At around age 25, Raymond Hou (Raymond) and his wife Song Zhiyou (Yuzu) moved west to mainland China, using Beijing as their base for work and life for about a year. This period had been planned as “the last stage of working for someone else.” Their original plan to settle there for three to five years was interrupted by the outbreak of the pandemic in early 2020. After returning to Taiwan for Lunar New Year on the first day of the new year, Raymond and Yuzu could not return to Beijing. The five-year plan ended early and instead became a direct catalyst for his full-time shift to a company of one (see The 2020 Retreat from Beijing to Taiwan and the Birth of Raymond Thirty).
Motivation for moving west and career positioning
After graduating from National Cheng Kung University at around age 24, Raymond chose to enter the workforce first. He reasoned that he would not want to work for someone else after turning 30, so he planned to spend the remaining years “working hard for other people,” and chose Beijing, where work moved at an especially high-pressure pace, to gain experience. This continued his earlier experience as a freelancer and lecturer (see Six Years at National Cheng Kung University: Changing Majors Twice and Extending Graduation): it was a time-limited, purposeful stay in the workforce, rather than a long-term career track aimed at promotion.
The final step before deciding to move was an intense nine-day trip in July 2019, during which he interviewed with eight companies. Raymond found that beyond differences in basic terminology and methods, the greatest gap between interviews on the two sides of the strait lay in their understanding of “the values of work,” and that the reality differed greatly from his prior image of a “wolf culture.” Interviewers most often questioned how familiar and adaptable he was to mainland China’s internet ecosystem, even though he had followed its internet content for more than three years by his own account. He compared this anxiety with the earlier situation in his third year of university, when people questioned his “qualifications” after he began teaching publicly. He reminded himself that only sustained accumulation and output could establish his footing.1 This interview trip ultimately led him to move to Beijing and join Keep that August.
In Beijing, Raymond worked in product operations at Keep, a sports-internet company and fitness app, while also serving as a digital-transformation consultant to a Taiwanese brand group, helping it establish a viable digital business model. Together, the two jobs brought his annual salary to around NT$1 million.2 Yuzu managed a shared office space of about 1,000 ping (approximately 3,306 square meters) for Ucommune, Beijing’s largest coworking brand. They also began hosting community events for independent workers in that space, continuing Raymond’s long-standing interest in real communities.
Early after arriving, Raymond and his friend Vincent Lin entered a smart AI dormitory design competition launched by Xiaomi and won the top prize for best design among more than 100 teams. They not only created model renderings and analyzed user scenarios, but also built a website to present the proposal. Raymond later summarized the experience as “learning by doing”: learning through hands-on completion of a concrete project was one of his consistently effective learning methods. The RMB 20,000 in Xiaomi vouchers they received even led Xiaomi staff in the area to offer to buy products for him at a 20 percent discount.3
His work performance was good, but what Raymond repeatedly confirmed during this period was his underlying preference: “I still like assigning work to myself; life is more controllable that way.” Completing a six-month consulting engagement made him clearer that his value lay in “helping individuals accelerate, not organizations.” He could earn more and better fit mainstream values within an organization, but cared more about the lifestyle and sense of meaning of digital nomadism. This line of thought later became personal prehistory for the Super Individual concept; related career changes are discussed in From Freelancer to Business Operator.
Daily life, housing, and community practice
Raymond and Yuzu moved three times in Beijing. Their final home was in an older residential community about a two-minute walk from Wangjing subway station: a two-bedroom, one-living-room apartment. They also ran an Airbnb part-time to offset the rent. On August 13, 2019, they arrived in Beijing with 80 kilograms of luggage and worked out how to book tickets, rent an apartment, open bank accounts, and get phone numbers on unfamiliar streets near the Guomao CBD. In an anniversary reflection, Yuzu later recorded a homesick conversation and Raymond’s warm reply: “I am your home.”4 When they moved into the older community in Wangjing in early December 2019, they chose desks, bought furniture, and assembled their home expecting to live in Beijing for three to five years. This expectation of a long stay, contrasted with having to clear the home remotely the following year, became one of the most frequently revisited emotional memories of the period.5
Outside work, Raymond continued observing and practicing community building. He saw that many local internet brands were still stuck in “traffic thinking,” mistaking “private-domain traffic” for community. He wrote articles breaking down the nature of a community. They were republished by platforms such as Everyone Is a Product Manager and Digitaling, giving him initial visibility in mainland China and helping him meet peers who cared about community. His plan for after the 2020 Lunar New Year was to establish in Beijing a “learning community for community managers” modeled on the US-based CMX, holding salons and workshops.6
Earlier, at the end of 2019, Raymond had organized the Beijing satellite venue for Dedao App’s New Year’s Eve speech livestream. In less than a month, he and around 200 Dedao learners worked together on the venue, program, staffing, and sponsorship.7 Earlier in 2019, he had been invited by Dedao App to attend its Knowledge Spring Festival Gala in Shenzhen, watched by tens of thousands. That was also the first time in his life he stayed at a five-star hotel. These experiences brought him close to the fast-moving mainland knowledge-payment and community-operations scene.
Interruption and significance
In January 2020, Raymond and Yuzu each brought two empty suitcases back to Taiwan for Lunar New Year, expecting to stay only briefly. After returning on the first day of the new year, they faced the global spread of the pandemic and decided not to go back to Beijing. On March 1, they connected remotely with friends who were still in Beijing and the movers to empty the home, formally ending their residence and work there.8
The early end of the Beijing plan did not become an empty stretch of time; it became the starting point of a new direction. Yuzu wrote that among the possible paths of staying in Taiwan, Raymond chose “the hardest one”: work as an employee during the day, record two podcast episodes a week at night, edit articles late into the night, and launch the “Green Organization” and “Lighthouse Project” for refining knowledge inside the Raymond Thirty community. In March 2020, Raymond also launched the Raymond Thirty podcast. The first season explored diverse possibilities for people born in the 1990s before age 30.9 He then set up a personal website, moved past content back to a platform he owned, cultivated a listener community, and began a gray-release test of a paid personal-content subscription service at year’s end. This thread leads directly to Leaving Employment at 26 to Build a Company of One with Yuzu and the later construction of the Super Individual business.
On September 16, 2020, his 25th birthday, Raymond reviewed a year of intense changes after moving west, including an all-hands presentation at Keep, experiencing major layoffs at Keep, the Shenzhen livestream, and the pandemic-driven retreat. He thanked his wife Yuzu for accompanying and guiding him along the way. In the article, he established a direction centered on individual control over one’s life, cited Tsai Kang-yung’s principle of focusing by “continually deleting things as you have less time left,” and drew on Luo Zhenyu’s argument to describe growth as “continually climbing out of setbacks in the gap between the subjective and objective worlds.” He then declared his central path for the future: “Build my own content products, build my own community ecosystem, and find a reproducible yet flexible business model. Make some noise.”10 This statement became an important turning point in his thinking as he moved toward running a company of one.
This period also included two life events covered in separate entries: in March 2019, a neighbor’s fire affected his Tainan home and forced him to move (see The Late-Night Fire at Raymond’s Tainan Home in 2019); in July 2019, he married Yuzu (Song Zhiyou).11 In Raymond’s personal history, the Beijing period was both a high-pressure work experience and a point at which his long-term belief in “believe first, see later” was recalibrated through real-world shocks.
Sources cited
Footnotes
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Hou Zhixun, “#Raymond’s Beijing Notes: Finding a Job Is About Fate,” Facebook post, 2019-07-16. View original ↩
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Hou Zhixun, “The Entrepreneurial Path of Hou Zhixun: From University Talks to a Company of One | Highlights from the Lonely Tavern Podcast Interview,” WordPress, 2025-07-06. View original ↩
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Hou Zhixun, “Winning Xiaomi’s Smart AI Dormitory Design Competition,” Facebook post, 2021-07-15 (recounting a 2019 event). View original ↩
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Song Zhiyou (Yuzu), “【This Day Last Year, Us This Year】The Story of Arriving in Beijing with 80 kg of Luggage,” Facebook post, 2020-08-13. View original ↩
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Hou Zhixun, “#A Couple Drifting North | Arriving in Beijing,” Facebook post, 2019-08-13. View original ↩
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Hou Zhixun, “A Community for Community Managers: Beijing Meetup,” WeChat public-account article, 2020-01-02. View original ↩
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Hou Zhixun, “Another Year Is About to Pass; What Comes Next?” Facebook post, 2020-09-16. View original ↩
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Hou Zhixun, “【Goodbye Beijing, See You Next Year】Where Can You Find Us?” WeChat public-account article, 2020-12-08. View original ↩
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Hou Zhixun, “Week One: Record of Retreating from Beijing, Wiping Away Tears, and Starting the Raymond Thirty Podcast,” WordPress, 2020-08-21. View original ↩
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Hou Zhixun, “Another Year Is About to Pass; What Comes Next?” Facebook post, 2020-09-16. View original ↩
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Hou Zhixun, “Who Are the 柚智夫妻? Marriage, Entrepreneurship, and Independent Work: The Practice Story of Song Yuzu and Hou Zhixun,” WordPress, 2020-08-15. View original ↩