Halsey Minor

Halsey McLean Minor (born 1964 in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA) is a technology entrepreneur who founded CNET in 1994 (initial plans for the company began in 1992).

Minor attended Woodberry Forest School and the University of Virginia, where he was a member of St. Elmo Hall and received a degree in anthropology. After graduation, he worked at Merrill Lynch, before moving on to start his own company.

Halsey Minor was a key figure in digital publishing. In 1993, he founded CNET Networks, the first comprehensive consumer-facing technology content publisher. Minor ran CNET for eight years during which time it became one of the Internet's first companies to achieve profitability. Halsey led CNET to become a NASDAQ 100 company and it was acquired by CBS Corporation in 2008 for $1.8 billion.

In 1997, Halsey spun off technology developed by CNET to Vignette, a web-publishing software company, acquiring a 33% stake in the company. Vignette was one of the most successful IPOs of the first tech boom, reaching a market capitalization of $26 billion. Halsey also provided the seed funding for music service Rhapsody in 1998.

Minor co-founded and was the largest financial investor and second largest shareholder in salesforce.com. Starting in 2000, Salesforce.com had achieved a market capitalization in excess of $15 billion. He was Salesforce’s second-largest shareholder at the company’s 2004 IPO, owning over 10% of the company.

In 2005, Halsey established Minor Ventures, the vehicle through which he founded and funded several tech startups, including OpenDNS, a web security leader and Grand Central Communications, a web-based telephony companies. In 2007, Halsey sold Grand Central Communications to Google, where it was rebranded as Google Voice.

In May 2014, Minor announced his current venture, Uphold [FKA Bitreserve], a digital money service.

On September 4, 2007, Minor announced the development of a new three-star hotel located in historic downtown Charlottesville called the Landmark. The planned six-story hotel would be part of Minor Family Hotels, a series of three-star boutique hotels located in historical districts around the world. By early 2009, however, construction on the hotel had stopped as a result of financial problems involving the project developer and the bankruptcy and FDIC receivership of the construction lender. Minor alleges the FDIC's failure to act on the note for two years while costing taxpayers $11 million in legal fees.

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