Many of the requests for funding were received in the dot-com bubble and its immediate aftermath.This poses two important problems. First,we are studying an era of early industry emergence.There was no tried-and-true way to do
business on the Internet during this period (see Goldfarb, Kirsch, and Miller, 2007). Second, our sample is Internet specific. It is unknown to what extent our results generalize to business planning documents for mature industries or to other emerging industries such as, say, biotechnology. This problem is mitigated somewhat as our sample also includes requests received during the post bust era when the industry was (slightly) more mature