The Track Before the Road

There’s a road outside Klerksdorp that I grew up on, and another in northern Botswana that I keep going back to. Neither is signposted. Both are passable only by someone who’s already decided where they’re going. Google Maps gives up an hour before either road begins, and the map shows a grey wash where the road is supposed to be. You drive it because somewhere at the other end there’s something worth finding, and because the people who waited for the road to be paved won’t be the ones who find it.

I’ve been investing in companies the same way since 2011. More than seventy-five first cheques, three companies of my own, and one pattern that repeats so often I’ve stopped pretending it’s 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, in a market that’s shaped wrong, where regulation hasn’t caught up and the category doesn’t yet exist on a slide. What you’re looking at, before any deck, is a person who’s lived inside the problem long enough to be impatient with everyone who hasn’t.

Wise was that in 2011, at pre-seed, in the first round the company ever raised: a small team in a London office with an idea about international money transfer that nobody serious in financial services believed could work at scale. It didn’t matter that my cheque went in before the unit economics were defensible because the founders had lived the problem so completely that they’d stopped arguing about whether it mattered. They were arguing about how to build it.

Tide was the same in 2015, when I co-founded it and funded it from the start: a small-business banking platform, ahead of PSD2 and before the incumbents had worked out what open banking would mean.

Neither bet was obvious at the time, and that was the point: once it was obvious, the cheque was gone. The opportunity lives in the gap between a founder’s insight and the market’s consensus, and the gap closes the moment somebody else can see what the founder sees.

What the track teaches you

The Kalahari doesn’t tolerate pretension, and neither does an early-stage investment. If a founder can’t explain the problem in language a driver would understand on a long empty stretch of road, the bet is too clever. If the team is performing rather than doing, the wheels 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 doesn’t announce itself, judgement in conditions that don’t improve, and a willingness to keep moving when the surface turns unpredictable. Those are the same properties that separate founders who get a company through its early years from founders who burn capital trying to look like they’re getting it through.

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’s always broadcasting is rarely the founder who’s solving, and the signal is in what someone does with the empty time. I 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. A founder with real insight has a head start on the rest of the market, and that head start compounds while the market is still deciding whether the problem matters. Time inside the problem is the only asset an early company has, and it’s the one asset capital can’t copy.

So the compounding asset is the founder’s conviction rather than the technology, and the particular shape of that conviction decides what the product becomes. The investor’s job is to recognise it in the first conversation, tell it apart 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: execution against a known thesis at a price everyone can see. There’s money in that game, but it isn’t ours. Ours is the cheque written when the only evidence is the founder, the problem and the first signs that the thing is real.

What we bring when we arrive early

The cheque is only part of what arriving early means. The rest is the operating experience that comes with it: hiring before the founder knows what kind of company they’re building, working out how to carry yourself with a regulator before you’ve met one, and handling a board before it has settled, when one wrong director eats the hours that belong to customers. I’ve been on the other side of all of those, more than once.

Co-founding Tide taught me the version of these problems you only see when the regulator is also in the room. Wonga taught me the version you only see when the product decides in real time and the company is Britain’s fastest-growing technology company, as we were in 2011, when Wonga topped the Sunday Times Tech Track 100. 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 doesn’t arrive. None of that is in a textbook. It’s miles on the clock, and it comes with the cheque.

Where we go next

The dust road isn’t a metaphor we picked for a brand exercise. It’s the landscape that shaped how we think, and the place I go back to when the noise gets too loud. It taught me what useful preparation looks like and what performative preparation looks like, and the investment philosophy has 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.

We’re looking for founders who’ve already started walking, and who’d rather have the cheque that arrives on the track before the road than the one that arrives once it’s paved.