Many of the solicitations came from companies that had already received financial support of one kind or another. D ANGEL takes the value of one if a non-VC round is reported in the funding request. For the 117 firms that reported private equity amounts, the mean prior investment amount (ANGEL AMOUNT) was $3.3M. ANGEL AMOUNT is highly skewed; hence we use the natural log of ANGEL AMOUNT (measured in thousands of dollars) in the regression analysis