Halsey Minor has seen it all. He made millions founding tech legends like CNET.com and investing in Salesforce.com in the 1990s.
He then withdrew from the world plagued by a severe bout of depression which took him six years to overcome. He ended up losing his fortune when he declared bankruptcy in 2013.
Because of his experiences with banks during his half a decade of suffering, he decided to change the consumer experience of money for good and started his new venture Uphold (formerly Bitreserve).
In this exclusive and in-depth interview, Halsey Minor told Epoch Times how and why he innovates, and why Bitcoin likely won’t become the dominating currency of the world [Bitcoin: Page 2].
Epoch Times: Why do you Innovate?
Halsey Minor: I don’t innovate because I want to, I do it because I have to. I’m always seeing things and trying out how to fix them. I’m literally compelled to do it. The internet coming along was magical. This thing that comes along that remakes every single industry.
I become transfixed by something and just constantly try to figure out how you can use technology. I understand technology deeply and I think I have a pretty good grasp of consumer behavior, so I try to put those two things together.
Literally my whole life is about innovating. That’s what makes me happy, it’s what energizes me. It gets me up in the morning. It makes me a happy person to talk to my wife.
It’s really the problem that gets me transfixed and then gets me thinking nonstop, walking around the house absent-minded, and my wife knows that I’m onto something.
She knows not to talk to me. I think that’s what you need to be able to build things that ultimately serve a lot of needs and generally make things better for people.
You have to become really, myopically focused on specifically what it is that you’re doing for people and you need to do it in a way, you need to implement a way that’s easy to accept and integrate into your life.
Epoch Times: How do you, as an entrepreneur, see whether something has the potential to be very disruptive?
Mr. Minor: It all starts by having a basic understanding of what a problem is. I started what is now Google Voice because for six years I was going back and forth between L.A. and San Francisco every other week.
Nobody could reach me. I got two guys out of Yahoo! and I gave them some money in my office. I said build a service that no matter what phone I have, it rings. One number for life, follows me everywhere.
Oh and when somebody leaves a message I don’t want to check my messages I want it automatically transcribed and texted or emailed to me. So we developed it and Google bought it 13 months later [for $50+ million].
Epoch Times: Tell us more about the internet, the place where your inventions CNET and Salesforce were very successful.
Mr. Minor: I have a fundamental belief that no bad product has ever succeeded on the internet and no good product has ever failed.
Everybody just types in a few letters. There’s no distribution guy you have to go through, you don’t have to pay somebody to put you on the shelf at a certain place.
It’s a very democratic kind of market place. What I like about the internet is that you do something great, people can find you and they can take advantage of it. I always start with the fact that you need to have a world-class product that does something valuable.
If you can get a lot of people to come and use something, generally it’s been proven, that you can build something valuable.
I usually start with a business model different from entrepreneurs and a lot of the companies that I’ve started have gone on to be very large, very profitable, and served a lot of users.
In my head I had a concept for how we would be able to build a sustaining business and still be able to take away all of the fees.
Epoch Times: During the last financial crisis, you identified a problem with the banking system…
Mr. Minor: I really build things out of personal experience. They’re things that I love and I care about. Coming out of the crisis in 2008 and seeing when the entire banking system goes bankrupt.
You have to realize; when it keeps happening there’s a fundamental flaw there. A lot of people want to blame bankers. It keeps happening over and over again no matter who is at these banks.
You have to understand that something is not right there. The tech industry doesn’t blow up the world, the automotive industry doesn’t blow up the world, but the banking industry keeps, through history, causing massive panic and dislocation.
Hopefully by the time I’m done now, we'll be taking hundreds of billions of dollars of [banking] fees away from consumers around the world, giving them more direct access to their money.
What would be fantastic if we got a much safer system that doesn’t have the same problems that all the banks had in 2008.
Epoch Times: How does your personal experience of declaring bankruptcy factor in this decision?
Mr. Minor: My problems were hardly alone. I was joined by every bank in America. The only difference was I had to turn everything over, most of them got to keep their jets. They got to keep a lot of money and they’re all very profitable again today.
But out of that experience, because I had to pay a price, out of that experience comes learning and I learned that we must have a transparent system. Money must be transparent. You cannot hand your savings over to people who do not tell you what they do with it.
Mr. Minor: That is the only way to fix the problem. We’ve tried every way else. We’ve tried every time and the system’s blown up. We’ve tried more and more and more and more regulation and it doesn’t stop the system form blowing up.
So we basically created a system where if you are big and fail you get paid off. I think the only way out of that is transparency. That’s what you do in our society and that’s what you do on the internet. It’s all about transparency. I'd like to think that we are a more transparent society than most other societies around the world.
Epoch Times: What do you like about the U.S. system?
Mr. Minor: It’s an amazing thing about the U.S. system; you need a system that will allow for failure. If you don’t have a system that allows for failure for people like me who take risks and start businesses because sometimes things go wrong, sometimes things go horribly wrong.
Sometimes you go into depression and don’t talk to people for 6 years, these things happen.
If I had not been able to hand everything over and start again, as difficult as it is, I wouldn’t be able to start these businesses. You should pay a heavy price for it, as I did, but you should get the opportunity to go back and be productive again.
If societies don’t allow people to fail, then they don’t really encourage people to succeed either. It‘d be great if everybody could just succeed every time. I mean I’d love to think that everything I did every time was going to be successful, but that’s just not the way the world is.
The one great thing about our culture is this country is that you have to make a very painful decision, but you can turn it all over to a trustee, he can go sell all of the assets and you don’t have to have lawyers calling you three times a day trying to disrupt your life.
Then you can go along and start being productive again, creating jobs in the process.
Epoch Times: What about China?
Mr. Minor: I think there’s a very strong risk-taking culture. Ironically I think the more China liberalizes, the more potent a competitor they become. I think we’ve seen that, right?
I know that the entrepreneurial zeal of the Chinese everywhere in the world is staggering. I think the more they liberalize their economy the faster they grow. Ultimately they’re going to have to liberalize their currency like all major economies.
So move away from the communist control mechanism?
Yes, free markets.
Epoch Times: And Bitcoin?
Mr. Minor: Bitcoin has the problem that it’s so hard to buy Bitcoin, it’s hard to spend Bitcoin.
So Bitcoin, despite all the great things that came with the technology, it lacks this ability to integrate seamlessly into people’s lives because it’s somebody else’s currency.
You can’t ever get off an airplane and walk in and they accept Bitcoin, right? There’s no Bitcoin country. There’s a dollar country and a euro country, pound country, but there’s no Bitcoin country.
But there are a lot of great ideas that are really at the core of what we’re doing and what I think is the new monetary system of the world, which came from Bitcoin.
You can’t expect that Bitcoin is going to become the new global currency as some people expect; they’re expecting too much. You’re depriving yourself of the hard work that’s needed to get from what’s good about it to what’s necessary so the consumers can get a real benefit.
