Halsey Minor

Halsey Minor
Minor in 2019
Born	Halsey McLean Minor 1964 (age 59–60) Charlottesville, Virginia, U.S.
Education	BA in anthropology from University of Virginia
Occupation(s)	Entrepreneur, businessperson philanthropist
Known for	Starting CNET and Salesforce.com

Halsey McLean Minor Sr. (born 1964) is an American entrepreneur who founded CNET in 1993. He founded or co-founded Uphold, Vivid Labs, Salesforce.com, Google Voice, OpenDNS, NBCi and Vignette. He uniquely founded and built a NASDAQ 100 company and immediately co-founded a DOW 30 company, both in San Francisco.

Minor then created the company studio for his ideas Minor Ventures and started Google Voice, OpenDNS and was majority shareholder in Kareo. In June 2013, he filed for bankruptcy but has gone on to start, manage and invest in numerous successful technology companies.

Early life and education

Halsey Minor was born in 1964 in Charlottesville, Virginia. His father, Charles Venable Minor Jr., was a real estate broker, and his mother bred and trained horses. Halsey was born into a family of predominately lawyers His great-great-grandfather John B Minor a law professor at the University of Virginia, was considered one of the great jurists of his time. Minor Hall, the former University of Virginia Law School, was named in his honor. Fearing that his troops would ravage the University of Virginia as had just happened at the Virginia Military Institute, a University delegation of the Rector, Chairman of the Faculty, and John B. Minor, met General Custer to successfully convince him to not burn the University of Virginia. His great-grandfather Raleigh Minor served as Dean and founded The Raven Society, the oldest and most prestigious honorary society. His grandfather, with Governor Battle, founded Battle, Perkins, and Minor today McGuireWoods, and served as the head of the Virginia Bar Association. His namesake and great uncle was Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, Jr, five star fleet Admiral during WW 2 in the Pacific who attended The University of Virginia and for whom Halsey Hall is named.

At nine, Minor created a "triple-decker version of checkers" and attempted to sell it to Milton Bradley, marking his first entrepreneurial project. By age ten, he began showing an interest in computers and programming.

As a teenager, Minor started a farm fence-painting business hiring friends. He attended Woodberry Forest, an all-boys boarding school in Madison County, Virginia. After graduating, he pursued anthropology at the University of Virginia, where he became a member of the Delta Phi fraternity. While in college, Minor founded the Rental Network, a business that provided information about local housing rentals through a network of public kiosks, a precursor to Zillow Rentals. After graduating in 1987, Minor initially considered focusing on the Rental Network business but decided to gain business experience first by working as a financial analyst at Merrill Lynch in New York.

Career

Early career

Halsey Minor moved to New York City for his first job out of college, working for Merrill Lynch as an investment banker in the oil and natural gas group. It was made up of bankers from Merrill’s acquisition of the respected White Weld investment bank which Merrill used to enter investment banking. While there, he created an Intranet in 1989 focused on sharing information and training materials across Merrill's IT infrastructure one the first hypertext service toda called intranets documented in a book published in 1991 titled The Multimedia Handbook, authored by Tony Cawkell. One of the notable mentions in the book is Halsey Minor’s work in creating an online service for Merrill Lynch. Halsey Minor was a pioneer in developing multimedia platforms, and this project was part of his early contributions to the digital world before founding CNET. This followed his two years as an investment banker. It was called Merrill Online and ran on their at the time, uncommon global corporate network for employees. Next, he sold Merrill Lynch a follow up project called World Watch with co-worker Jeff Bezos to develop software that would have provided custom news feeds to each banker based on their clients and areas of expertise, services provided by Bloomberg today. The two planned to create a commercial customized newspaper by fax and email.

Merrill Lynch signed a three-year contract to fund the news feed project, which was then cancelled following Merrill's poor financial results. Afterward, Minor spent a year doing consulting work for EastWest Network, which published magazines for 7 major airlines. He was working on a startup idea using satellites to distribute computer training content at corporations before a friend offered him a job as founder Russ Reynolds assistant at the multinational recruiting firm Russ Reynolds Associates, where he worked as Russ’s assistant for 18 months. Russ became the first investor. As part of his agreement he could work on the idea that became CNET and Russ would invest. Halsey left when Russ left to start his new firm.

CNET Networks

Minor conceived the idea for CNET in 1992. Minor quit his job working with Russ to start CNET that December with a $50,000 investment from Russ Reynolds. 6 months later, former classmate Shelby Bonnie. provided an investment just as the company was about to shut down. Shelby later left Tiger Management to join the venture and became its largest early investor. Minor obtained some funding from friends and family members and with the significant help of Shelby who raised capital from his former Tiger partners.

Initially, Minor was trying to launch both an online resource on Prodigy and AOL and complementary TV programming. The Internet was not yet commercial. CNET pursued TV deals with VH1 and USA Networks but could not get any cable channels to license CNET's TV shows about technology. By 1994, CNET was not able to make payroll. However, after several months of no cash Minor and Bonnie convinced Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen to invest $10 million for a 20% interest in the company. Also, USA Network bought the rights to 4 of the company’s shows, including CNET's TV show "Central TV" hosted by Ryan Seacrest.

Minor bought domains like news.com, tv.com, search.com, shopper.com, auctions.com, radio.com, mac.com, java.com, community.com, shareware.com, shopping.com, chat.com and download.com. From the beginning, he focused on CNET as an internet replacement for computer magazines consistent with Paul Allen’s wired world investing strategy, rather than a broadcast business, culminating in the launch of CNET.com in June 1995. CNET.com would later become what CNET is best-known for and one of the most highly-trafficked websites on the internet regularly in the top 15 in the world in traffic while Minor ran the company. Minor also helped create the Internet Advertising Bureau now known as the Interactive Advertising Bureau patterned on the Cable Advertising Bureau, hosting an industry-wide meeting at CNET to build support, and he significantly influenced the development of the online publishing industry. CNET developed the first commercial web publishing application to use a database and spun the technology out for 35% of Vignette, a company with a market capitalization of more than $9 billion in 2000. In July 1996, Minor took CNET public with Morgan Stanley.

In 1997, Minor started a search engine called Snap.com 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. However, two years later Minor sold a 60% interest in Snap to NBC for $500 million. Similarly, 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.

Minor sold CNET's publishing platform to a company called Vignette, and he was earning profits from CNET's advertising sales as the website grew in popularity, unusual during the dot.com boom. CNET was one of the rare companies to join the NASDAQ 100 before 2000 with Yahoo and Lycos. The company held a $1.3 billion stock interest in Vignette in 2000, and stock in Beyond.com, and NBCi. By 1997, Minor's estimated net worth was $180.2 million. By 2000, his 11 percent interest in CNET alone was worth $495 million.

In March 2000, Minor retired from his CEO position. Minor remained on the CNET board as Chairman, while co-founder Shelby Bonnie took over as CEO.

Post CNET

According to Minor, he left CNET in February 2000 to focus on expanding Salesforce.com which launched in January, where he was the second-largest shareholder when the company went public. Minor was a co-founder of the company and had made an early investment of $19.5 million from his personal wealth in 1999. Marc Benioff approached Minor with the idea for Salesforce.com in 1997. Marc returned 18 months later with a more refined plan. Minor had a practice of serving on no other boards or making investments in other companies to solely focus on CNET. Minor was running one of the largest web destinations, had created the enterprise software product Vignette’s key Story Server product and CNET was the enterprise software company’s largest shareholder. He was also exploring buying CRM software exactly when Benioff returned. Minor agreed to be the first investor and board member and made his first venture investment. In total Minor invested $19.5 million in 1999 and January 2000 and was initially and for the first 7 years the company’s second largest shareholder.

In 2002 as Salesforce.com was running out of money and John Dillon the company’s CEO disagreed on strategy Minor decided that Marc Benioff should return from Hawaii and serve as CEO. Minor spent a substantial amount of his time on the company given his investment and philosophy of only investing when deeply involved, principally worked with Marc but on hearing a therapist was in the office whenever Marc returned from Hawaii and after several times receiving messages from John saying “I quite” he grew concerned about management. Following a disagreement over hiring an external enterprise salesforce and with seven months cash left Minor convinced Benioff to return to San Francisco to become CEO for six months and hire a new CEO. After unexpectedly making the company cash flow positive after three months it was decided Marc would continue as CEO. Minor continued to devote his time to the company until leaving the board just before the IPO and ringing the bell with Benioff on the NYSE when the company began trading in July 2004. He was also the first investor and one of the largest investors and shareholders in Rhapsody, the first music streaming service sold to Real Networks in April 2003, convincing the company founder Rob Reid to leave and start the company by promising to back him.

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 firm focused on creating software-as-a-service companies in 2004, called Minor Ventures. Minor Ventures did well and built and sold Grand Central Communications to Google in 2007 for $65 million later renamed Google Voice. It created OpenDNS at its San Francisco office and was the majority owner, finding its first CEO, David Ulevitch, who served as CEO for the first 18 months, providing coaching, investment, and administrative support to get the company started as was the model.Ulevitch was replaced but later returned as CEO and ran the company until its acquisition by CISCO for $640 million in 2015. The firm also became the majority shareholder of Kareo.

Bankruptcy

Minor said he wanted to focus more on philanthropy and venture capital, rather than being a CEO. He eventually lost his wealth on real-estate, horse-breeding, legal disputes, and artwork, culminating in a bankruptcy filing in March 2013. Business Insider depicted the decline in Minor's wealth as "most likely due to his expensive taste in real estate, art, and horses." The Washington Post said it was a "post-divorce spending spree." Minor said it was a mix of the overall great recession and banking crisis that led to numerous legal disputes with banks which started immediately following the 2008 crisis including with Silverton Bank, the largest FDIC takeover in Georgia history and Merrill Lynch. Silverton was funding his hotel. Minor sued Silverton for stopping payments on the loan after providing he had already provided the required equity financing; Silverton, counter sued one month before the bank was seized by the FDIC. As a result the lawsuit ended up in a Georgia court rather than in Virginia where the project was located and the initial lawsuit filed was now against the FDIC. The lawsuit continued until his bankruptcy in March of 2013. Minor’s legal fees totaled almost $10 million, roughly equal to the governments. Silverton had only paid out $12 million of the loan before defaulting and sued by Minor for non-performance. It was later learned Silverton had syndicated most of the loan to 5 other banks, 3 banks had less than $5 million in capital and one bank had only $1.5 million in capital.

Following his divorce in 2006 Minor became extremely depressed after his divorce and learning of his father's suicide.

In 2007, Minor bought the historic Carter's Grove estate from the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation for $17 million, which he planned to rehabilitate and to prevent its development given its prime waterfront location and history. He placed the farm in an historic non development easement as part of the transaction so it could never be developed. The home had not been used as a home in half a century and was used as a museum from 1969 to 2003. It had been abandoned for 4 years but with monitoring equipment measuring heat and humidity. Colonial Williamsburg shut down the property due to their overall rapidly falling ticket sales and revenue and were unable to afford to maintain it as a museum financially. Minor planned to restore the property to its original state, deeding it so that it could only be used for horses and horse-breeding and planned to reopen the property 2 weeks per year in the spring to guests as part of a historic garden week. However, Minor never lived at the estate and the vacant 18th century, mansion.

Following the acquisition, Minor paid Colonial Williamsburg $11,000 a month to continue to monitor the property and have a representative check the house weekly at the same time he developed his plans, including researching the original paint colors in all the rooms and layout and spent over $1 million on creating a modernized version of the original landscape with gardens. With only $1.5 million remaining on the mortgage with Colonial Williamsburg Minor sued for damages after a large amount of stucco fell off the wall due to rain incursion he asserted they knew about at the time of sale. In addition the large parking lot used by visitors was discovered to have not to have been removed and disposed of properly per environmental mandates, saving Colonial Williamsburg $50,000. It was instead buried on various parts of the property and dumped in the woods. After he filed for personal bankruptcy in 2013 the property was sold at auction. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation submitted the only bid at the auction held on May 21, 2014, for the outstanding mortgage amount of $1.5 mm. They announced they planned to resell it, with an increased prive because of significant costs related to the sale, including over $600,000 in what they termed necessary repairs. Despite their announcement to sell the home at a higher price they were only able to sell the property for $7.5 million. Around this same time, Minor was building the $32 million luxury hotel in his hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia. where Minor’s bank Silverton had agreed to provide $27 million in financing, but stopped after only $12 million after the bank failed.The project was later resold to another developer Dewbery Capital who has never developed the site which is close to the site of the Robert E Lee event in 2017.

Minor was involved in a series of legal disputes with Christie's and Sotheby's regarding art purchases during the financial crisis. A jury awarded $8.57 million to Halsey from Christie's for keeping Halsey’s paintings worth $25 million for over a year without his permission, despite promising to return them after 2 weeks if not sold. The jury took 4 hours and awarded Halsey $7.5 million plus legal fees and found Christie’s guilty of Conversion, Breach of a contract, Bailment and Fraud. The $7.5 Christie’s paid after a 2 year appeal represented the difference between the $25 and the amount received when finally sold. Christie’s originally took the paintings, claiming to be selling them to the Russian Oligarch Roman Abramovich in London for $25 million, sending them to their newly acquired gallery, only to hold the paintings, only showing them to their own clients. This was a part of their disastrous entry into the gallery business with the acquisition of Haunch Venison. Haunch Venison refused to return the paintings locking up $25 million of Minors liquidity for a year during the financial crisis. Minor refused to pay for a few paintings of far lesser value he had purchased shortly after Christie’s had taken his art. Sotheby’s filed suit for $16.8 million in unpaid debt for paintings Halsey bought. Halsey counter-sued, saying that Sotheby’s had sold an artwork that went for a record price without fully disclosing the paintings were Sotheby’s collateral for the prior owner’s loans. On May 24, 2010, Minor was ordered to pay the $6.6 million-plus he owed Sotheby's for backing out on his winning bids for three paintings.

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

Recent work

In 2013 one day after bankruptcy Halsey Minor founded and launched the fintech company Uphold. Uphold today has 10 million members and is one of the top Fintech trading platforms in the world supporting crypto, stocks, metals and other assets. When Uphold launched in 2014 it was the first platform to support complete reserve transparency years before the need for such transparency was to be universally recognized in the crypto industry. It is one of the only large US platforms to support crypto and to never have had any regulatory issues with the SEC. In 2016 Minor created a virtual reality company called Live Planet. The company produced a ground breaking live stereoscopic VR camera with 16 sensors, cloud software and application support for the major VR headsets. In 2017, he created VideoCoin, which uses idle data center servers to support streaming video encoding, recognizing how much processing VR video required. The videocoin platform supports anyone contributing spare video encoding resources and they receive compensation, not in crypto as in other projects, but in dollars. The volatility of cryptocurrency does not allow for predictable pricing models which makes them unsuitable to compete with AWS and other similar providers. In 2021, Minor founded the open media asset platform Vivid Labs which used the new NFT technology to be able to store and exchange large bundles of media, video, audio images and 150 other file types cheaply and securely. Vivid Labs merged with Studio Now in early 2024.

Today, Minor is solely focused on building the first large scale AI application services. He is developing services never before possible, only enabled by today’s cutting-edge AI tools.

Personal life

Halsey Minor is currently not married. His divorce from his second wife Shannon Minor was in early 2024 and he is the father of seven children. His second oldest son lost his life tragically due to suicide at age 18. He was previously married to Deborah Minor, but they divorced in 2005. Notably, Minor was able to locate his biological father, who was living just 30 miles away from him in Benicia, California when he committed suicide. Minor has made donations to both the Republican and Democratic political parties in the past. He is a past member of the Business Committee at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Board Member California Academy of Sciences, NATPE National Association of Television Executives, provides a Scholarship each year through the Jefferson Scholar Program at UVA, the Raven Society, and served on the board of Kids Turn in San Francisco and funded the complete rebuilding of their program materials using subject matter experts. Kids Turn addresses the issues kids face in difficult divorces. He has also served on many public and private company boards including CNET, NBCi, and Salesforce.com, among others.