Caution Media

Caution Media was founded by Rick Winfield in 2001 as the business entity behind ComputerTrainingSchools.com, a pioneering website in the .edu lead generation space. Rick is an Internet industry veteran. He placed his first "online" order in 1990 (buying blank cassette tapes from a post on a Usenet group), built his first ecommerce site in 1996 (selling officially licensed merchandise for the 1996 Athens Olympics), was hired as the first employee on the online team for computer game companies Humongous and Cavedog Entertainment (and built a company wide ecommerce platform for their parent company, GT Interactive, now Atari), and was hired as CTO of workz.com towards the end of the Internet bubble era. In addition to ComputerTrainingSchools.com, Caution Media also provided technology consulting and web development services in the early 2000s. Rick built the initial MVP for All Star Directories (AllNursingSchools.com) and moved NaturalHealers.com to a pay-per-lead platform that helped them more than triple their revenue and led to the successful sale of the website to All Star Directories. In 2003 Caution Media started offering marketing consulting services, building on the rich knowledge base we were developing marketing our own sites. In 2011 Caution Media launched SustainabilitySchools.com, a website dedicated to helping students find schools that offer education opportunities focused around sustainability. SustainabilitySchools.com was sold in 2012. In addition to running Caution Media, Inc. Rick is an active start-up adviser and investor. Rick is co-founder and Director of Technology at Veskritec, Inc., a lead generation start-up incubator that helped found four lead generation companies, BeautySchoolsDirectory.com (sold 2007), ElderLivingSource.com (sold 2008), AllPropertyManagement.com (sold 2010), and ManufacturedHomeSource.com. Rick also independently invests in and advises a number of start-ups focused around Internet marketing, big data, ecommerce, and sustainability. Rick is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in Linguistics and Cognitive Science (focusing on computational linguistics and artificial intelligence) and is currently working on his MBA at the Columbia Business School Global Asia program (a partnership between Columbia Business School, London Business School, and Hong Kong University). Rick is focusing his studies on marketing, innovation, and leadership.