Were you able to secure early grants in your career?
I'm not at the point of applying for grants yet. Still in PhD program.
Knowing this information, what will be your strategy? If securing these grants is indeed correlated highly to future success, will you put extra effort into trying to get them?
It seems initial effort wasn't the primary determinant here. It's hard, without a grant, it's hard to imagine you'd have the resources necessary to keep up productivity and write grants at the same frequency and quality. Might be a good idea to pursue a couple of smaller grant lines with co-PIs during your initial years of start up, so that if the larger grants fail, there is a chance you can still float a bit longer to write a second round on the larger grant for a better chance of success.
imo just get a business degree and make phat $ instead of worrying about that
I think this is what mathematicians call a degenerate case. ---