I came from a low income situation in Appalachia. Friends and family had zero money for such things as well.

I have one central piece of advice: build something that matters, something that is good, something that can get attention. It doesn't have to be giant in scope. It's a leveling thing, if you make yourself hard to ignore by being great at something. There are few literal barriers to doing it other than doing it (there are infinite life & work friction points that will try to slow you down). With the Internet you can pick a technical subject and become good at it and then keep going, becoming great at it. If you're great at most anything in tech, you can open a lot of doors.

I grew up in technical poverty (government healthcare and food stamps included), although it didn't feel like it (I didn't know we were poor). The Internet was a revelation for me, circa 1994. Lightning from Zeus himself. I had only a passing interest in computers growing up. The Internet however, I immediately got it, its enormous potential was obvious. Computers were tools, the Internet was the platform to reach and access the world, a canvas to paint anything on and immediately distribute it with few barriers. I'm still in love with it.

I started a small wannabe gaming company in the late 1990s with people I met online. I had zero network, just the willingness to put myself out there and try. I gradually got to know a bunch of people by running a gaming blog (basically that's what it was) and hanging out on a lot of IRC channels. These things were points of contact into a field I had no connection into initially. I didn't mind failing, I never thought much about it at that age.

I was infatuated with the world of the Web in the 1990s, it seemed incredible like a brilliant light show. I got to know some Silicon Valley people just by emailing them and learned a lot about how to pitch / sell (broadly speaking). I learned that so much of it is just being willing to do it and have doors slammed in your face repeatedly (most people won't do it out of fear of rejection). In those days you could email almost anybody, from Michael Dell to Tim Berners Lee, and get a reply. HN is now a great resource for that same premise, there are thousands of prominent builders on HN that you can freely email and they will reply, they will offer sage advice.

I messed with programming and Web development throughout the 1990s. I ran a small consulting business at around 19-23 years old. That taught me the value of not spending my life making money for everyone else by building their platforms, and instead building my own. Consulting / freelancing also doesn't scale effectively as primarily a billable hours service business. It's useful as a personal funding resource to enable you to build on your own dime, and can be particularly effective today (back then it was hyper local still; now you can far more easily reach around the world and find business clients).

I went in search of a lever. With the modest experience at building things that I had accumulated, I started working on systems that would scale, at around 24 years old.

So the prior seven or eight years required zero venture capital and very little funding. It required a shitty PC and a dial-up account. No Ivy League necessary and I required no permission. I was free to learn and build to whatever capacity I could. I was constantly turned down when asking friends & family for money for ventures, nobody ever said yes. It was always embarrassing even to ask (I realistically knew the answer ahead of time), my own grandmother turned me down. It was a combination of them not having it and the few that did (successful small business types) being very conservative financially (investing in a tech related venture was far beyond their shores).

I raised my first formal venture capital with the first platform type service I built in 2004-2005. It was a serious undertaking that took about 9-12 months to build, in the ecommerce space. The VC raised was modest, like a YC seed round. It was enough, mostly, though.

Having a product will often open a lot of shut doors. They don't have to bet on you as an unknown, they don't have to bet that you can build this thing that you claim you can. With a product in hand, you've already demonstrated that and removed that risk factor for the investor. Then they have to evaluate and decide if they like what you already have. The investor will now view it as you possessing an actual asset, rather than an idea (most astute investors know what those are really worth). I've found walking in the door with a product, even a modest demo, makes an immense difference.

If you can build product on your own (again, even something modest), you can raise money from all sorts of diverse sources these days. The last venture capital I raised was from a billionaire courtesy of a cold email I sent, backed with a modest demo of the product. Nothing enabled that other than my accumulated experience at pitching (getting told NO a million times and learning from it) and an ability to build something to show.

If you can't build you're fucked, basically. Unless you either have a network / reputation (Ivy League etc), friends & family with money, or you're special in some way (a talented salesperson for example, that has a jobsian gift for convincing people). Teach yourself to build things and do it over and over and over and over again. You will fail a lot most likely; that is a required point of suffering more often than not and is useful. Persist.