The tricky thing about this is that networking is often the right move if you're playing to do well rather than to win. If you're looking for a mid- to upper-management role at an established company, networking is great. If you're going into an established, competitive market with no intentions of "winning" the market (and becoming a monopoly), then networking can get you customers, it can get you distribution partners, and it can get you funding. Just not lots of all of the above, and you will have to fight hard for each.

Most business founders come from an environment where this is what has worked for them their whole career. That's how you get a job on the business side of things, and it's how you do your job on the business end of an established company.

The take-away, I think, is to know which game you're playing and make your moves accordingly. Being a great research engineer is one game; being an engineer at a startup is another, and moving up the ranks in a big company is another one entirely. Doing sales for a big company is a different game from doing customer development for your own startup, which is different from doing business development for either. Building a lifestyle business in a competitive niche is very different from doing hard tech research, which is very different from solving a problem that seems crazy in an area nobody else will go near. If you apply the rules of one game to the situations of another, you're unlikely to get good results.

(A corollary of this is to make sure that all your startups' other decisions are lined up with the game it is playing. I've seen a number of startups with ideas & personal goals that are clearly in the "lifestyle business" camp, but then they make decisions about markets, fundraising & hiring that put them in the "we're gonna be Google" camp, and unsurprisingly this tends to end poorly.)