Andy Kessler (author)


Andy Kessler is an American businessman, investor, and author. He writes the "Inside View" column for The Wall Street Journal opinion page.
Kessler has worked for about 20 years as a research analyst, investment banker, venture capitalist, and hedge fund manager. He was also the Co-founder and President of Velocity Capital Management, an investment firm based in Palo Alto, California, United States where he turned US$100 million into US$1 billion between 1996 and 2001.
He has written for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Wired, Forbes, The Weekly Standard, the Los Angeles Times, The American Spectator, and Thestreet.com.
Raised in Bridgewater Township, New Jersey, Kessler attended Bridgewater-Raritan High School East. He has a BS in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University and an MSEE from the University of Illinois.
From 1980 to 1985, Kessler worked for AT&T Bell Labs as a chip designer and programmer. In 1985, he joined Paine Webber in New York as an analyst of the electronics and semiconductor industry. In 1989, Kessler joined Morgan Stanley as a semiconductor analyst before moving to San Francisco in 1993. There he worked for Unterberg Harris as an investor, until starting Velocity Capital with Fred Kittler. Currently he lives in California with his wife, Nancy, and four sons, Kyle, Kurt, Ryan, and Brett.

Writer

From January to March 2003, Kessler wrote and successfully self-published a book, Wall Street Meat: My Narrow Escape From the Stock Market Grinder, about working with Jack Grubman, Frank Quattrone, and Mary Meeker, after hearing that traditional publishing houses would take over a year to publish it.
Kessler's 2010 novel Grumby takes him into the world of super-hackers. The book is notable among books by well-known authors for being released first on Kindle and then in hardcover. This allowed Kessler to include a fictional cause for the flash-crash, which occurred just prior to publication, in the plot.
Among his many other writings, in an April 26, 2007 guest column in The New York Times, entitled "Trust Me", Kessler wrote in part: "There are plenty of things I don’t trust – like Wikipedia. I’ve watched my 15-year-old son and his friends take turns editing the page for the animated film 'Land Before Time,' flipping the gender of the character Littlefoot from he to she and back."

Awards