What Halsey Minor is up to these days
October 5, 2004Halsey Minor was the guy who co-founded CNET.com. I didn’t know him that well when he was the CEO, though I certainly knew of him. He was famous, the pretty-boy whiz kid who started CNET. He was also known to be something of a terror, though I thankfully never had to work directly for him. I heard he was somewhat micro-managing and definitely wanted things done his way.
I’m pretty sure it was he who started the partnership with E! Television to build eonline.com, and later sold CNET’s interest to E!. It was his idea for CNET to spend millions in Snap.com, which turned out to be a pretty good investment after we sold it off to NBC. It was he who decided to license our Web publishing system to become Vignette StoryServer.
That was in fact his strength as far as I could tell–generating new ideas and then finding ways to make somebody else buy them. After he got bored actually having to try and run a company instead of building things, he left CNET to try again with Grand Central and the ill-fated 12 Entrepreneuring venture.
Then he went silent for a while but he’s apparently back, putting up $50 million of his own money into a new venture fund. Of course the fund is aimed at investing in companies that share the Grand Central vision of software-as-services. Will be interesting to see if he succeeds, or if he loses it all.
Must be nice to have enough money that you can just risk $50 million. Of course for Bill Gates that would be chump change.
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