called the Rental Network, which was a network of public kiosks with information about local housing rentals. After graduating from college in 1987, Minor considered focusing on the Rental Network business, but his friend's father persuaded Minor to get business experience as a financial analyst first. Career Early career Halsey Minor moved to New York City for his first job out of college working for Merrill Lynch as an investment banker. While there, he created a spinoff called Global Publishing Corporation, which focused on sharing information and training materials across Merrill's IT infrastructure. This was followed by a project with coworker Jeff Bezos to develop software that would have provided custom news feeds based on each user's job description and interests. Merrill Lynch signed a three-year contract to fund the news feed project, then cancelled due to Merrill's poor financial results. Afterwards, Minor spent a year doing consulting work for EastWest Network, which published magazines typically found on airplanes. He 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. CNET The idea for CNET was conceived by Halsey Minor in 1992. Minor quit his job to start CNET that December with cofounder and former classmate Shelby Bonnie. Bonnie provided $25,000 in seed funding and Minor obtained some other funding through friends and family members. Initially, Minor was not able to get any deals with broadcasters to license CNET's TV shows on technology. By 1994, CNET was not able to make payroll. However, that year Minor convinced Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen to invest $5 million for a 20% interest in the company. Also, USA Network bought the rights to CNET's TV show "Central TV." Minor bought domains like news.com, tv.com, search.com, shopper.com, and download.com. Over time, he focused more on CNET as an internet publication, rather than a broadcast business, culminating in the launch of CNET.com in June 1995. CNET.com would later become what CNET is best-known for and one of the most highly-trafficked websites on the internet. Minor and CNET also helped create the Internet Advertising Bureau (now known as the Interactive Advertising Bureau) and influenced the development of the online publishing industry. In July 1996, Minor took CNET public. In 1997, Minor started a search engine called Snap.com with $25 million in