Halsey Minor

Born in 1964 and raised in Charlottesville, Virginia, Minor moved to New York City to work as an investment banker for Merrill Lynch.

He is known to be an early internet visionary and has founded technology companies that have generated more than $100 billion in cumulative value, including CNET, Uphold, Live Planet, Salesforce.com, Google Voice, OpenDNS, Vignette, and Vivid Labs.

Minor is also the founder of Minor Ventures, a venture capital firm that supports start-ups.

Apart from his active involvement in technology and start-ups, he is an avid collector of fine arts and a passionate horse-racing fan.

Halsey Minor was born in 1964 in Charlottesville, Virginia.

His father, Charles Venable Minor Jr., was a real estate broker, while his mother bred and trained horses.

Some of his grandparents were war heroes in the Civil War and World War II, respectively.

When Minor was nine, he created a "triple-decker version of checkers" and tried to sell it to Milton Bradley, marking his first entrepreneurial project.

At age 10, he began showing an interest in computers.

As a teenager, Minor started a fence-painting company.

He attended the prestigious 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.

Initially, he wanted to help third-world countries develop their infrastructure.

While in college, Minor created a business called the Rental Network, which provided information about local housing rentals through a network of public kiosks.

After graduating in 1987, Minor considered focusing on the Rental Network business, but his friend's father convinced him to gain business experience first by working as a financial analyst.

Halsey 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, which 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, where he worked as an executive recruiter.

The idea for CNET was conceived by Halsey Minor in 1992.

Minor quit his job to start CNET that December with cofounder and former classmate Shelby Bonnie.

Bonnie provided $25,000 in seed funding and Minor obtained some other funding through friends and family members.

Initially, Minor was not able to get any deals with broadcasters to license CNET's TV shows on technology.

Halsey McLean Minor Sr. is a prominent American entrepreneur who gained fame for founding CNET in 1993 - the first technology content publisher aimed at consumers.

He is also the founder or co-founder of various technology start-ups, including Live Planet, a virtual reality start-up, VideoCoin, and Vivid Labs.

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.

Also, USA Network bought the rights to CNET's TV show "Central TV."

Minor bought domains like news.com, tv.com, search.com, shopper.com, and download.com.

Over time, he focused more on CNET as an internet publication, 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.

He was previously married to Deborah Minor, but they got divorced in 2005.

Minor resides in Beverly Hills, California, but he frequently visits his family in Virginia.

Notably, Minor was able to locate his biological father, who was living just 30 miles away from him in Benicia, California.

Additionally, Minor has made donations to both the Republican and Democratic political parties in the past.

In June 2013, Minor filed for bankruptcy, listing his debts.

However, he continues to be involved in some companies, including Uphold, a cryptocurrency company, and Vivid Labs, a publishing and management platform that allows anyone to create, manage, and sell multimedia NFTs.

Halsey Minor is currently married to his second wife and is the proud father of seven children.