> The one data point that is not specific to the incubator deal is the company description. Pitchbook does not store or provide a time-varying description of the company. Instead, for each startup I have a current description of the firm, its product, and activities, independent of its health or status. I use this information in my analyses as a way to extract information about the company’s product and thus refer to this field as product information. A key assumption in this approach is that the descriptions found in Pitchbook do not evolve as a function of early-stage funding or late-stage success which would mechanically make the descriptions predictive. To the best of my knowledge the company descriptions available to me today are not systematically different from the descriptions available to early-stage investors when they would have been engaged in due diligence. Further, all results are robust to the exclusion of the product information.

This is a prime place to go looking for a leak of signal from the future that inflated the performance of the model.

It would be interesting to go look at Pitchbook's descriptions of successful and failed startups and see if these descriptions seem to leak any information about the later success or failure of the firm.