Particle Founder: My Deepest Entrepreneurial Insights from the Past Year

Author: Pengyu Wang, Founder of Particle

As a founder, the most sincere and practical startup advice I’ve seen in the past year is: don’t pursue lean startup.

Recently, I’ve been focusing on two main activities:

2. Actively exploring and using a wide range of AI products to understand AI’s real capabilities for non-coding entrepreneurs and the current limits of AI tools. I built a complete AI workflow and independently launched a SaaS product that even generates revenue. It’s currently in a small-scale trial, and I plan to introduce it to everyone in a few days.

3. Summarizing the lessons and insights from my startup journey over the past year. I’ve organized startup principles I want to follow consistently and pitfalls I aim to avoid in the future.

One of the most impactful startup principles I want to adhere to comes from a recent public talk by a well-known entrepreneur:

“Don’t launch your product too early.”

This advice comes from Google co-founder Sergey Brin during a campus event at Stanford in December 2025.

The context is that in December 2025, during Stanford Engineering’s centennial celebration, Sergey Brin was invited back to the campus for a conversation with Stanford President Jonathan Levin and Engineering Dean Jennifer Widom.

A student asked how to avoid pitfalls in entrepreneurship:

Brin’s core answer: Don’t make a big splash with your product before it’s fully ready—he used Google Glass as an example, emphasizing that when you have a cool new hardware idea, you should first refine it thoroughly before holding a flashy launch event like a parachute jump or airship.

This advice was very sincere. Most entrepreneurs at such events tend to share politically correct opinions or inspiring but vague motivational quotes that don’t translate into concrete actions. But Brin offered a very practical perspective.

We’ve spent a lot of time, made many mistakes, and invested significant resources to realize the importance of this advice.

Because the common startup philosophy we’ve been taught is lean startup, rapid iteration, user-first, quick feedback loops.

But why might this be wrong? Let’s first look at Brin’s core reasoning: once you release a product too early, it’s hard to tell whether you’re on the right path of iteration or just patching up user desires. Once you start signaling externally, it’s like stepping onto a “treadmill”—you’re bound to a delivery schedule, but you may not have enough time to complete everything you need to do. External expectations snowball, growing larger and larger, while you don’t give yourself enough time to digest, judge, and manage these expectations.

From my personal startup experience, another key reason is that releasing too early might mean you haven’t yet considered two questions:

2. What currently drives winners in this market: is there still an opportunity driven by product?

3. If it’s product-driven, what features, performance, or design truly drive the product?

Take our UniversalX as an example—we “perfectly” made these two mistakes:

2. We didn’t realize that there was still a product-driven opportunity in the market (or even evaluate this possibility). We placed too much emphasis on the so-called timing window, but fundamentally, we were overly opportunistic and systemically lazy, prioritizing chance over strategy.

3. Since we didn’t assess whether there was still a product-driven opportunity, we couldn’t make optimal decisions about the core features or performance that would drive the product. Our eventual differentiation—proven wrong—was “multi-chain.” But market evidence shows that for trading terminals, product-driven success relies on either information advantage (alpha, or at least making users feel they have alpha) or performance advantage (speed).

This mistake was only fully understood after Axiom emerged, which relied on product performance to quickly capture the largest market share in what seemed like a highly competitive environment. We realized 80% of the truth. Why not 100%? Because we continued to make mistakes—focusing on aligning and completing features rather than going all-in on alpha and performance. We’re still paying for this today. We’re spending time optimizing performance, even a year after product launch, while 90% of people now believe the trading terminal industry is no longer meaningful.

In short: we tend to treat “fast + iteration” as an infallible truth, neglecting to think about where the real competitive advantage lies. We also tend to see early user feedback as purely positive reinforcement, which easily leads to misaligned iteration directions and increases sunk costs—time and emotional investment—when adjusting or shutting down the business.

In the AI era, this is even more true. Tools have leveled the productivity gap and strengthened information equality. As a result, products that are just “good enough” and those without leverage in their design have drastically lower production costs. The phrase “fighting startups” has lost its meaning.

Like the saying: when magic lamps are everywhere, what you wish for matters more.

Stop pursuing lean startup and rapid iteration. Take a moment to think about what your product’s true aspiration is.