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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.

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 […]

Why Crypto’s A Growing Threat To FAMGA (a.k.a. Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon)

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The largest U.S. companies by market cap are all tech. That wasn’t always the case: In April last year, I published “The Profound Implications of Five Increasingly Dominant Tech Companies”, which outlined the increasing share of market cap that FAMGA was accounting for of the 100 largest NASDAQ companies by market cap. That trend not […]

The Flippening Is Coming :  But Not The One You Think

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In Cryptoland, “The Flippening” refers to a point in time at which Ethereum overtakes Bitcoin in terms of market capitalization. There are websites dedicated to the “Flippening Watch”: As of the publication of this post, Ethereum was 44% of the way to “The Flippening” (ie. it’s market cap was 44% that of Bitcoin). That’s down from a […]

The Pundits Were Wrong, Bancor Solves A Big Problem, and is Scaling Rapidly

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Bancor hit the market with a splash in June, 2017, when it raised a (then) record $150 million in an ICO. At it’s core, Bancor is a set of formulas that solves the liquidity problems faced by most tokens. Bancor works by creating a token that is connected to shared liquidity pools on the blockchain. The way the math […]

The Single Biggest Misconception of Cryptocurrency is….

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I was reading a CNBC article titled “Most cryptocurrencies will crash to zero, Goldman Sachs says”. I agree with the part where Goldman Sachs head of Research Steve Strongin compares the current market to the “internet bubble of the late 1990s.” That’s what markets do. They swing from bubble to crash to bubble again. The […]