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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.

What is Bitcoin?

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As Bitcoin starts to gain the attention of the broader population again, we continue to struggle as an industry to define what Bitcoin is in a way that’s accessible to most people. I recently attended a Bitcoin 101 class taught as part of the grand opening of the awesome Bitcoin Center Miami. It’s a great way to help […]

Facebook is Dying, Libra Won’t Save It, and Wall Street is Clueless

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I was the first person to call Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 and offer to buy the company (I was running Bolt at the time). In March, 2010, I published the first Wall Street style research report on Facebook on a Tumblr blog, with a $100 billion five year price target (it was actively trading in the private markets at […]

Bitcoin : The Worlds Best Store of Value, 2024 Price Target = $50,000

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Target Price = $50,000 (assumes $1 Trillion valuation and 20,000,000 BTC, fully diluted) I’ve been around the block. In the 90s I was an equity analyst following media companies at Goldman Sachs. I loved it. But the internet came calling, and I jumped in. After my 2nd company, I became an angel investor and then a VC. […]

Why The Facebook Coin Could Be A Watershed Moment In Crypto

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While I focus on crypto, I’ve written a lot about Facebook over the years. I was the original Facebook bull following the publication of the first Wall Street style research report on Facebook in March of 2010. In April of 2017, I started writing about “The Profound Implications of Five Increasingly Dominant Tech Companies” (Facebook, […]

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 […]

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. […]