We present four stylized facts about the Dot Com Era: (1) there was a widespread belief in a Get Big Fast business strategy; (2) the increase and decrease in public and private equity investment was most prominent in the internet and information technology sectors; (3) the survival rate of dot...

In this paper, we establish a series of starting points for understanding the emergence of the industries associated with the commercial internet. First, we report baseline estimates of the number of internet technology companies created from 1994-2001. Approximately 50,000 companies solicited...

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...

We explore the effectiveness of economic experimentation as a learning mechanism through a historical exploration of the early automobile industry. Our quantitative analysis suggests that economic experimentation was associated with success. We then leverage historical methods to understand if...

We explore the effectiveness of economic experimentation as a learning mechanism through a historical exploration of the early automobile industry. We focus on a particular subset of economic experiments, called strategic pivots, that requires irreversible firm commitments. Our quantitative...

We examine the role of angel investors in early venture financing using a unique sample of 182 Series A preferred stock rounds. Our sample includes deals in which angels invest alone, VCs invest alone, and where both investor types co-invest. We find that deals with more angel investors have...

A novel database of business planning documents that closely approximates the population of Dot-Com entrepreneurs is introduced and used to compile three estimates: 1) the survival rate of dot-com startups, which we find is 48%; 2) the number of dot-com startups from 1998-2002, which we find to...

We analyze the extent to which efficient trade is possible in an ongoing relationship between impatient agents with hidden valuations (i.i.d. over time), restricting attention to equilibria that satisfy ex post incentive constraints in each period. With ex ante budget balance, efficient trade...