Catherine Heald

Co-Founder & CEO

Catherine is an adventurer, an Asiaphile and a serial entrepreneur. She describes her greatest fear in life as mediocrity, and her second greatest as boredom -- and the combination being a stimulus for the creation of Remote Lands. She is a former software engineer, technology entrepreneur and founder of three software companies since 1989, and previously founded and ran three technology companies in Hong Kong, Guangzhou, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. She was a pioneer in digital media in the 1980’s-1990's including creating the world's first travel e-books and being Silicon Alley's first IPO in 1996 (NASDAQ: LUST). 

Wanderlust is in Catherine's blood, inherited from her great-grandparents from Pittsburgh who circumnavigated the world multiple times in the 1800’s on Asian art and antique-buying trips. Catherine's Asia obsession began back in the 1980’s 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. She was working on Wall Street at L.F. Rothschild at the time while getting her MBA at night at NYU.  After trying to finish her MBA in Asia and finding it was impossible back then, she made a life changing decision. In 1987 she boarded a plane to Hong Kong with two phone numbers in her pocket and her total savings of $1,000, immediately got a job selling Apple computers, 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 in 2006; a magical New Years Eve in Mongolia sharing a ger with a nomad family at -35°F; hiking to far-flung hill tribe villages off the grid in eastern Myanmar; off-piste skiing in Gulmarg, Kashmir in 1989; trekking alone in the Everest region of Nepal; taking a private helicopter up to view the peak of the third highest mountain in the world, Kanchenjunga in Sikkim in 2001; cruising in Siberia from the Arctic Circle to Vladivostok in a Russian icebreaker in 1997; chartering a private plane to visit remote corners of the Gobi Desert and eastern Mongolia; travelling solo for a week across North Korea back when it was legal in 2009; cruising through Komodo National Park in Indonesia; hiking through the magical rainforests of Yakushima Island in Japan; attending the mindblowing Kumbh Mela festival in Prayagraj, India of over 200,000 pilgrims in 2019. She and her husband were married in New York in 2003 and have had their wedding vows renewed in Bhutan, Borneo, Bali and Kerala.

Catherine founded her first company in Hong Kong in 1989 at age twenty six, a travel software publishing company which later morphed into Take-Two, a video game company with sales over $1 billion and parent company of Rockstar Games. Next she licensed the Pink Panther character from MGM 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', which also credited her with being one of the founders of New York's now famous Silicon Alley. Her third company, Soliloquy, was a natural language technology developer with the same goal as Siri but too early.

In late 2005 she partnered 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 Jay in Bangkok handling operations. Their goal has always been clear-cut - to be the preeminent ultra-luxe Asia travel provider and to own that 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 then moved to New York to attend Columbia University (Barnard College). 1980 was the first year Columbia offered Computer Science as a major, and her instinct told her computers would become increasingly integral into business and life in general. She took a particular interest in her Artificial Intelligence courses (yes, AI is not new and has been around for many decades) She earned her BA in Computer Science in 1984 and then spent over three years writing code for Wall Street's LF Rothschild while attending NYU's Graduate Stern School of Business, but she left for Hong Kong before completing her MBA.

She lives with her husband, Donald Heald, a collector and purveyor of rare books and manuscripts, and their white Labradors, Bali and Bhutan, on Manhattan's Upper East Side and in Sherman, Connecticut.  Her proudest accomplishments include having been the youngest female CEO of a publicly traded  company at age 33 in 1996 (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 and having won dozens of travel awards from Condé Nast Traveler, Travel + Leisure, the Robb Report and more since 2012. She credits daily running since 1976 and the self-discipline she learned from training with being the foundation for her achievements in life. 

Catherine is passionate about fitness, wellness and nutrition, and practices mindfulness, meditation and Zen. She feels it is essential to exercise daily and eat healthily while travelling in order to maximize wellbeing and overall enjoyment of one's journey.  She has been deeply inspired by Shintoism and reverence for nature, and adores hiking in the mountains of Japan and the Himalayas and all over Asia. She feels that the more strenuous and challenging a hike is the more rewarding it is - an apt metaphor for the journey of life. Besides travel, hiking and dogs, her hobbies include reading nonfiction and studying languages, specifically French and Japanese.