To explore the relationship between the content of business planning documents and the observed outcome of the proposed venture, we exploit a sample of funding requests submitted to a single VC firm based in the Northeast United States from April 1999 to February 2002. The requests in the sample were received during the peak of the dot-com bubble and its immediate aftermath.The VC firm that received the requests partnered with a major Internet portal; over 89 percent of the requests proposed to create dot-com firms (defined with reference to the taxonomy of Internet business models proposed in Afuah and Tucci (2003)).The potential implications of sampling during this period are addressed more fully in the discussion below