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.