“…The company description was modeled after a real-world company that has recently been considered for VC funding. In the scenario description, we controlled for a set of factors that previous research has indicated to be influential, such as referral, characteristics of the management team, deal strategy, and equity stake 10 ENTREPRENEURSHIP THEORY and PRACTICE (Franke, Gruber, Harhoff, & Henkel, 2008;Fried & Hisrich, 1994;Matusik, George, & Heeley, 2008;Petty & Gruber, 2011). Each respondent was then presented with a series of prospective investment opportunity profiles to consider, which were associated with a different configuration of affiliated angel characteristics (experiment 1) or affiliated crowdfund characteristics (experiment 2).…”