Entrepreneurs: a Lesson form Halsey Minor
by Miki Saxon
When an entrepreneur spent millions on his wedding during the original dot com boom a very cynical friend of mine commented, “If the wedding costs that much what do you think the divorce will cost?”
While there are still a lot of over-the-top multimillion dollar weddings being staged by the current crop of entrepreneurs (more money than brains IMO), there are plenty of others who aren’t jumping on the lavish bandwagon.
Those of you who think it’s no big deal to indulge yourself after striking it rich might want to consider the case of Halsey Minor, founder of CNET.
Minor was 38 when he started CNET and sold it to CBS for $1.8 billion when he was 42.
But that wasn’t all.
He then started and sold two more companies, Vignette Software and Snap/NBCi, and was a major investor and one of the largest shareholders in salesforce.com.
He just filed for personal bankruptcy.
That’s a hell of a lot of money to burn through in five short years.
Halsey still has $50 million in assets, but that doesn’t go far when you owe $100 million.
For some, it’s wine, women and song; for Minor it was houses, hotels, horses and art.
Perhaps startup founders and employees, along with lottery winners, should adopt caveat emptor as their default before cashing that check.
Flickr image credit: magerleagues
