Building CNET one person at a time

This story is part of CNET at 25We’re celebrating a quarter of a century of industrial technology and our role in telling you its story.

Editor’s Note: On the occasion of our 25th birthday, we are publishing a series of guest columns from former CNET executives, publishers and reporters. Below is the biography of Halsey Minor.

CNET was literally a ridiculous idea when it started: an ad-financed online service with content that complements a “TV channel” operated by people who knew nothing about television. But it also had a chance of being successful because you could see the excitement in the content vision we created.

My idea for CNET came after I built one of the world’s first intranets for Merrill Lynch in New York in 1990. I have been a passionate reader of computer magazines from the start. But in 1993, when AOL started, I realized I had to build a new type of media company that combined my passion for technical media with my skills in creating “hypertext” content, now called HTML.

At the time, everything felt very discouraging. I had written a 100-page business plan and another 100-page document describing the online service we created. Although people took me seriously because I had a clear vision of where I was looking Technology wentI had a very limited amount of funding.

As I created all of this great content, the first $ 100,000 I collected went quickly. I was totally exhausted and saw no way out, but then I started talking to a colleague from the University of Virginia named Shelby Bonnie, who was fine with a New York hedge fund. He liked the idea and, I think, my passion, because on a depressing Friday, which was a weekend before the end, Shelby wired $ 50,000 while he was on vacation.

On to San Francisco

In January 1994 I moved from New York to San Francisco with our two other employees. We found an amazing building at 150 Chestnut Street – in those days before Dotcom, San Francisco had an 18% vacancy rate – that had a large open area that could be used as a studio. To be clear, I had never used a home camera at this point, let alone operated a television studio.

My job back then, and it’s probably still my best skill, was finding people. So I was looking for a respected TV manager, Kendall Wendell, who had played an important role in launching the Fox Network and other well-known TV properties. We convinced him that this media model is the future, and he came to us and moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco. I was able to convince Jonathan Rosenborg, who headed the media group at BellcoreTo become my CTO, I commissioned Pentagram, the world’s best graphics company, to create the CNET logo. I even hired former MTV video producers to make a “vision tape”.

People think of CNET for content, but there was a lot of magical technology behind the way we did things. One of the problems we had with publishing at the time was that there were no software packages for web publishing. There was none single website on the Internet that was connected to a database – and we created a database from content. All websites had static content that was programmed by hand. I gave Jonathon six months to create a dynamic solution, so he created the first tool on the Internet to publish pages that could change based on a database.

Grow and go public

Then, in June 1996, Morgan Stanley brought us to the public. When Netscape had gone public in 1995, it had become a cultural phenomenon. Investors noticed the internet and so we quickly started to collect private money for our own IPO. After Netscape and Yahoo, which also had an IPO in 1996We were one of the first internet companies to go public. We raised $ 25 million, which doesn’t seem like much today.

The 1990s, commonly known as the “Internet Bubble”, felt like a TV show that was fast-forwarding four times. Everything happened quickly. Offers went quickly. People were hired quickly. People left their jobs quickly. People invested quickly. The shares rose quickly. It was very tiring to run a company that could be attractive to the industry, but that lived up to our ideals.

The main focus followed was to improve our internal systems and improve every aspect of our business so that we could be the best possible company with our mission to offer everything related to computing under one brand. I wanted a company that had the right ethos and survived when others fell apart. CNET thrives 25 years later and this ethos is intact.

Halsey Minor is the founder of CNET and was CEO until 2000. when he left the company. Today he is the CEO of LivePlanet.