Gera, Kirsch, and Goldfarb (2008) find that social mediation is an important determinant of venture funding acquisition for this sample. Ideally,we would add a control variable for social mediation. However, with one exception, unmediated requests never received funding from any venture capitalist. Because no additional information is needed to predict the outcome, these observations are necessarily dropped from the regression analysis. In particular, of the 1,063 requests we
observe the presence or absence of mediation for 428 requests, 302 of which were not socially mediated