What is the dust-road thesis?

The dust road is the literal road outside Klerksdorp where Errol grew up — unpaved, unsignposted, only navigable by knowing where you wanted to go. The investing thesis carries the same shape: back companies whose market has not formed a view yet, where the analysts are not covering, where the consensus has not arrived, and where the founder has already started walking. The cost of entry is low because nobody else can see what the founder can see. The cost of hesitation is high because by the time the consensus arrives, you are no longer the first cheque.

What does Dust Road Ventures invest in?

First or second cheques at seed stage in fintech, AI, health-tech, and enterprise software. The cheque size is small. The conviction is large. The firm is kept intentionally narrow because the investments worth making are the ones that nobody else wants to make yet, and that is a skill that does not scale by adding partners.

How do you tell a real dust road from ordinary stubbornness?

Real dust-road founders have lived inside the problem long enough that their fluency is biographical, not analytical. They answer edge-case questions with stories, not frameworks. They have already decided what to do, and the meeting is a formality. They have a high tolerance for being wrong about details and a near-zero tolerance for being wrong about the shape of the problem. Stubborn founders look similar from a distance and become indistinguishable from the real thing in a pitch. They diverge in the second hour of the second meeting.

Why I Invest on Dust Roads

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, 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 the founder 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 full-time. Supply Chain Connect in 2000. Wonga in 2006. Then a long stretch through and after Wonga, with the angel portfolio that grew into Dust Road Ventures.

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. The early backers of Wonga were the ones who could see past the consensus that 2006 was a bad year to start a finance company, that automated decisioning was a niche, and that the kind of customer the existing banks were turning down was not worth lending to. Each of those positions was the consensus when the company was being built. Each was wrong.

Each of those businesses was started 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.

The pattern shows up in three specific ways, and learning to read all three is most of the work.

The first is that the best founders 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 addressable market, 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.

Where the cheques have gone

The early cheques tell the same story. I wrote one of the first cheques into Wise — then TransferWise — in 2011, when it was a pre-revenue currency-transfer experiment a few months past launch. I backed Cazoo at the deck stage in 2018, before the product existed. I was an early investor in Tide before the small-business digital bank had reached its first cohort of customers. I have publicly defended Bitcoin as a censor-resistant store of value through a decade in which the rest of the financial system was treating it first as a curiosity, then as a threat.

The pattern across those is the same. Each was a dust road when the cheque went in. The valuations were not heroic because the consensus had not arrived. The diligence was constrained by the absence of data. The decision had to be made on the shape of the problem and the texture of the founder, because that was all there was to read. The road only looks obvious in the rear-view mirror.

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.

Questions

What is the dust-road thesis?: The dust road is the literal road outside Klerksdorp where Errol grew up — unpaved, unsignposted, only navigable by knowing where you wanted to go. The investing thesis carries the same shape: back companies whose market has not formed a view yet, where the analysts are not covering, where the consensus has not arrived, and where the founder has already started walking. The cost of entry is low because nobody else can see what the founder can see. The cost of hesitation is high because by the time the consensus arrives, you are no longer the first cheque.
What does Dust Road Ventures invest in?: First or second cheques at seed stage in fintech, AI, health-tech, and enterprise software. The cheque size is small. The conviction is large. The firm is kept intentionally narrow because the investments worth making are the ones that nobody else wants to make yet, and that is a skill that does not scale by adding partners.
Why permanent capital instead of a traditional fund?: No fund cycle, no LP committee, no deployment pressure. 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 is the only structure that makes that kind of patience possible without compromise.
How do you tell a real dust road from ordinary stubbornness?: Real dust-road founders have lived inside the problem long enough that their fluency is biographical, not analytical. They answer edge-case questions with stories, not frameworks. They have already decided what to do, and the meeting is a formality. They have a high tolerance for being wrong about details and a near-zero tolerance for being wrong about the shape of the problem. Stubborn founders look similar from a distance and become indistinguishable from the real thing in a pitch. They diverge in the second hour of the second meeting.