You're thinking about scale in a different sense.

> You can do things that don't scale to accelerate a good idea, but by definition you actually can't do that if the idea itself requires scale. The idea has to work on day 1, for customer 1.

He's talking about ideas that only work if the company has scaled to some non-trivial size of users or some other relevant factor. Uber would be an example. How could Uber work if there was only 1 customer? There would be no drivers.

If you need to "do things that don't scale" to launch your idea, your idea probably also needs to work with low scale of users/revenue/investment or you will be dead in the water.