Catherine Heald
Co-Founder and CEO
Catherine describes her greatest fear in life as mediocrity, and her second greatest as boredom -- and the combination being the stimulus for Remote Lands. A former software engineer and technology entrepreneur, she considers herself lucky to have found her true calling at the age of 42, and to have been able to turn her life's passion into her profession.
Wanderlust is in Catherine's blood' inherited from her great-grandparents from Pittsburgh who circumnavigated the world multiple times in the 19th century on Asian art and antique-buying trips. Catherine's Asia obsession began back in 1985 when she read James Clavell's 'Tai Pan' and was instantly smitten. She had already lived in France and had traveled widely throughout Europe, but she had never been to Asia, and was determined to go. In 1987 she flew to Hong Kong with two phone numbers in her pocket, got a job working for the Apple distributor, and ended up staying for seven years -- travelling constantly all over Asia and the world for both business and pleasure.
Some of her most memorable travel experiences include having a private lunch with the Queen of Bhutan in her palace; a magical New Years Eve in Mongolia sharing a ger with a nomad family at -35°F; getting married in an Iban tribal longhouse in Borneo; skiing in Gulmarg, Kashmir in 1989; taking a helicopter up to view the peak of Mt. Everest; cruising in Siberia from the Arctic Circle to Vladivostok in a Russian icebreaker; and most recently, travelling solo across North Korea.
Catherine founded her first company in Hong Kong in 1989 at age twenty six, a travel software publishing company which later morphed into a video game company with sales over $1 billion. Next she licensed the Pink Panther character to star as a globetrotter teaching kids about foreign cultures for Wanderlust Interactive, her second company. She took the company public in 1996 (NASDAQ: LUST) which was Silicon Alley's first IPO according to 'Crain's New York Business'. Her third company was a natural language technology company, which tried to change the world by allowing consumers to converse with websites as if talking casually to a shopkeeper. This turned out to be far too ambitious a problem - and indeed remains the holy grail of human Internet interaction. After leaving Soliloquy, she took a few years off from startups to work in her husband's Upper East Side art gallery.
As a hardcore entrepreneur and workaholic, she couldn't remain out of the fray for long. In late 2005 she hooked up with her old Hong Kong colleague, Jay Tindall, whom she knew was as passionate and knowledgeable about Asian travel as she was. Together they founded Remote Lands, with Catherine in New York running sales and marketing and Jay in Bangkok running operations and private jet and yacht charters. Their goal is clear-cut - to be the preeminent ultra-luxury Asia travel provider and to own the niche market for celebrities, Fortune 500 CEOs and other UHNWI's travelling in Asia. They coined the phrase 'travel designer' to describe their unique way of creating highly personalized and detailed itineraries for clients, and are flattered to see that many other travel companies are now using the term.
Catherine (née Evans) graduated from Shady Side Academy in Pittsburgh, and has a BA in Computer Science from Columbia University '84 (Barnard College). She lives with her husband, Donald Heald, a purveyor of rare antiquarian books, and their white Labrador, Burma, on Manhattan's Upper East Side and in Sherman, CT. Her proudest accomplishments include having been youngest female CEO of a publicly traded American company at age 33 (as Catherine Winchester); being featured onstage with Bill Gates in two of his major keynote speeches in 1991 and 1993; and finishing the 1985 NYC Marathon in 101st place with a time of 3:17.