The size of VC firms has grown over time (Gompers and Lerner, 1999). However, managerial expertise is not necessarily scalable. Hence, venture capitalists tend to finance in larger amounts than other non-venture private equity investors (Fenn, Liang, and Prowse, 1995). A request for too little money will cue the venture capitalist to the possibility that the opportunity is either not of sufficient size to be of interest, or the entrepreneurs are not particularly savvy, or both. We expect the amount requested to have high cue validity. We hypothesize: