Catherine Heald
Encyclopedia
Catherine Heald is a serial entrepreneur and founder of four software and travel companies in Asia and the United States since 1989. She is currently CEO of Remote Lands
, a New York and Bangkok-based luxury travel company catering to celebrities and high net worth individuals travelling to Asia. Heald has been widely credited in the press for her deep knowledge of Asia and her Asian travel expertise, particularly in far-flung places off the beaten path. She lived in Hong Kong from 1987 to 1994, and currently lives in New York, NY and Sherman, CT with her husband, antiquarian bookseller Donald Heald.
in Pittsburgh. She later earned a B.A. in Computer Science from Barnard College
, Columbia University
in 1984, the first year that computer science was offered as a major. Following graduation, Heald worked as a software engineer at Wall Street firm LF Rothschild, Unterberg and Tobin. In the early 80’s she attempted to become a semi-professional distance runner, but she reached her peak in 1985 when finished in 106th place in the women's field of the New York City Marathon
with a time of 3:17:31, and she subsequently ceased to compete.
In 1987 she dropped out of the MBA program at NYU’s Stern School of Business to move to Hong Kong, where she initially worked for the Apple distributor. In 1989, Heald started her first business, a software company in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, China, when she was 26 years old.
in the pre-Internet years. At a time when female chief executives were rare in technology, Heald was one of the few female CEOs and was a frequent public speaker at global new media conferences in the 1990's. Bill Gates
, who helped spearhead the widespread use of multimedia technology, featured Heald on stage with him demonstrating her travel titles in two of his major keynote addresses, on October 8, 1991 when the “Multimedia PC” was launched at the Museum of Natural History
in New York, and in San Jose, CA in 1992 at the Multimedia and CD-ROM Conference. Heald signed a distribution deal with Apple in 1993, making Apple the exclusive distributor for 27 of InterOptica's products, including its Sierra Club
and Royal Geographical Society
branded travel titles.
In 1993 she sold out to Peter Brant and model Stephanie Seymour
, owner of Take-Two Interactive Software (NASDAQ:TTWO) and briefly served as a company executive before it went on to publish Rockstar Games
' Grand Theft Auto
and other best-selling video games.
character for digital and other rights. At the time, she was known as Catherine Winchester when she was married to British author Simon Winchester
; in 2003 she married Donald Heald and took his surname.
She was credited with being one of the founders of New York’s “Silicon Alley
” by Crain’s New York Business, citing that "Silicon Alley really began in the early 1990s with Catherine Winchester, founder of Wanderlust, which created educational software for kids.". At the age of 33, Heald became one of the youngest female CEO’s of a publicly traded company in the US with Wanderlust's IPO in 1996 (NASDAQ:LUST). She signed licensing deals in 11 languages and 18 markets from Russia to South Korea, but sales in the USA were disappointing and she was eventually let go by the board.
, joined them as CTO. The company raised more than $11 million in venture capital and employed over 60 staff, including 12 Ph.D's. In June 2000, she was asked by Michael Bloomberg
and Muriel Siebert
to join them onstage to discuss the future of e-commerce. Soliloquy closed after the tech crash in 2000.
. Heald and Remote Lands have been featured in the Financial Times
, The Wall Street Journal
, Forbes
, Newsweek
, BusinessWeek
, Town & Country
, Travel + Leisure
and Conde Nast Traveler
/Concierge. Remote Lands accolades include National Geographic Adventure’s Best New Trips in October 2008, National Geographic Traveler
’s Tours of a Lifetime in May 2009, May 2010 and April 2011, Travel + Leisure’s Best Life-Changing Trips in October 2011. In March 2010, Heald’s first hand account of a solo reconnaissance around North Korea
was featured in Departures, the American Express Platinum and Centurion card publication, generating a controversial reaction and much criticism of her visit. Remote Lands is part of the Virtuoso consortium of leading travel suppliers and agents around the world.
Remote Lands
Remote Lands is a privately-held ultra-luxury Asia travel designer and tour operator based in New York and Bangkok. The company creates highly personalized bespoke holidays in Asia for high net worth individuals, often using upmarket travel agents...
, a New York and Bangkok-based luxury travel company catering to celebrities and high net worth individuals travelling to Asia. Heald has been widely credited in the press for her deep knowledge of Asia and her Asian travel expertise, particularly in far-flung places off the beaten path. She lived in Hong Kong from 1987 to 1994, and currently lives in New York, NY and Sherman, CT with her husband, antiquarian bookseller Donald Heald.
Early years
Heald grew up in western Pennsylvania and attended Valley School of Ligonier and Shady Side AcademyShady Side Academy
Shady Side Academy is a private, secular coeducational PK-12 preparatory school located on three campuses in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, established in 1883.- Campuses :Shady Side Academy has three campuses in Pittsburgh....
in Pittsburgh. She later earned a B.A. in Computer Science from Barnard College
Barnard College
Barnard College is a private women's liberal arts college and a member of the Seven Sisters. Founded in 1889, Barnard has been affiliated with Columbia University since 1900. The campus stretches along Broadway between 116th and 120th Streets in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough...
, Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
in 1984, the first year that computer science was offered as a major. Following graduation, Heald worked as a software engineer at Wall Street firm LF Rothschild, Unterberg and Tobin. In the early 80’s she attempted to become a semi-professional distance runner, but she reached her peak in 1985 when finished in 106th place in the women's field of the New York City Marathon
New York City Marathon
The New York City Marathon is a major annual marathon that courses through the five boroughs of New York City. It is one of the largest marathons in the world, with 45,103 finishers in 2010...
with a time of 3:17:31, and she subsequently ceased to compete.
In 1987 she dropped out of the MBA program at NYU’s Stern School of Business to move to Hong Kong, where she initially worked for the Apple distributor. In 1989, Heald started her first business, a software company in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, China, when she was 26 years old.
InterOptica Publishing Ltd.
Heald was known for her role as a new media pioneer in the early 1990’s as Co-Founder & CEO of InterOptica Publishing Ltd, a Hong Kong-based travel software publisher on CD-ROMCD-ROM
A CD-ROM is a pre-pressed compact disc that contains data accessible to, but not writable by, a computer for data storage and music playback. The 1985 “Yellow Book” standard developed by Sony and Philips adapted the format to hold any form of binary data....
in the pre-Internet years. At a time when female chief executives were rare in technology, Heald was one of the few female CEOs and was a frequent public speaker at global new media conferences in the 1990's. Bill Gates
Bill Gates
William Henry "Bill" Gates III is an American business magnate, investor, philanthropist, and author. Gates is the former CEO and current chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen...
, who helped spearhead the widespread use of multimedia technology, featured Heald on stage with him demonstrating her travel titles in two of his major keynote addresses, on October 8, 1991 when the “Multimedia PC” was launched at the Museum of Natural History
American Museum of Natural History
The American Museum of Natural History , located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States, is one of the largest and most celebrated museums in the world...
in New York, and in San Jose, CA in 1992 at the Multimedia and CD-ROM Conference. Heald signed a distribution deal with Apple in 1993, making Apple the exclusive distributor for 27 of InterOptica's products, including its Sierra Club
Sierra Club
The Sierra Club is the oldest, largest, and most influential grassroots environmental organization in the United States. It was founded on May 28, 1892, in San Francisco, California, by the conservationist and preservationist John Muir, who became its first president...
and Royal Geographical Society
Royal Geographical Society
The Royal Geographical Society is a British learned society founded in 1830 for the advancement of geographical sciences...
branded travel titles.
In 1993 she sold out to Peter Brant and model Stephanie Seymour
Stephanie Seymour
Stephanie Michelle Seymour is an American model and actress. Seymour has modeled for many notable fashion magazines and designers, and has been photographed by several well-known photographers including Herb Ritts, Richard Avedon, Gilles Bensimon, and Mario Testino.-Career:Born in San Diego,...
, owner of Take-Two Interactive Software (NASDAQ:TTWO) and briefly served as a company executive before it went on to publish Rockstar Games
Rockstar Games
Rockstar Games is a major video game developer and publisher based in New York City, owned by Take-Two Interactive following its purchase of UK video game publisher BMG Interactive. The brand is mostly known for Grand Theft Auto, Max Payne, L.A...
' Grand Theft Auto
Grand Theft Auto (video game)
Grand Theft Auto is a 1997 action-adventure video game created by British games developer DMA Design and published by BMG Interactive. The game allows the player to take on the role of a criminal who can roam freely around a big city. Various missions are set for completion, such as bank...
and other best-selling video games.
Wanderlust Interactive, Inc.
In 1994, Heald founded Wanderlust Interactive, Inc. to create educational travel games for children, and signed a worldwide licensing agreement with Hollywood's MGM/UA for the Pink PantherThe Pink Panther (character)
The Pink Panther is the main and title character in the opening and closing credit sequences of every film in The Pink Panther series except for A Shot in the Dark and Inspector Clouseau. His popularity spawned a series of theatrical shorts, merchandise, a comic book, and television cartoons...
character for digital and other rights. At the time, she was known as Catherine Winchester when she was married to British author Simon Winchester
Simon Winchester
Simon Winchester, OBE , is a British-American author and journalist who resides mostly in the United States. Through his career at The Guardian, Winchester covered numerous significant events including Bloody Sunday and the Watergate Scandal...
; in 2003 she married Donald Heald and took his surname.
She was credited with being one of the founders of New York’s “Silicon Alley
Silicon Alley
Silicon Alley is a nickname for an area with a concentration of Internet and new media companies in Manhattan, New York City. Originally, the term referred to the cluster of such companies extending from the Flatiron District down to SoHo and TriBeCa along the Broadway corridor, but as the location...
” by Crain’s New York Business, citing that "Silicon Alley really began in the early 1990s with Catherine Winchester, founder of Wanderlust, which created educational software for kids.". At the age of 33, Heald became one of the youngest female CEO’s of a publicly traded company in the US with Wanderlust's IPO in 1996 (NASDAQ:LUST). She signed licensing deals in 11 languages and 18 markets from Russia to South Korea, but sales in the USA were disappointing and she was eventually let go by the board.
Soliloquy, Inc.
Her third company, Soliloquy Inc., was a natural language technology developer whose goal was to revolutionize the online shopping experience by making it interactive and conversational. She co-founded Soliloquy with Nathaniel Polish, Ph.D, an expert in computer speech; later Mark Lucente, Ph.D, an artificial intelligence expert from the MIT Media LabMIT Media Lab
The MIT Media Lab is a laboratory of MIT School of Architecture and Planning. Devoted to research projects at the convergence of design, multimedia and technology, the Media Lab has been widely popularized since the 1990s by business and technology publications such as Wired and Red Herring for a...
, joined them as CTO. The company raised more than $11 million in venture capital and employed over 60 staff, including 12 Ph.D's. In June 2000, she was asked by Michael Bloomberg
Michael Bloomberg
Michael Rubens Bloomberg is the current Mayor of New York City. With a net worth of $19.5 billion in 2011, he is also the 12th-richest person in the United States...
and Muriel Siebert
Muriel Siebert
Muriel “Mickie” Siebert, , and known as "The First Woman of Finance", was the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange and the first woman to head one of its member firms. Her struggle to obtain that seat – and join the 1365 male members of the exchange – culminated...
to join them onstage to discuss the future of e-commerce. Soliloquy closed after the tech crash in 2000.
Remote Lands, Inc.
Heald co-founded Remote Lands with Bangkok-based Jay Tindall as a high end travel designer and outfitter focused exclusively on Asia, with venture capital backing from Skymoon Ventures and Mike FarmwaldMike Farmwald
Mike Farmwald is a successful serial entrepreneur working in the Silicon Valley high-tech industry.Mike Farmwald is known for his combination of computer engineering skill and market vision...
. Heald and Remote Lands have been featured in the Financial Times
Financial Times
The Financial Times is an international business newspaper. It is a morning daily newspaper published in London and printed in 24 cities around the world. Its primary rival is the Wall Street Journal, published in New York City....
, The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. It is published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corporation, along with the Asian and European editions of the Journal....
, Forbes
Forbes
Forbes is an American publishing and media company. Its flagship publication, the Forbes magazine, is published biweekly. Its primary competitors in the national business magazine category are Fortune, which is also published biweekly, and Business Week...
, Newsweek
Newsweek
Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...
, BusinessWeek
BusinessWeek
Bloomberg Businessweek, commonly and formerly known as BusinessWeek, is a weekly business magazine published by Bloomberg L.P. It is currently headquartered in New York City.- History :...
, Town & Country
Town & Country (magazine)
Town & Country, formerly the Home Journal and The National Press, is a monthly American lifestyle magazine. It is the oldest continually published general interest magazine in the United States.-Early history:...
, Travel + Leisure
Travel + Leisure
Travel + Leisure is a travel magazine based in New York City, New York. Published 12 times a year, it has 4.8 million readers, according to its corporate media kit. It is put out by American Express Publishing Corporation, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of American Express Company led by...
and Conde Nast Traveler
Condé Nast Traveler
Condé Nast Traveler is a US magazine published by Condé Nast. It has its origins in a mailing sent out by the Diners Club club beginning in 1953, listing locations that would take the card. It began taking advertising in 1955. In order to attract more advertisers, it became a full-fledged magazine,...
/Concierge. Remote Lands accolades include National Geographic Adventure’s Best New Trips in October 2008, National Geographic Traveler
National Geographic Traveler
National Geographic Traveler is a magazine published by the National Geographic Society in the United States. It was launched in 1984. Local-language editions of National Geographic Traveler are published in Armenia, Belgium/the Netherlands, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, Indonesia, Latin America,...
’s Tours of a Lifetime in May 2009, May 2010 and April 2011, Travel + Leisure’s Best Life-Changing Trips in October 2011. In March 2010, Heald’s first hand account of a solo reconnaissance around North Korea
North Korea
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea , , is a country in East Asia, occupying the northern half of the Korean Peninsula. Its capital and largest city is Pyongyang. The Korean Demilitarized Zone serves as the buffer zone between North Korea and South Korea...
was featured in Departures, the American Express Platinum and Centurion card publication, generating a controversial reaction and much criticism of her visit. Remote Lands is part of the Virtuoso consortium of leading travel suppliers and agents around the world.
External links
- Remote LandsRemote LandsRemote Lands is a privately-held ultra-luxury Asia travel designer and tour operator based in New York and Bangkok. The company creates highly personalized bespoke holidays in Asia for high net worth individuals, often using upmarket travel agents...
- Soliloquy
- Donald Heald
- Virtuoso