Halsey Minor is the founder or co-founder of the technology companies such as the virtual reality startup Live Planet, VideoCoin, and Vivid Labs.
36 Facts About Halsey Minor
2.
Halsey Minor moved to New York City to work as an investment banker for Merrill Lynch.
3.
Halsey Minor was an early internet visionary who is the founder of technology companies that have created over $100 billion in cumulative value including CNET, Uphold, Live Planet, Salesforce.
4.
Halsey Minor is the founder of Halsey Minor Ventures, a venture capital firm dedicated to helping start-ups.
5.
In June 2013, Halsey Minor filed for bankruptcy listing his personal debts.
6.
Halsey Minor continues to have his hand in a number of companies including cryptocurrency company Uphold and Vivid Labs, a publishing and management platform that allows anyone to create, manage and sell multimedia NFTs.
7.
Halsey Minor was divorced from his first wife in 2005, Deborah Halsey Minor.
8.
Halsey Minor discovered the identity of his biological father who was living 30 miles away from his son in Benicia, California Minor has donated money to both the Republican and Democratic political parties.
9.
Halsey Minor's father was a real estate broker, Charles Venable Minor Jr.
10.
Halsey Minor's first entrepreneurial project was a "triple-decker version of checkers" that Minor created when he was 9 and tried to sell to Milton Bradley.
11.
Halsey Minor started showing an interest in computers around age 10.
12.
Halsey Minor attended the prestigious all-boys boarding school Woodberry Forest in Madison County, Virginia.
13.
Halsey Minor initially wanted to help third-world countries develop their infrastructure.
14.
Halsey Minor moved to New York City for his first job out of college working for Merrill Lynch as an investment banker.
15.
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.
16.
Bonnie provided $25,000 in seed funding and Halsey Minor obtained some other funding through friends and family members.
17.
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.
18.
Halsey Minor remained on the CNET board as Chairman, while cofounder Shelby Bonnie took over as CEO.
19.
Halsey Minor was a co-founder of the company and had made an early investment of $19.5 million from his personal wealth in 1999.
20.
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.
21.
Halsey Minor created another venture capital firm focused on software-as-a-service companies in 2004, called Minor Ventures.
22.
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.
23.
Halsey Minor said he wanted to focus more on philanthropy and venture capitalism, rather than being a CEO.
24.
Halsey Minor eventually lost his wealth on real-estate, horse-breeding, legal disputes, and artwork, culminating in a bankruptcy filing in June 2013.
25.
In 2007, Halsey Minor bought the historic Carter's Grove estate from the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, which he planned to use as a retreat and for horse-breeding.
26.
However, Halsey Minor never lived at the estate and the vacant 18th century mansion began to fall into disrepair.
27.
Around the same time, Halsey Minor planned to build a $31 million luxury hotel in his hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia.
28.
Halsey Minor invested in substantial real property assets that declined in value during the housing crisis.
29.
Halsey Minor was involved in a series of legal disputes with Christie's and Sotheby's regarding art purchases.
30.
Halsey Minor was required to pay for paintings he bid on but did not pay for.
31.
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.
32.
On May 24,2010, Halsey Minor was ordered to pay the $6.6 million-plus he owed Sotheby's for backing out on his winning bids for three paintings.
33.
When Halsey Minor declared bankruptcy, he owed $100 million and had only $50 million in remaining assets.
34.
In 2014, Halsey Minor founded and launched a bitcoin platform Bitreserve now called Uphold.
35.
In 2017, Halsey Minor created VideoCoin, which uses idle data center servers to support streaming video.
36.
In 2021, Halsey Minor founded Vivid Labs, a next-generation publishing and management platform that allows anyone to create, manage and sell multimedia NFTs.