Halsey Minor (born December 6, 1964) is an American entrepreneur who founded CNET in 1993. He also founded or co-founded Live Planet, VideoCoin, Vivid Labs, Salesforce.com, Google Voice, OpenDNS, and Vignette.
Minor founded the venture capital firm Minor Ventures. In June 2013, he filed for bankruptcy but continued to be involved in the capital or management of some technology companies.
Career
Early career
Minor moved to New York City for his first job out of college working for Merrill Lynch as an investment banker. While there, he created a spinoff called Global Publishing Corporation that focused on sharing information and training materials across Merrill's IT infrastructure. This was followed by a project with coworker Jeff Bezos to develop software that would have provided custom news feeds based on each user's job description and interests. Merrill Lynch signed a three-year contract to fund the news feed project, then cancelled due to Merrill's poor financial results.
Afterwards, Minor spent a year doing consulting work for EastWest Network, which published magazines typically found on airplanes. He was working on a startup idea using satellites to distribute training content at corporations before a friend offered him a job at a recruiting firm called Russ Reynolds Associates,
CNET
Minor conceived of the idea for CNET in 1992. He quit his job to start CNET that December Bonnie provided $25,000 in seed funding, culminating in the launch of CNET.com in June 1995. Minor and CNET also helped create the Internet Advertising Bureau (now known as the Interactive Advertising Bureau) and influenced the development of the online publishing industry. In July 1996, Minor took CNET public.
Minor also sold some of CNET's technology rights to a company called Vignette, and he was earning revenue from CNET's advertising sales as the website grew in popularity. He was also an early investor in Rhapsody.
Minor started a venture capital firm called 12 Entrepreneuring in February 2000, but it quickly dissolved due to internal discord and the decline of the tech sector after the dot-com bubble. He created another venture capital firm focused on software-as-a-service companies in 2004 called Minor Ventures. Minor Ventures did well and invested in Grand Central Communications, which was sold to Google in 2007 for $65 million and later became Google Voice.
Bankruptcy
Minor said he wanted to focus more on philanthropy and venture capitalism rather than being a CEO. Business Insider depicted the decline in Minor's wealth as "most likely due to his expensive taste in real estate, art, and horses". Minor said it was a mix of the overall recession and banking crisis, as well as being depressed after his divorce and his father's suicide. Around the same time, Minor planned to build a $31 million luxury hotel in his hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia. Minor also invested in substantial real property assets that declined in value during the housing crisis. A jury awarded $8.57 million to Minor from Christie's for keeping his paintings when the paintings did not sell, despite promising to return them. Minor was required to pay for paintings he bid on but did not pay for. Sotheby's filed suit for $16.8 million in unpaid debt for paintings Minor bought. Minor counter-sued saying that Sotheby's routinely sold artwork without fully disclosing the paintings were still collateral for the prior owner's loans. On May 24, 2010, Minor was ordered to pay the $6.6 million+ he owed Sotheby's for backing out on his winning bids for three paintings.
When Minor declared bankruptcy, he owed $100 million and had only $50 million in remaining assets. In 2017, he created VideoCoin, which uses idle data center servers to support streaming video.