As to the investors contacted vs meetings plot, the red line is evidently bogus. It is likely caused by trying to fit the data to some polynomial for which the

As to the investors contacted vs meetings plot, the red line is evidently bogus. It is likely caused by trying to fit the data to some polynomial for which there is no a priori justification. A straight-line fit would look more reasonable and also be less affected by one "outlier" who contacted 300 investors. I would agree that cutting-off curve fitting at 100-150 investors would look prettier; the thing to do in that case would be either to not attempt to fit a curve and just show the data, or alternately to fit only the earlier part (so the red line stops half-way across the x-axis), but show all the data. The only reason for doing a curve fit on this kind of data is to show that the data fit some prior model, showing that the model is likely correct, or to show where some statistical value lies.