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Lou Kerner

Lou Kerner is the Founder and Managing Partner of The Social Internet Fund, which invests in the primary and secondary shares of rapidly growing privately held social, mobile, cloud, security, and big data companies. The Fund’s investments include, FireEye (FEYE:NASDAQ), Livefyre, LiveRamp (acquired by Axciom), Meetup, Optimal (acquired by Brand Networks) , Palantir, Scrib’d, and Yashi (acquired by NexStar).

 

Lou is also a Managing Partner of The Israel Syndicate on AngelList, which invests in shares of tech companies founded by Israelis, regardless of where they’re located. Lou’s Israeli investments include Viewbix, IT Central Station, and Segmanta.

Lou was previously Wall Street’s first private company analyst at Wedbush Securities, where he was the Managing Director of the Private Shares Group. At Wedbush, Lou started the first private shares trading desk on Wall Street. From 2003-2006 Lou was President of Bolt.com, a leading social network which grew to over 20 million uniques. From 2000-2002 Lou was the CEO of The .tv Corporation, an idealab company which licensed the top level domain (.tv) from the tiny island nation of Tuvalu. .tv was acquired by Verisign (Nasdaq:VRSN).

Prior to .tv, Lou had a distinguished career as an equity analyst following media companies for Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch. Lou began his career at Bain & Company, where he sat outside of Mitt Romney’s office.

Lou is regularly quoted in social media stories in the WSJ, NY Times and other business publications, in addition to his recurring appearances on CNBC and Bloomberg Television.

Lou has a B.A. from U.C.L.A. and an MBA from The Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Why Everyone Who Sees The Crypto Light Sees Something Different

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I’ve written extensively about my experience seeing the crypto light, and why others struggle to see it. This post is about why, when people see the crypto light, everyone sees something different. The Blind Men & An Elephant The genesis of this post was the result of reading an interesting post by Casey Caruso “The five camps of crypto”. In […]

CryptoWinter Has Nothing On FAMGA Winter Market Cap Loss

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Per CoinMarketCap, total crypto market capped peaked at $795.8 billion on January 7, 2018. Since that time, we’ve lost over $680 billion in market cap. We’re down over 85%. Crypto total market cap bottomed at $102 billion. So at the bottom, crypto had lost $692 billion. However, the total amount lost by FAMGA (my acronym […]

The Two Reasons Why The Forecasts For Bitcoin YE 2018 Were So Horribly Wrong

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As the chart above shows, the biggest names in crypto all got 2018 horribly wrong. Why were they so wrong? I think they’re all smart guys and I applaud their work and the important contribution they’re making to the ecosystem. I think there are two main reasons why they’re so bad. 1. Accurately Predicting The […]

The 10 Stupidest Things Nouriel Roubini Said In His Testimony To The US Senate Committee on Banking

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I assume Nouriel Roubini is a smart guy. So is Warren Buffet. It doesn’t mean I’d want them to do heart surgery on me, because it’s not their thing. My guess is, they’d have no interest in performing heart surgery because they know it’s not their thing. So, just because someone’s smart, doesn’t mean they understand crypto. […]

The Coming Epic Battle Between Crypto & FAMGA (aka Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, & Amazon)

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Crypto is a new computing paradigm, poised to create more disruption and wealth creation in the next 20 years, than the internet has in the last 20. The question I face as a VC is who is going to capture that massive wealth creation? The wealth creation can either go largely to the five incumbents […]

If You Like Decentralization, You Should Love Hard Forks

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If decentralization is to realize it’s potential, various problems need to be addressed. Scalability issues get the most attention and have the most people working to solve it. So my assumption is that scalability is getting solved. The bigger issues with decentralization are Token Economics and Governance & Consensus. While people are working on those problems, it’s […]

The Crypto Bloodbath isn’t a Bloodbath, it’s a …….

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This is the 60th crypto related post I’ve written since I saw the crypto light on June 29th, 2017. My most read piece remains “7 Thoughts On Blockchain, Cryptocurrency & Decentralization After Three Months Down The Rabbit Hole”.The 5th thought in the piece, which tried to give context to the remarkable run-up in crypto prices […]

The One Graph That Shows (Again) That Facebook’s Epic Run Has Ended

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I mostly write about Crypto. I’ve written about “Why Crypto’s A Growing Threat To FAMGA (a.k.a. Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon)”. But that’s in the future. This post is about how after being a massive Facebook’s bull for 8 years, I turned negative in January because of one chart. I’ve written about how I […]

12 Interesting Crypto Thoughts From The Dissenting SEC Commissioner

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As Asia (Korea, Japan, Hong Kong…) and Europe (Switzerland, Malta, Gibraltar..) work to create friendly regulatory environments for Crypto, driving innovation and investment, U.S. regulators struggle to approve the most simple of Crypto investment vehicles. The latest regulatory fail is the SEC’s decision on July 26th to deny the Winkelvoss’ bitcoin trust the ability to […]

A Call For US Leadership in Crypto

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I work in New York, a city known for finance, in a country known for innovation. We Americans now find ourselves at a moment of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance. The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds. Despite the […]