Conditional on its inclusion, if the cue is communicative,
larger teams should be associated with
better outcomes. If founding team size plays a ceremonial
role, venture capitalists will not care about
the actual size of the founding team, and we will
not find a relationship between founding team size
and outcomes. A finding that neither inclusion of a
cue nor its content conditional on inclusion is predictive
of VC decisions suggests that the candidate
cue is ignored by venture capitalists.
Importantly, a finding that included information
content matters is a sufficient test to conclude that
this cue is communicative, though it is insufficient
to conclude that this information was learned from
planning documents. As discussed above, when
entrepreneurs strategically include positive information,
the information content from those funding
requests will be more favorable than the information
that would have been included by the omitting
entrepreneurs. Hence, if VC decision makers are
acquiring this information from reviewed business
planning documents, we should also expect to find
a relationship between inclusion of information
and outcomes. If we do not, then investors are
acquiring information by other means. We apply
this logic to the nested hypotheses below and summarize
it in Table 1.7
Application of this logic requires an additional,
important assumption. One must assume that the
content of a request does not deviate from the
actual attributes of the underlying venture, or
if it does deviate, this deviation is systematic.
According to Bull and Watson (2004), we would
not expect systematic deviation for easily verifiable
information, although it may occur if some
entrepreneurs are particularly na¨ıve or when information
is difficult to verify. For example, revenue
projections are likely to deviate systematically
because they are difficult to verify. Therefore,
revenue projections may be biased upward, but
will be discounted accordingly by venture capitalists.
If we identify a relationship between revenue
7 As noted, this inferential strategy requires the assumption that
there is sufficient variation conditional on information inclusion.
If the inclusion of information is strategic, as suggested by Bull
and Watson (2004), then it will only appear in the planning
documents if it is difficult to verify and/or favorable. To exploit
the conditional information, we must believe that entrepreneurs
occasionally err by including business attributes that decrease
the likelihood of funding. Given the complexity of the venture
funding process, it is unlikely that entrepreneurs, in general,
understand the decision criteria of VCs to such a precise degree
that no negative information would appear in funding requests.