The article, written by Particle founder Pengyu Wang, shares his entrepreneurial insights from the past year, emphasizing the importance of "not releasing products too early."
Article author and source: Pengyu Wang, founder of Particle
The most sincere and practical startup advice I've seen in the past year as a founder: Don't be a lean startup.
I've been mainly working on two things lately:
- Through hands-on exploration and use of numerous AI products, I've come to understand the real capabilities AI provides to entrepreneurs without coding backgrounds, as well as the current limitations of AI tools. I've built a complete AI workflow and independently launched a SaaS product that has even started generating revenue. It's currently in limited use, and I plan to introduce it to everyone in a few days.
- This is a comprehensive summary of my entrepreneurial experiences and lessons learned over the past year. It outlines the entrepreneurial principles I hope to continue following and the entrepreneurial pitfalls I want to avoid in the future.
One of the most insightful entrepreneurial principles that I hope to always follow comes from a recent public sharing by a well-known entrepreneur:
"Don't release your product too early."
This is an answer from Google's founder at a Stanford campus event in December 2025.
The background is roughly as follows: in December 2025, at the closing event of Stanford University's School of Engineering's centennial celebration, Google co-founder Sergey Brin was invited back to the university for a dialogue. His counterparts were Stanford President Jonathan Levin and Dean of the School of Engineering Jennifer Widom.
A student asked how to avoid pitfalls when starting a business:
Brin's core answer: Don't launch a product with a big fuss before it's ready—he used Google Glass as an example, meaning: when you have a cool new hardware idea, you must polish it thoroughly before going through the flashy launch events like skydiving or airships.
This sharing was so sincere. Most entrepreneurs at these events would share politically correct viewpoints or some high-level motivational platitudes that sound incredibly inspiring but ultimately leave you wondering what to do with them. But Brin offered a very practical perspective.
We spent a lot of time, made many mistakes, and paid a high price to understand the importance of this statement.
Because the entrepreneurial concepts we've always been taught are lean startup, lightning-fast startup, user-first, and rapid iteration.
Why might this be wrong? Let's first discuss the core principles behind Brin: Because once you release a product too early, it's difficult to distinguish whether you're on the right iterative path or constantly patching up various so-called user desires. Once you start sending signals to the outside world, it's like getting on a "treadmill"—you're tied to a certain delivery timeline, but you may not have enough time to complete everything that needs to be done. External expectations will snowball, and you haven't given yourself enough time to digest, assess, and process these expectations.
Based on my personal entrepreneurial experience, another important reason is that releasing a product too early may mean you haven't considered two key questions:
- What drives the emergence of winners in this field now: is it still a product-driven opportunity?
- Then you obviously can't figure out the next question: If it's product-driven, then what are the functions, performance, or design of the product that can actually drive it?
Taking our UniversalX project as an example, we "perfectly" made these two mistakes:
- We failed to understand that there were still product-driven opportunities in the market at that time (we didn't even assess this possibility). We placed too much emphasis on the so-called window of opportunity. Of course, in essence, we were too opportunity-driven and, at the bottom, systematically lazy in terms of strategy.
- Since we didn't assess whether there were still opportunities for product-driven growth, we naturally couldn't make the optimal decision in finding the core support to drive the product. Therefore, our differentiator was the "multi-chain" approach, which was later proven false. However, the market has proven that product-driven growth at the underlying level of a trading terminal can only rely on: information gap (alpha, or at least making users feel that there is alpha) or time gap (performance).
We only understood 80% of this mistake after Axiom emerged, leveraging its product performance to quickly capture the largest market share despite its late launch (in what seemed like an already fiercely competitive market). Why not 100%? Because we continued to make the same mistakes, failing to go all-in on alpha and performance, still focusing on alignment and feature completion. And we're still paying the price for this mistake today. Yes, we're now spending time aligning performance again (and this is a year after our product launch, and 90% of people already think the trading terminal industry is meaningless).
Simply put: When we start a business, we too easily treat speed and iteration as an irrefutable truth, neglecting to think about where the decisive step in market competition really lies. We also too easily treat any early user feedback as a positive incentive, which can easily lead to a misalignment in the direction of iteration and increase the sunk costs (time and emotions) of quickly adjusting the business later (or even shutting down the business).
I believe this is even more true in the AI era. Tools have leveled the gap in productivity and strengthened information equality. This has led to a sharp decrease in the production costs of just-right products and products designed without leverage, rendering the term "spin-off entrepreneurship" meaningless.
Just like the saying goes: when there are magic lamps everywhere, what you wish for is more important.
Stop lean startup, stop blitzkrieg startups, and think carefully about what your product aspirations are.
