We explore a well-known instance of fast decision making under high uncertainty, venture
capital (VC) opportunity screening. We analyze a sample of 722 funding requests submitted
to an American VC firm and evaluate the influence of the form of the submission and content
of business planning documents on VC funding decisions. We improve on prior literature by a)
using a large sample of known representativeness, b) relating request characteristics to actual
VC decisions, and c) developing an inferential logic that takes account of the multiple sources
of information to which VCs have access. We find that the presence of planning documents and
some information contained therein are weakly associated with VC funding decisions. Based on
our inferential strategy, we find that this information is learned independently of its inclusion in
the business planning documents