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:

Hands-on exploration and using a large number of AI products to understand the real capabilities AI adds to non-coding entrepreneurs, as well as the current limits of AI tools. I built a complete AI workflow and independently launched a SaaS product that even directly generates revenue. It’s currently in limited use, and I plan to introduce it to everyone in a few days.

A comprehensive summary of my startup insights and lessons learned 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 well-known entrepreneur’s recent public sharing:

“Don’t launch your product too early.”

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

The context is that in December 2025, during the centennial celebration of Stanford Engineering School, Google co-founder Sergey Brin was invited back to the campus for a dialogue. The participants included Stanford President Jonathan Levin and Engineering School Dean Jennifer Widom.

A student asked how to avoid pitfalls when starting a business:

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

This sharing was very sincere. Most entrepreneurs at such events tend to share politically correct views or inspiring but vague high-level clichés that don’t translate into concrete actions. But Brin offered a very practical perspective.

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

Because the startup mindset we’ve been taught emphasizes lean startup, rapid iteration, user-first, and quick pivots.

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 iteration path 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 handle these expectations.

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

1. What currently drives winners in this industry? Is there still a product-driven opportunity?

2. If it is product-driven, what features, performance, or design truly can drive the product?

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

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, it was because we were overly opportunistic and lazy—focused on chance rather than strategy, with a systemic tendency to prioritize competition over strategic planning.

Since we didn’t assess whether a product-driven opportunity still existed, we couldn’t make optimal decisions about the core support for driving the product. Our differentiator was later proven wrong—“multi-chain.” But the market proved that for trading terminals, product-driven success depends on either information advantage (alpha, or at least making users feel they have alpha) or time advantage (performance).

This mistake was only fully understood after Axiom emerged, which relied on product performance to quickly capture the largest market share in a seemingly saturated environment. We realized 80%. Not 100%, because we continued to make mistakes—focusing on aligning and completing features rather than 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. It’s also too easy to see early user feedback as positive reinforcement, which can mislead the direction of iteration, increasing the sunk costs of rapid adjustments or even shutting down the business—time and emotional investment.

In the AI era, I believe it’s even more critical. Tools have leveled the productivity playing field and strengthened information equality. This drastically reduces the production costs of just-good-enough products and products without leverage in design, rendering the term “cutthroat startup” meaningless.

As the saying goes: when lamps are everywhere, what you wish for matters more.

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