First congrats! It's great you recognized this as a milestone and worked towards it. Keep in mind not all money is equally green. Who is in your network ? Do y

First congrats! It's great you recognized this as a milestone and worked towards it. Keep in mind not all money is equally green. Who is in your network ? Do you have a good pedigree ? Are you capable of helping with strategy and direction ? Are you a good communicator and do other smart people find you interesting/insightful ? What is your investment strategy (do you even have one?) ? Are you a domain expert ? Do you have adequate capital to do follow-up rounds and not get diluted into oblivion ? "I recently reached accredited investor status" -- so that's a hard no to the last question. The bar is lower now that capital has tightened but no YC company wants you on the cap table for $1k. $50k maybe, $20k questionable. But even then it won't be one of the more desirable companies if you can't answer the above questions with confidence. I personally didn't pass the above tests and lost a good amount of money when I placed a bet on a biotech startup that wasn't getting much traction with other investors and has since died. Yeah it was cool to say I'm an early VC in a YC company, but that ego boost was not cheap. Unfortunately the accredited investor status is a low bar. It should have been periodically updated for inflation. $1million the 90's was quite a bit of money. $1millon now, not so much. And your ego can destroy $1m pretty easily.