There's some good advice in here regarding attitude and hustle.

Can I give one more piece of advice? If you (correctly) figure out that the reason you aren't getting given jobs / funding / etc is a lack of connections, then you should optimize for achieving connections. This doesn't come naturally to everybody, myself included, but it isn't harder than lots of things which are table stakes to being an engineer.

Similarly, if you keep getting told No and think you need social proof... then get social proof. Plan B, whining about how humans have exploitable deficiencies in decisionmaking processes such as requiring social proof, is distinctly suboptimal.