Walking University Avenue Cured Me of a Fantasy

Walking University Avenue in Palo Alto today, I finally saw what many Chinese students get wrong, we treat Silicon Valley as a destination.

Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01

I want to work in Silicon Valley, I want to start a company in Silicon Valley, I want an offer from a big tech company in Silicon Valley. As if arriving here meant life had reached some finish line.

Walk this street and you notice people here do not think that way. They treat Silicon Valley as a tool. They come for resources, connections and a place to test ideas, and then they go do something bigger. For them it is a springboard, not an end point.

The difference looks small, but it sets the direction of your whole life strategy.

Graduate, join Google or Meta, earn two or three hundred thousand dollars a year, buy a house in the Bay Area, and that is it. Is that a good goal? Of course. But have you noticed it follows the same logic as taking the civil service exam or joining a state owned company back home? Both chase a stable, predictable, linear path.

What this street teaches is the opposite. Silicon Valley runs on nonlinear growth. You do something today, it pays nothing for three years, and in the fourth year it suddenly takes off. None of the companies that came out of this neighborhood grew in a straight line.

That is the contradiction. Most people come to Silicon Valley looking for linear security, but its spirit is anti linear. Bring a linear mindset to a nonlinear place and of course you feel anxious and stuck in a rat race, because you are measuring yourself on the wrong axes.

There is a more practical point too. The cafes along this street used to be full of angel investors and VCs meeting founders. Since AI arrived, a lot of that investing logic has changed. You used to need a team and several rounds of funding to build a product. Now one person with AI tools might have a prototype in a few weeks. There are more ways into the game, more people pouring in, and more competition.

So what I figured out on this street is to not treat any place as the finish line. Not Silicon Valley, not a big tech offer, not a salary. They are parts, resources you use to build a system of your own.

The real question is what system you want to build. One that keeps creating value, improves itself and does not depend on any single platform or employer. The early stage is painful, with no steady income, no certainty and a long time without recognition. Once the system works, though, the returns are exponential.

I did not come to this street as a pilgrim today. I came to figure out what my own system should look like.