Halsey Minor

Last updated
Halsey Minor
ExecHeadshot HalseyMinor.jpg
Minor in 2019
Born
Halsey McLean Minor Sr

1964 (age 60–61)
Charlottesville, Virginia, U.S.
OccupationEntrepreneur
Known forStarting CNET [1]

Halsey Minor (born 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.

Contents

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. [2] [3] 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, [2] where he worked as an executive recruiter. [4]

CNET

Minor conceived of the idea for CNET in 1992. [5] He quit his job to start CNET that December [2] with cofounder and former classmate Shelby Bonnie. [6] Bonnie provided $25,000 in seed funding, [3] and Minor obtained some other funding through friends and family members. [5]

Initially, Minor was not able to get any deals with broadcasters to license CNET's TV shows on technology. By 1994, CNET was not able to make payroll. However, that year Minor convinced Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen to invest $5 million for a 20% interest in the company. [2] [3] Also, USA Network bought the rights to CNET's TV show "Central TV." [2]

Minor bought domains like news.com, tv.com, search.com, shopper.com, and download.com. [6] [5] Over time, he focused more on CNET as an internet publication rather than a broadcast business, [6] [7] culminating in the launch of CNET.com in June 1995. [5] CNET.com later became one of the most highly-trafficked websites on the internet. [8] 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. [9] In July 1996, Minor took CNET public. [5]

In 1997, Minor started a search engine called Snap.com [6] with $25 million in funding and 150 employees from CNET. The decision to create a search engine was "universally booed" and caused CNET's stock to decline. [5] [7] Two years later Minor sold a 60% interest in Snap to NBC for $500 million. [6] [7] Investors widely criticized Minor in 1999 when he increased marketing spending from $400,000 to $100 million. However, in hindsight the campaign was later believed to have dramatically increased website traffic and recognition of the CNET brand. [10]

Minor also sold some of CNET's technology rights to a company called Vignette, [11] and he was earning revenue from CNET's advertising sales as the website grew in popularity. [6] CNET joined the NASDAQ 100 [6] and held interests in Vignette, Beyond.com, and others. [5] By 1997, Minor's estimated net worth was $180.2 million. [6] By 2000, his 11 percent interest in CNET was worth $495 million. [7]

In March 2000, Minor retired from his CEO position. [6] He remained on the CNET board as Chairman, while cofounder Shelby Bonnie took over as CEO. [7]

Post CNET

According to Minor, he left CNET to focus on expanding Salesforce.com where he was the second-largest shareholder when the company went public. [11] He was a cofounder of the company and had made an early investment of $19.5 million of his own money in 1999. [9] [12] He was also an early investor in Rhapsody. [13]

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. [14] [15] He created another venture capital firm focused on software-as-a-service companies in 2004 [16] called Minor Ventures. [17] 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. [11] [9] [18] It installed OpenDNS at its San Francisco office, providing coaching, investments, and administrative support to get the company started. [19]

Bankruptcy

Minor said he wanted to focus more on philanthropy and venture capitalism rather than being a CEO. [17] He eventually lost his wealth on real estate, horse-breeding, legal disputes, and artwork, [11] [20] [18] culminating in a bankruptcy filing in June 2013. [21] Business Insider depicted the decline in Minor's wealth as "most likely due to his expensive taste in real estate, art, and horses". [18] The Washington Post said it was a "post-divorce spending spree". [22] 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. [9]

In 2007, Minor bought the Carter's Grove estate from the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, which he planned to use as a retreat and for horse-breeding. [17] Minor never lived at the estate and the vacant 18th century mansion began to fall into disrepair. After he filed for personal bankruptcy in 2013, the property was sold at auction. The Foundation submitted the only bid at the auction held on May 21, 2014, for the outstanding mortgage amount, and announced that it planned to resell it, with the price increased because of significant costs related to the sale, including over $600,000 in necessary repairs. [23] Around the same time, Minor planned to build a $31 million luxury hotel in his hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia. [22] A dispute formed between Minor and the bank he said was going to provide financing. [6] The project was abandoned in 2009. [24] Minor also invested in substantial real property assets that declined in value during the housing crisis. [6] [18]

Minor was involved in a series of legal disputes with Christie's and Sotheby's regarding art purchases. [25] 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. [26] 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. [27]

When Minor declared bankruptcy, he owed $100 million and had only $50 million in remaining assets. [18] [21]

Other activities

In 2014, Minor founded and launched a bitcoin platform Bitreserve now called Uphold and a virtual reality company called Live Planet. [13] [28] In 2017, he created VideoCoin, which uses idle data center servers to support streaming video. [12] In 2021, he founded the NFTs open platform Vivid Labs. [29]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marc Andreessen</span> American entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer (born 1971)

Marc Lowell Andreessen is an American businessman and former software engineer. He is the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser with a graphical user interface; co-founder of Netscape; and co-founder and general partner of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He co-founded and later sold the software company Opsware to Hewlett-Packard; he also co-founded Ning, a company that provides a platform for social networking websites. He is an inductee in the World Wide Web Hall of Fame. Andreessen's net worth is estimated at $1.7 billion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sotheby's</span> International auction house

Sotheby's is a British-founded multinational corporation with headquarters in New York City. It is one of the world's largest brokers of fine and decorative art, jewellery, and collectibles. It has 80 locations in 40 countries, and maintains a significant presence in the UK.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Webvan</span> Bankrupt technology company

Webvan was a dot-com company and grocery business that filed for bankruptcy in 2001 after 3 years of operation. It was headquartered in Foster City, California, United States. It delivered products to customers' homes within a 30-minute window of their choosing. At its peak, it offered service in ten US areas: the San Francisco Bay Area; Dallas; Sacramento; San Diego; Los Angeles; Orange County, California; Chicago; Seattle; Portland, Oregon; and Atlanta, Georgia. The company had hoped to expand to 26 cities by 2001.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Evan Williams (Internet entrepreneur)</span> American technology entrepreneur (born 1972)

Evan Clark "Ev" Williams is an American billionaire technology entrepreneur. He is a co-founder of Twitter, and was its CEO from 2008 to 2010, and a member of its board from 2007 to 2019. He founded Blogger and Medium. In 2014, he co-founded the venture capital firm Obvious Ventures. As of February 2022, his net worth is estimated at US$2.1 billion.

Business.com is a digital media company and B2B web destination which offers various performance marketing advertising, including lead generation products on a pay per lead and pay per click basis, directory listings, and display advertising. The site covers business industry news and trends for growth companies and the B2B community to stay up-to-date, and hosted more than 15,000 pieces of content as of November 2014. Business.com operates as a subsidiary of the Purch Group since being acquired in 2016.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Salesforce</span> American software company

Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, artificial intelligence, and application development.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carter's Grove</span> Historic plantation in Virginia, United States

Carter's Grove, also known as Carter's Grove Plantation, is a 750-acre (300 ha) plantation located on the north shore of the James River in the Grove Community of southeastern James City County in the Virginia Peninsula area of the Hampton Roads region of Virginia in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marc Benioff</span> American businessman (born 1964)

Marc Russell Benioff is an American internet entrepreneur and philanthropist. Benioff is best known as the co-founder, chairman and CEO of the software company Salesforce, as well as being the owner of Time magazine since 2018.

JPG was an online photography magazine published by 100 Tribes, Inc. in New York City.

Peter Mark Brant Sr. is an American industrialist and art collector. He is married to model Stephanie Seymour. He was also a magazine publisher until 2018 and a film producer.

govWorks Inc. was a dot-com company founded in 1998 by Kaleil Isaza Tuzman, Tom Herman, and Chieh Cheung. It went bankrupt when the dot-com bubble burst in 2000. The company's history is documented in the 2001 documentary Startup.com. Originally known as Public Data Systems, the company produced software to help government clients track contracts and oversee purchasing functions. As the Internet boom accelerated, the company transitioned toward becoming an Internet web portal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Slack Technologies</span> Software company in Canada

Slack Technologies, LLC is an American software company founded in 2009 in Vancouver, British Columbia, known for its proprietary communication platform Slack. Outside its headquarters in San Francisco, California, Slack also operates offices in New York City, Denver, Toronto, London, Paris, Tokyo, Dublin, Vancouver, Pune, and Melbourne.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mark Suster</span>

Mark Suster is an American businessman and investor. He is a managing partner at Upfront Ventures, the largest venture capital firm in Los Angeles. Aside from his business career, Suster is also a prominent blogger in the American high-technology startup scene and venture capital world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexis Ohanian</span> American internet entrepreneur and investor (born 1983)

Alexis Kerry Ohanian is an American internet entrepreneur and investor. He is best known as the co-founder and former executive chairman of the social media site Reddit along with Steve Huffman and Aaron Swartz. He also co-founded the early-stage venture capital firm Initialized Capital, helped launch the travel search website Hipmunk, and started the social enterprise Breadpig. He was also a partner at Y Combinator.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Garrett Camp</span> Canadian billionaire entrepreneur (born 1978)

Garrett Camp is a Canadian businessman, investor, and software engineer. He helped build the search engine StumbleUpon and is a co-founder of Uber. He lives in Los Angeles.

ThousandEyes, Inc. is a network intelligence company headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Dublin, London, Mexico City, Kraków, Lisbon, Sydney and Austin, Texas. The company produces software that analyzes the performance of local and wide area networks, servers and applications. On May 29, 2020, Cisco announced it would be acquiring ThousandEyes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adam Neumann</span> Israeli-American businessman (born 1979)

Adam Neumann is an Israeli-American billionaire businessman and investor. In 2010, he co-founded WeWork with Miguel McKelvey, where he was CEO from 2010 to 2019. In 2019, he co-founded a family office dubbed 166 2nd Financial Services with his wife, Rebekah Neumann, to manage their personal wealth, investing over a billion dollars in real estate and venture startups.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bryan Goldberg</span> American entrepreneur

Bryan David Goldberg is an American entrepreneur and the owner of Bustle Digital Group, which operates a number of media properties, including Bustle, Nylon, W Magazine and Gawker. Previously, Goldberg founded Bleacher Report, a sports news website that sold to Turner Broadcasting System in 2012 for $200 million.

Checkmarx is an enterprise application security company specializing in static application security testing (SAST) headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ICONIQ Capital</span> American investment management firm based in San Francisco

ICONIQ Capital, LLC (Iconiq) is an American investment management firm headquartered in San Francisco, California. It functions as a hybrid family office providing specialized financial advisory, private equity, venture capital, real estate, and philanthropic services to its clientele. Iconiq primarily serves ultra-high-net-worth clients working in technology, high finance, and entertainment. The firm operates in-house venture capital, growth equity, and charitable giving funds for its clients.

References

  1. ↑ Veitch, Martin (August 24, 2015). "The rise, fall and rise again of CNET founder Halsey Minor". IDG. Retrieved April 25, 2019. It's still CNET that Minor is best known for.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Reid, Robert (1997). Architects of the Web: 1,000 Days that Built the Future of Business. pp.  321-353. ISBN   9780471325734.
  3. 1 2 3 Turner, Marcia (2001). "Halsey Minor". How to Think like the World's Greatest New Media Moguls. McGraw Hill. pp.  28. ISBN   9780071360692.
  4. ↑ Nee, Eric (July 27, 1998). "Surf's Up". Forbes. p. 106.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Serwer, Andrew; Key, Angela (June 21, 1999). "CNET: Revenge of the Preppies Southern blueblood Halsey Minor is trying to create a great online media company". Fortune. Retrieved April 27, 2019.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Barnes, Lindsay (November 27, 2008). "Minor mishaps: He built an Internet giant, so why is Halsey hurting?". The Hook. Retrieved April 26, 2019.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 Fitzgerald, Kate (2000). "Halsey Minor". Advertising Age. Vol. 71. p. 46.
  8. ↑ "Minor mogul". The Economist. August 7, 1997. Retrieved April 27, 2019.
  9. 1 2 3 4 Bryant, Martin (February 6, 2016). "The incredible story of CNET founder Halsey Minor". The Next Web. Retrieved April 27, 2019.
  10. ↑ "How to Think Like the World's Greatest New Media Moguls". McGraw-Hill Companies. July 27, 2001 – via Internet Archive.
  11. 1 2 3 4 Veitch, Martin (August 24, 2015). "The rise, fall and rise again of CNET founder Halsey Minor". IDG. Retrieved April 25, 2019.
  12. 1 2 Popomaronis, Tom (April 1, 2018). "The Co-Founder of Salesforce is Taking His Talents to the Blockchain--Here's Why". Inc.com. Retrieved April 27, 2019.
  13. 1 2 Wolverton, Troy (September 12, 2016). "Web pioneer Halsey Minor bets on VR with Live Planet". The Mercury News. Retrieved April 27, 2019.
  14. ↑ Turner, Marcia (2001). "Halsey Minor". How to Think like the World's Greatest New Media Moguls. McGraw Hill. pp.  37. ISBN   9780071360692.
  15. ↑ Wilson, Lizette (December 14, 2001). "OneonOne: Halsey Minor at it once more". San Francisco Business Times. Vol. 16, no. 19.
  16. ↑ Knorr, Eric (November 29, 2004). The End of IT as we Know it?. InfoWorld. Retrieved April 27, 2019.
  17. 1 2 3 Flores, Chris (December 22, 2007). "New Owner of Carter's Grove". dailypress.com. Retrieved April 27, 2019.
  18. 1 2 3 4 5 Bort, Julie (May 31, 2013). "5 Years After Selling CNET For $1.8 Billion, Halsey Minor Is Broke". Business Insider. Retrieved April 27, 2019.
  19. ↑ "Startup offers free Internet security service". SFGate. 2008-07-05. Retrieved 2019-05-06.
  20. ↑ Stone, Madeline (April 3, 2015). "A Versailles-inspired mansion owned by CNET's bankrupt founder gets its price chopped to $12.5 million". Business Insider. Retrieved April 27, 2019.
  21. 1 2 Garofoli, Joe (May 15, 2014). "Once wealthy, then bankrupt, Halsey Minor turns to bitcoin". SFGate.
  22. 1 2 Stevens, Elizabeth Lesly (May 31, 2012). "The sorry fate of a tech pioneer Halsey Minor and historic Virginia estate Carter's Grove" – via www.washingtonpost.com.
  23. ↑ "Colonial Williamsburg to sell plantation anew"Virginia Lawyers Media June 2, 2014 p. 5
  24. ↑ Stout, Nolan (March 28, 2019). "Councilors Bellamy, Signer will not seek re-election". The Daily Progress.
  25. ↑ "The Art Market: sprint to the finish". Financial Times. June 14, 2013. Retrieved April 27, 2019.
  26. ↑ "CNet founder Halsey Minor sues Sotheby's in auction dispute". October 1, 2008.
  27. ↑ Golding, Bruce (2010-05-24). "'Net tycoon Minor told to pay $6.6M to Sotheby's". NYPOST.com. Retrieved May 30, 2013.
  28. ↑ Captain, Sean (July 22, 2016). "Halsey Minor's Reality Lab Networks Unveils Streaming VR System, Live Planet". Fast Company. Retrieved April 27, 2019.
  29. ↑ Biggs, John (2022-01-13). "Here's why CNET co-founder Halsey Minor is bullish on NFTs". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2024-06-25.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.