ABSTRACT
We have seen above that the forms of evidence we gathered are of both the quantitative (e.g. what is your IRR?) and qualitative (e.g. what are the objectives of your financial modelling?) variety. This chapter focuses on the quantitative evidence. By contrast with Chapter 4, which is largely narrative in its approach to statistical evidence, here we focus on inferences. That is to say, we ask what may be inferred from the data, with a reasonable degree of certainty. In doing so, we continue the work of Chapter 5, which was also inferential in character. In that chapter, we focused on the relative judgements made by entrepreneurs and venture capital (VC) investors about risk classes (e.g. categorised by stage of investment). By contrast, here we focus on the investor evidence (compare Proimos and Wright, 2005, for an Australian example).
