An Event Empire in Formation: Heather Holst-Knudsen and the Art of Reinvention
Still in the middle of the build, Heather Holst-Knudsen turns family legacy and fearless gatherings into a real-time lesson in what it takes to start again.
Most business stories are told backward. The company sells, the IPO happens, the founder becomes myth. Heather Holst-Knudsen’s story is still being written—in the noise, the motion, the exhaustion—where most entrepreneurs actually live. Her days are an alternating current of vision and logistics, ambition and anxiety, the tug between what’s working and what’s still being willed into existence.
Heather was born into a family that measured life in issues, ad pages, and industrial directories. Her great-grandfather founded Thomas Publishing in 1898, creator of the Thomas Register of American Manufacturers—the heavy green books that once defined American industry. Her father ran the company like an inheritance of duty. For four generations, Thomases and Holst-Knudsens had catalogued the nation’s machinery. But Heather, the middle child, was drawn to a different kind of machinery: people.
In her parents’ New Jersey house, she would sneak out of bed to watch their jazz wine and cheese parties from the staircase. She studied the choreography—the arrivals, the laughter, the unspoken rules of charm. Those nights were her first education in how space, sound, and timing could make belonging feel like magic. At Georgetown University she became the social conductor of her circle. There were no sororities, so she built her own network through dinners and late-night parties. “If I’m not planning something,” she likes to say, “I don’t know what to do with myself.”
After graduating with degrees in Italian and art history, she dutifully joined Thomas Publishing, then quickly escaped. Corporate predictability bored her. She talked her way into a job in Barcelona with Reed Elsevier (now RELX), producing trade magazines for veterinarians and cement makers—proof that even the dullest niches could have an audience if told with imagination. When she returned to New York, she took NYU’s executive publishing program and landed at Miller Freeman, one of the great B2B empires of the nineties. Then came The Industry Standard—the rocket ship that would both inspire and scar her.
At its peak, The Industry Standard was the sun around which the new economy orbited. BusinessWeek called it “the Internet Economy’s New Bible.” Ad pages doubled monthly. Editors believed they were chronicling a revolution; in truth, they were living inside a hallucination. Heather joined the event division under John Battelle,, an impresario who treated his Internet Summit like an opera. He charged $4,000 a ticket, filled ballrooms with venture capitalists and founders, and obsessed over the microphysics of atmosphere—lighting, badges, music, the scent of possibility. Heather watched him turn staging into strategy and absorbed the lesson: an event wasn’t a side hustle, it was power embodied.
Then the bubble burst. In 2001, The Industry Standard—once the fastest-growing magazine in America—imploded. The staff scattered; the myth vanished. Heather remembers watching it unravel, one canceled ad, one empty seat at a time. “It was a spectacular failure,” she says. “A master class in what happens when hype outruns reality.” It left her with a permanent allergy to bubbles. When she looks at the fevered promises of AI today—the gold-rush language, the endless keynotes—she recognizes the rhythm. “We’ve seen this before,” she says. “The technology will change everything, but it can’t change human nature. Eventually, gravity wins.”
When she rejoined her family’s business, she carried both her optimism and her scars. Her father handed her the failing Managing Automation division while her brother took the crown jewel, ThomasNet. It felt like exile, but she turned exile into a stage. She launched the Manufacturing Leadership Summit, transforming an “unsexy” industry into a black-tie experience at The Breakers in Palm Beach. She gave plant managers the glamour of a Cannes premiere and sold sponsorships at $150,000 a pop. For a few years, she had it all—profit, praise, purpose.
Then the rug pulled. Her father sold the division to Frost & Sullivan, and within months her innovations were dismantled. “Mediocre was good enough,” she says. “That was the culture.” She stayed two years out of obligation, but the experience broke her faith in big organizations. She left determined never to let anyone else control her work again.
What followed was messy and brave. She divorced, remarried and moved to Florida. She started KidBacker, a platform to fund teenage entrepreneurs, ran out of capital, and shut it down. She consulted for Feathr, learning the architecture of SaaS and data marketing. She freelanced as a strategist, but hated the impotence of consulting. “It’s never your win when it works and always your fault when it doesn’t,” she says. “I’m only alive when I own the product.”
So she built one. From Sarasota she launched H2K Labs, her own experiment in how media, data, and community could fuse into growth. The flagship became RevvedUp, a C-suite summit built not for scale but for intimacy—an anti-conference. The first, in 2025 at Sarasota’s Art Ovation Hotel, hosted 110 executives from companies like Informa, Questex, Clarion Events, and the New York Post. It sold out. The NPS was 90. The room hummed with the charge she remembered from her childhood staircase.
She followed it with LunchLab, a 40-person series of white-tablecloth working sessions at the Yale Club, and then the Revenue Room™ Salon, an invitation-only dinner for senior women in leadership. Barbara Peng of Business Insider, Sarah Personette of Puck, and Samantha Skey of SHEMedia headlined the October 2025 edition, sponsored by Bombora, JEGI LEONIS and Tricon Infotech. The conversations drifted between profit models and personal stamina—the private truths behind public titles.
The next phase, RevvedUp 2026 at The Vinoy in St. Petersburg, will tackle “Redefining Growth: AI, Data & the Business Model Shift Ahead.” She calls it “a live laboratory.” To her, each gathering is another data point in a grand experiment: can you rebuild the revenue model itself as an event? Can the machinery of capitalism learn to feel human again?
Around her, the industry itself is mutating. Organizers are turning conferences into year-round memberships; others are monetizing data from attendee behavior; some are testing immersive environments that feel half-cinema, half-strategy session. Events are becoming laboratories, not monuments. For Heather, the potential market is staggering. The global ecosystem of B2B events, media, and data-driven growth is worth between twenty and fifty billion dollars. Within that, she sees a ten-billion-dollar slice of companies ready to transform—and perhaps one or two percent she could realistically capture in the next few years. But for her, it isn’t just about market share. It’s about rewriting how growth feels: less transactional, more designed, more human.
She’s part strategist, part stage director, part sociologist. While others are still selling sponsorships and floor space, she’s treating growth itself as an experience-design problem. Her salons, labs, and summits are prototypes for a new kind of enterprise—part think tank, part membership network, part performance art. They are places where CEOs dissect compensation structures as if they were set lists, where AI tools are tested over dinner, where belonging becomes a new metric of ROI.
Family still shadows the narrative, but the tone has mellowed. Thomas sold in 2021 to a strategic buyer. Her brother and sister remain in New York and her parents live in south Florida; she builds from the Gulf Coast. “We’re close,” she says, then pauses. “But at some point you stop asking for approval.” The Thomas Publishing dynasty lives on through directories and digital indexes, but her branch has evolved. Every generation of the family built with the tools at hand—her great-grandfather had presses, her father had databases, and she has people.
Heather’s life has unfolded through every storm of modern business—the dot-bomb, 9/11, the recession, the pandemic, the AI wave—and through it all, her medium of survival has been the gathering. She used events to repair her career, her confidence, even her sense of self. What she’s building now is neither a company nor a conference but an empire in formation: a constellation of rooms, conversations, and communities where the future of revenue is being rehearsed in real time.
She isn’t finished. The story is still mid-sentence, messy, uncertain, alive. She once watched her parents’ parties from the top of the stairs; now she’s the one designing the guest list, arranging the light, deciding who sits where. She isn’t just staging events anymore—she’s staging the reinvention of revenue itself. The happy ending isn’t written yet. The goosebumps come from knowing she’s still writing it.