is large. I keep the firm intentionally narrow because the investments I want to make are the ones that nobody else wants to make yet, and that is a skill that does not scale by adding partners.
How to find me
If you are building something the market does not yet know it needs — if your path is not paved, if your conviction is older than your deck, if you have been living inside the problem long enough that the answer is starting to feel obvious to you and bewildering to everyone else — then we should talk. The road won’t be easy. The cheque will not solve the problem on its own. But it might be the signal you needed at the moment you needed it.
Email me directly: errol@dustroad.vc. I read every message that lands there.