Andy Kessler
Author, Wall Street Meat; former hedge fund manager

Andy Kessler is a former hedge fund manager who now writes on investment trends in technology and communications. Andy is a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal op-ed page and has written for Forbes Magazine, Forbes ASAP, The American Spectator magazine and thestreet.com website. He has written a piece of fiction for Slate, bet you can't find it.

Andy Kessler was co-founder and President of Velocity Capital Management, an investment firm based in Palo Alto, California, that provided funding for private and public technology and communications companies. Private investments have included Real Networks, Inktomi, Alteon WebSystems, Centillium and Silicon Image. He sits on the board of several private companies.

Andy has spent most of his professional life as a research analyst and investment banker for several Wall Street firms. Andy spent 5 years at AT&T Bell Labs as a chip designer, programmer, and spender of millions in regulated last minute, use it or lose it budget funds. In 1985, he joined PaineWebber in New York, where he did research on the electronics and semiconductor industry and was an “All Star” analyst in the Institutional Investor poll. He recommended Intel at the end of July 1986, on the basis of a turn in the cycle and a value pricing strategy for their 386 microprocessor, dropping AMD as a second source.

In 1989, Andy joined Morgan Stanley as their semiconductor analyst, and following in the footsteps of Ben Rosen, he added the role of technology strategist and helped identify long-term, secular trends in technology. Many of those trends were based on the elasticity of semiconductors: as chips drop in cost by 30% year in and year out, new applications open up to take advantage of the cheaper functionality. In 1993, he moved to San Francisco to join Unterberg Harris, where he ran a private interactive media venture fund, with investments that included N2K, Exodus and Tut Systems.

Andy received a BS in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University in 1980 and an MSEE from the University of Illinois in 1981. K-12 was at Bridgewater-Raritan High School East in New Jersey. Every morning for 13 years, while heading out for the school bus, Andy looked to his left, up the hill, and checked out the flag flying at Middlebook Encampment, where George Washington and his troops spent winters watching the British troops in New Brunswick. On June 14, 1777, the Continental Congress approved the Betsy Ross 13 star flag as the official flag, and it flew for the first time at the Middlebrook Encampment. Pretty cool.

He lives with his wife and four sons in the Bay Area and enjoys basketball, hiking, biking, skiing, Pininfarina designed moving objects and reminiscing about raising Siberian Huskies.