Cathie Reid's epic life building a $1 billion business and heading into space

Cathie Reid wants to make her life as epic as possible.

The entrepreneur co-founded the Epic Healthcare Group and the Icon Group, which is Australia's largest private cancer and oncology services group and is valued at more than $1 billion.

But she's also a mother-of-two, Brisbane Lions board member, chairwoman of artificial intelligence start-up Flamingo and set to be an astronaut in Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic space program.

A proposal

Reid's background is as a pharmacist and in 1998 she was working on a concept for a start-up around the way pharmacy services are delivered in Australia when she met her future husband, Stuart Giles, who was working for a competitor.

Four months later Giles proposed.

"I was under a confidentiality agreement so I hadn't told him what I was doing at all so I said to him 'This proposal, do you want to get married or do you want me to tell you what I'm doing for work?'," Reid told Fairfax Media on the sidelines of the Dell Women's Entrepreneurs Conference. "He said, 'Look, I do want to know what you are doing for work, but I really want to get married as well.' So I told him what I was doing and a couple of weeks later he quit his job and joined me and we bought our first pharmacy." Read more