23 Facts About Halsey Minor

Halsey Minor was born on 1964 and is an American entrepreneur who founded CNET in 1993.

Halsey Minor founded or co-founded Live Planet, VideoCoin, Vivid Labs, Salesforce.

Halsey Minor 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.

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

Halsey Minor 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.

Halsey Minor remained on the CNET board as Chairman, while cofounder Shelby Bonnie took over as CEO.

Halsey Minor was a cofounder of the company and had made an early investment of $19.5 million of his own money in 1999.

Halsey 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.

Halsey Minor created another venture capital firm focused on software-as-a-service companies in 2004 called Minor Ventures.

Halsey 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.

Halsey Minor said he wanted to focus more on philanthropy and venture capitalism rather than being a CEO.

Halsey Minor eventually lost his wealth on real estate, horse-breeding, legal disputes, and artwork, culminating in a bankruptcy filing in June 2013.

Halsey 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.

In 2007, Halsey Minor bought the Carter's Grove estate from the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, which he planned to use as a retreat and for horse-breeding.

Halsey Minor never lived at the estate and the vacant 18th century mansion began to fall into disrepair.

Around the same time, Halsey Minor planned to build a $31 million luxury hotel in his hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia.

Halsey Minor invested in substantial real property assets that declined in value during the housing crisis.

Halsey Minor was involved in a series of legal disputes with Christie's and Sotheby's regarding art purchases.

Halsey Minor was required to pay for paintings he bid on but did not pay for.

Halsey 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, Halsey Minor was ordered to pay the $6.6 million+ he owed Sotheby's for backing out on his winning bids for three paintings.

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

In 2014, Halsey Minor founded and launched a bitcoin platform Bitreserve now called Uphold and a virtual reality company called Live Planet.