But at what stage do you adopt this focus? From Day 1? The point of the anecdote about Apple is that they began their startup by doing something unscalable. Not only was building computers by hand unscalable, but the financial risk they took was unreasonable. What if they failed to sell enough of their computers to cover the cost of the parts?

Many businesses that you see as "mass scale" may have began life as "small scale" ones. Check your assumptions.