Congrats, also for being honest and mentioning you previously worked in VC and had ivy-league connections.
Myself and my co-founder never had time to go network or sell to investors, building a product just took 200% of our time. Having a moonshot idea and big market didn't matter. We just didn't have the connections or the time to build them. Looking back that is all that mattered. They didn't care we had customers and revenue and a good deck or market.