Starting in 2025, Raymond Hou (Raymond) published a series of “Who Is X?” profiles in the “Super Individual Cases” category on his website, raymondhouch.com. Each article is based on Raymond’s own research and conversations, breaking down a person’s career path into a pattern that others can refer to. What these people share is not the same method, but similar underlying logic: find something “only I can do,” amplify it through systems, and keep doing it for ten years. The list is also a mirror Raymond uses to examine his own path. Most profiles include a “Raymond’s observation” section that marks his relationship to, or differences from, the person. For related concepts, see Super Individual.
Writing Monetization: Nicolas Cole
Nicolas Cole is a writer and serial entrepreneur who co-founded Ship 30 for 30 and Premium Ghostwriting Academy with Dickie Bush. In this profile, Raymond lays out two paths for monetizing writing: first survive and accumulate case studies through a “service model” (ghostwriting and freelance work), then move to a “product model” (courses and books) to break through the ceiling, corresponding to Two Paths to Monetizing Writing. Cole argues that one should find traffic “where the people already are”: write first on Quora, Medium, and X, then bring readers back to one’s own platform. Raymond observes that Cole’s path is very similar to Raymond Thirty’s development “starting from written content and finding a replicable business model.”
The Pathless Path: Paul Millerd and Angie
Paul Millerd is a former McKinsey consultant, author of The Pathless Path and Good Work, and a digital nomad who practices the lifestyle with his wife Angie Wang and their daughter.1 The core of this case is questioning society’s script for success and the “Ship, Quit & Learn” experiment design, which uses learning as the only goal and makes it easy to start and easy to leave. Raymond compares his and Yuzu’s complementary division of labor in a couple’s business with Paul and Angie’s model of pursuing their own development separately. The two couples even stayed in the same accommodation in Chiang Mai. Angie later became a profile subject in the Hall of Fame. Raymond approached her story through identity transition—moving from Taiwan to the United States, facing impostor feelings, and self-publishing—which echoes The Impostor State.
Long-Term Thinking: Ryan Holiday and Waki
Ryan Holiday dropped out of college at nineteen to become a research assistant to Robert Greene. He later built an ecosystem around Stoic philosophy that includes books, courses, a physical bookstore, YouTube, a newsletter, and a podcast. He accumulates ideas through a physical card-box note system using 4-by-6-inch index cards. Raymond sees him as one of his role models for practicing Stoicism; see Raymond’s Practice of Stoicism. Waki, founder of Reading Vanguard, was formerly an engineer at TSMC. He left at age thirty-three to build a knowledge business, deliberately “not pursuing virality and choosing a path he could stay on for ten years.” He used Dunbar’s number to limit community size, moving from tens of thousands of visitors toward a deep community of hundreds, corresponding to The Product Funnel: From Mass Traffic to a Deep Community of One Hundred.2 Raymond and Waki left their jobs and started businesses in the same year. When Waki published a book in 2022, Raymond hosted the first book-launch conversation, and Waki later joined a strategy-session bonus for The Super Individual’s Way of Working (see The Super Individual’s Way of Working (55-Unit Online Course)).
Rethinking Scale: Lan Nuo
Lan Nuo is the founder of Lan Nuo Photography Academy. She started freelancing at eighteen and founded a business at nineteen, once leading a ten-person team and working with clients including Starlux Airlines, Porsche, DJI, and Sony. After realizing that “scale does not equal success,” she dissolved the company amicably, moved to New Zealand in 2023, and designed a “micro-retirement” life working a few hours each day and leaving most of her time for what she loves. She uses the time difference to make cross-border collaboration run almost around the clock.3 Raymond summarizes her transition with the analogy that “running a company is like a bodybuilding competition—not making the muscles bigger, but finding the physique that suits you.” Lan Nuo’s experience of dissolving her business made Raymond rethink the trade-off between scale and freedom; see Scale vs. Freedom.
Real Experience: Zhou Jia’en
Zhou Jia’en is a former comedian, viral Facebook writer, and founder of the AI Electric Writing course. He proposes “follow your heart and care for others” and an inverted reading of “Dao, technique, method, and tool”: most people lose themselves in tools, while the real moat lies in “Dao” (who am I?) and “technique” (strategic positioning). In a context of AI-generated content overflow, he advocates using real-life experience to counter the “correct but empty words” produced by machines, corresponding to Use Real-Life Experience to Counter AI Mediocrity. Raymond sees Jia’en’s path—two years of unemployment, a friend’s suggestion to write daily, and finally finding a direction—as the Super Individual story closest to an authentic starting point.
Institutionalization: Manny
Manny is the founder of Manny’s Report. He graduated from National Chiao Tung University’s Institute of Communication Studies, formerly worked as a game-industry analyst at the Institute for Information Industry’s MIC, runs free and paid newsletters, and never shows his face while maintaining other work. His core idea is “creation is not a business, but a refuge.” From day one, he designed an exit mechanism and treated a paid product as “a boat,” not an extension of himself. His goal is for the founder to be able to fade out, echoing Human-Facing Brand vs. Faceless Brand, and the Advantages of Introverts. Manny and Raymond take opposite paths—faceless versus personal brand—but Raymond observes that their underlying pursuits are very similar. The question he watches most closely is whether a personal brand can transition into an institutional brand. For privacy, specific revenue and subscription figures are not reproduced here.
Interview Prototype: Jacky
The podcast hosted by “Left Side of the Escalator” (Jacky) was where Raymond fully articulated his Super Individual methodology. It serves as an “appendix / interview prototype” in the Hall of Fame. Raymond presented three stages—“ordinary person → Lifehacker → Super Individual”—and the The KIT Model: Knowledge, Influence, and Time, centered on the intersection of three systems: knowledge × time × influence, as well as the priority order “freedom of attention > freedom of time > financial freedom” (see Attention > Time > Money). Unlike the other profiles, which interpret other people for an outside audience, this is reverse material in which Raymond himself is interviewed and interpreted by someone else.
The Function of the Hall of Fame
Raymond does not treat this list as a set of simple biographies, but as multiple comparisons for the “Super Individual” concept and a source of material for a book manuscript. Each case is mapped to an outline chapter: “leaving the default path” corresponds to Paul Millerd and Lan Nuo; “asset thinking over trading time for money” corresponds to Manny and Nicolas Cole; “card-note methods and output-driven learning” corresponds to Waki and Ryan Holiday. These connect to Trust Over Traffic and Business Thinking. By comparing how these people differ in scale, whether they show their faces, and the pace of monetization, Raymond continues to calibrate his choices around Scale vs. Freedom and identity transitions.
Sources
Footnotes
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Raymond Hou, “Who Is Paul Millerd? Giving Up a US$200,000 Salary to Self-Publish the Bestseller The Pathless Path,” WordPress article, 2025-09-03. View original ↩
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Raymond Hou, “Who Is Waki? From TSMC to a Knowledge-Based Super Individual, Not Chasing Virality but Choosing a Path for Ten Years,” WordPress article, 2025-10-31. View original ↩
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Raymond Hou, “Who Is Lan Nuo? From Freelance Photography to Living in New Zealand: The Identity Transition Story of Dissolving a Ten-Person Company and Taking a ‘Micro-Retirement,’” WordPress article, 2026-02-18. View original ↩