Lou Kerner

Second Shares is a social media company that provides news, commentary, and Wall Street style analysis on the companies driving the social media revolution.

BIO

Lou recently returned to angel investing in private social media companies like Facebook and Klout.  He also recently returned to SecondShares.com, his blog that provides news, commentary and Wall Street style research on social media companies.  It was on SecondShares, in March of 2010, that Lou published his original report on Facebook.  The report, which predicted that the value of Facebook (then $18 billion) would rise to $100 billion over the following four years, vaulted Lou in to the spotlight, and lead to his return to Wall Street.

Lou spent most of 2010-2011 as the Founder and Managing Director of the Private Shares Group at Wedbush Securities, where he was Wall Street’s leading Social Media Analyst.  Lou not only wrote about social media, he was the first Wall Street analyst to live it, growing his Twitter following past 15,000, and posting his research on SlideShare.net where pieces often generated over 10,000 views.  Lou became a regular on CNBC and BloombergTV, and was regularly quoted in the WSJ, NY Times and dozens of other business publications around the world.

From 2007-2009, Lou founded and ran WildSites, a domain name aggregator, that acquired more than 30,000 domain names, including CreditCheck.com for $3 million, which remains the 11th most expensive public market acquisition in industry history.  WildSites continues to monetize its portfolio of unsold domain names, generating significant returns for its investors.

From 2003-2006 Mr. Kerner was President/Owner of Bolt.com, a leading social network which grew from 500,000 monthly uniques to over 20 million uniques in three years.    At  Bolt, Lou acquired eight smaller youth sites, but his attempt to acquire the small but rapidly growing, Thefacebook, was rebuffed.

Prior to Bolt, Mr. Kerner was the CEO of The .tv Corporation, an idealab! company which licensed the top level domain (.tv) from the tiny island nation of Tuvalu.  From 2000-2002, .tv grew to over 100 employees in Los Angeles, London and Hong Kong, and over $20 million in annual revenue, before being 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.

Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Internet industry

March 2010 – Present (2 years 2 months)

We're a social media company that provides news, commentary, and Wall Street style research on the companies driving the social media revolution.

Privately Held; 5001-10,000 employees; Management Consulting industry

1984 – 1986 (2 years)