This is certainly true in Silicon Valley, where it’s common to meet accomplished technical makers who, after reading a few stories from Richard Hamming and Richard Feynman, think they understand research well enough that they can “create the new Bell Labs”. Usually they’re victims of Dunning-Krugeritis, so ignorant they’re not even aware of their ignorance.
What are the ways to avoid falling into this trap? Research through double-loop learning?
Rather than a single centralized network modeled after the legacy telephone system, operated by a government or a few massive utilities, the internet was designed to allow any device anywhere to interoperate with any other device, allowing any provider able to bring whatever networking capacity it had to the growing party.
And to be able to survive a nuclear attack, one of ARPA's motivations in funding the network. See "The Dream Machine" for more history.
if the beachhead consists of people doing something lots more people will be doing in the future, then it's probably big enough no matter how small it is.
i.e. Twitter
The component of entrepreneurship that really matters is domain expertise. The way to become Larry Page was to become an expert on search. And the way to become an expert on search was to be driven by genuine curiosity, not some ulterior motive.
Developing domain expertise via self-driven research
If you don’t know you are doing, start with the simplest configuration, which is only setting workers to (2*CPU)+1 and don’t worry about threads.
It me.
I yell this a lot, so it's good to have a source on hand.