*Please respond to your invite to RSVP or email mark@courtlandbrooks.com with questions after reading this...
The Internet Dating Excellence Association SUMMIT is on Monday 28th November at happn's new HQ in Paris. We will also be arranging some social events on the Sunday 27th November.
This is an international gathering of by-invitation-only CEOs and executives of leading Internet dating apps and services.
The suggested topics for this SUMMIT are Innovation or M&A strategy.
The SUMMIT is designed to help you get to know other leaders from top companies in the dating industry. This is our first time in Paris. The SUMMIT is led by Karima ben Abdelmalek, the CEO of happn, and Mark Brooks, President of IDEA.
The most unusual thing about IDEA SUMMIT is there are no attendees. Just presenters. Everyone is presenting. So please bring one idea on how we can improve our individual apps and communities, innovate, and grow in effectiveness, or your M&A strategy thoughts. Slides are optional. Presentations will be just 10-15 minutes each.
There is no price we can put on this event, so we do not charge for it. There is no fee. (You just cover your direct costs (i.e. hotel, dinner, etc.)
The Internet Dating Excellence World Summit will be small and focused and like no other industry gathering. You'll meet fellow CEOs and top flight executives from a diversity of leading Internet dating companies from around the world.
This event is for C levels, founders, and rising-star leaders who are exceptionally personally and professionally invested in the industry. This will be a unique, uplifting and essential event that will inform your strategy, and help align you and your company with the best of what the industry is, and will become, and help you evolve with the benefit of perspective from your peers.
At each IDEA SUMMIT we also try to round out the industry perspective by having a couple start-ups (that we can inspire), an expert on safety, and a couple of supporting vendors-of-interest.
This is a closed-door session. There will be no reporters, no recording, and no blogging about the details of the event. This is a private gathering focused on the presentation and discussion of opportunities, real issues, and growth ideas.
This SUMMIT is kindly sponsored by:
vPaaS by The Meet Group - Video at scale
Courtland Brooks - Internet dating consultancy-agency
Matchmaker.com - Make money by referring users to experienced matchmakers
Please respond to your invite to RSVP or email mark@courtlandbrooks.com with questions.
Karima joined happn in 2017 as General Counsel, and is CEO & President since July.
happn helps singles find the people they’ve crossed paths with in real life and gives them a second chance at a first impression! It is the first geo-localized real time dating app and has 100+ million users worldwide. happn launched in 2014.
Karima heads a team of 120 people in Paris.
Prior to happn Karima was an in-house lawyer for Solocal Group and DailyMotion, and Microsoft, and a Board Member at Beewake.
Mark runs Courtland Brooks, an agency-consultancy focusing on strategy, marketing and bus dev for Internet dating communities. He's served POF, Meet Group and 120+ companies since 2005. Prior to this, he worked with Friendster and ran an adventure club in Silicon Valley. Mark has been quoted in press 288 times (18 times in WSJ).
He heads IDEA.gp (since 2007) and the executive news summary service Online Personals Watch (since 2004). He also owns Matchmaker.com.
Mark is a grad of Harvard Business School (PLD, 2014) and London School of Economics (Exec. MSc Behavioral Science, 2017).
Mark helps dating and social leaders connect, learn and share for an even more effective and prosperous future.
Geoff is CEO & co-founder of The Meet Group, a social dating and livestreaming company. He's also co-CEO and GM of video for the parent company ParshipMeet Group. He successfully transitioned the company from 90% advertising revenue in 2016 to 60%+ user-pay revenue while dramatically expanding revenue by investing heavily in livestreaming video.
The Meet Group and ParshipMeetGroup comprise Meetme, Tagged, Skout, Growlr, eHarmony, Parship and Lovoo.
Geoff joined the dating industry in 2005 and pioneered one to many video. vPaaS is now available to other dating apps, like POF who have it integrated.
Geoff is an IDEA Ten Year Club member and is an Innovation Fellow of Columbia Business School's Eugene M. Lang Entrepreneurship Center. He graduated from Harvard University with a BA in Economics.
Jens is an entrepreneur and digital product leader with over two decades of experience in web and mobile apps development.
Jens founded a European social network called Kwick! in 1999, which was sold to Kiwibox in 2011. That same year he created Jaumo, a social dating app network which now has 50M+ members. Jaumo is in 90 countries and 59 languages. Jens joined the dating industry in 1999.
Topic: How the Evolution of UX/UI Design and Technology Shaped Our Vision in Building Dating Products
Seda is the co-founder of Pembe Panjur, Turkey's meaningful relationships dating service. Launched in 2010, the site now has 6M+ users. It uses scientific matching with 60+ socio-economic questions and 60+ personality questions.
Pembe Panjur is one of the most recognized online dating sites in Turkey.
Paul is the CEO and Co-founder of SALT, the dating and relationship app for Christians.
SALT launched in the UK in 2018 with an aim of re-imagining how Christians meet and build relationships. SALT is now live in over 20 countries globally and is responsible for helping start 1000s of relationships and marriages.
Prior to SALT, Paul was part of the founding team at Innovate Finance. Before that he was SVP Strategic Partnerships and Chief of Staff to the CEO at Monitise plc and he began his career at Deloitte as a Strategy and Technology Consultant working across a number of clients and industries across Europe. While at Deloitte, he also worked in Corporate Finance and trained as a Chartered Management Accountant.
Outside of work, Paul enjoys playing tennis, watching the Springboks, BBQing, fine wine, Trappist beers and spending time with his wife and children.
Carsten has worked with Internet dating companies for most of his career, over 20 years.
He started out at Friendscout24, and graduated to work with Be2 and to become CEO at Insparx in 2011.
Now he leads be2, Academic Singles, Singles50, and C-date.
He heads a team of 160 that serve Internet dating services to 37 countries around the world.
David grew up in Iceland and studied Industrial Engineering.
Ten years ago, he co-founded Blendin, an app connecting friends, then Dusty Dots, an infuriating mobile game, and Watchbox, a photo and video-based social network for groups. Watchbox later became a tool for co-workers to connect via shared memories.
David fell in love with online dating in 2018 and started working on a serious dating app called The One. His team managed to raise an angel round. In 2020, they decided to leave serious dating and created Smitten, a fun dating app that allows singles to play interactive games.
Smitten raised $2.7M seed round in 2021 and a $10M Series A round a year later.
Laura is the co-founder and CEO of noii, a Swiss video chat-based dating platform.
Laura has a background in marketing and created noii out of a personal dissatisfaction with the available dating apps. She quit her job in 2021 and joined the multigenerational project Silver Ox, an idea incubator in Wagenhausen, Thurgau to advance her project.
Noii only works on Mondays at 8 p.m. and sends users on seven 6-minutes video speed dates.
Uwe has been immersed in the Internet since 1998 with the focus on digital platforms, communities and new business models. In the network of the Schöne Töchter, he has built up and accompanied several projects and especially new platforms as project manager as well as managing director. Since 2016 he successfully focused on the expansion of the white-label dating network ICONY.
With his community background, Uwe intensively follows the development of social media with a focus on his private passions such as (e)MTB and soccer.
Daniel is the co-founder & CEO of the dating app Feels, which feels closer to a Snapchat-style story or a TikTok feed rather than the swipeable cards found in other dating apps.
Before launching Feels, Daniel began his career in an investment bank in mergers and acquisitions and then in strategy consulting. He left consulting to focus on entrepreneurship and launched Feels with two school friends.
Cem is the co-CEO and co-Founder of Fitafy, an Aussie-born dating app for fitness singles.
Miral grew up between Australia and his Turkish parents’ homeland. He was selected to represent the Turkish table tennis team at the 2008 Beijing Olympics when he was 16, but he was forced to withdraw when his family moved to Perth. He studied engineering-commerce, and developed an oil and gas software platform while still at university.
After its successful launch in Australia, Fitafy has already taken off in the UK and will launch in the US late this year, fueled by Series A funding.
Alistair Shrimpton joined Meetic in 2007 as the Managing Director of the UK operations. Following the merger of the Meetic and Match.com European companies in 2009, Alistair subsequently led the Meetic European Online Services Division.
He is now responsible for managing the key European strategic partnerships and leads the European M&A.
Alistair also holds the Executive responsibility for The Match Group inventory and data monetisation business in Europe, managing the internalised advertising operations and commercial teams across the portfolio of European sites, including Meetic, Match.com. Friendscout24, Lexa.nl, Tinder, Twoo and OK Cupid.
Alistair was formerly Managing Director of Skype in the UK having moved in to the Internet space in 1999 as Managing Director for the internet recruitment company Jobline.
Aurora left college early to travel the world in 2020 with an associates degree in biology. World wide quarantine derailed those plans, leaving her with an unmet ambition to connect with people around the world and a personal vendetta against the new disconnectedness plaguing society.
This ambition is how she became the co-founder & CMO of Planet Theta, the first VR app dedicated to dating.
Planet Theta has been in closed beta since April 2022 and is targeting its launch before 2023. Planet Theta is developing a bot-free and safe environment with reliable identity verification and personal protection.
Stacy is the founder & CEO of Reddi, an exclusive member-only dating app for singles who want serious relationships leading to children.
Founder of The Performance Club, Stacy is a well-being expert, trusted coach and trainer. She has spoken at conferences, written articles for media, and facilitated well-being workshops for thousands of professionals. She is a mental health advisor to events, awards, and conferences. Stacy also provide 1:1 mental health and performance coaching to high performing executives, entertainers and sports professionals.
Natalie started her career as a computational theoretical chemist with an organic chemistry background. An unforeseen shift in her path diverted her from academic and research life to an entrepreneurial one. She started NUiT. During this journey, Natalie went from studying the vibrational state of molecules to observing the vibrational state of people - from being a scientific chemist to a relationship chemist.
In the course of building her startup, she learned design, development, financial modeling, legal, raising etc.
With offices in Amsterdam and London, David Vermeulen started the popular international online dating app Inner Circle eleven years ago. He conquered the dating market with the credo: "quality dating for like-minded people'. Inner Circle brings together like-minded, career driven singles by matching them on shared interests and hosting singles parties across the world. The app has grown to a community of over 4.8 million members.
Before launching Inner Circle, David started Sullivans List, which is a list of amazing events. He is the founder of Wisdom Marketing, an UK-based consultancy firm specialized in online marketing. He also led the marketing department of the international lifestyle-magazine FHM (For Him Magazine).
The official hotel is The Hoxton which is a few minutes walk to happn's office
Our 7th event was sponsored by Social Development Network (the Singapore Government) and led by Violet Lim, the CEO of Lunch Actually. This SUMMIT was focused on Connecting in Asia. The CEOs of Matrimony, Paktor, Woo, Filteroff and the Global Love Institute contributed their ideas. Participants also included leaders from Datefolio and IB Japan, along with the SIngapore Government.
See invitation site here.
Our May 2022 New York event was diverse in constituents and deep in learning and sharing. Geoff Cook, the CEO of The Meet Group, co-hosted. This event was focused on the topic of Human Connection. The speakers comprised CEOs from Happn, East Meet East, Swell, amnd RealMe, For the World Officers Weekend (WOW) we took in views from multiple skyscrapers, and dined at one of New York's best.
See invitation site here.
We kicked off the new strand of real world events in Dubai. A relatively safe bet for what we hoped would mark about the end of the pandemic. This roundtable was hosted by the CEO/Founder of Matrimony, Murugavel Janakiraman, along with Mark Brooks. Speaker guests included the CEOs of ParshipMeet Group, Happn, The League and Woo.
See invitation site here.
We had grand plans, but the pandemic stopped us in our tracks from 2020 thru 2022 so we started a monthly online conference. We've done ~20 online conferences to keep you satiated.
See the June 2022 online conference along with a list of all prior conferences here.
The first NYC SUMMIT was at Harvard Club New York with an all star cast. The CEOs of The Meet Group, Coffee Meets Bagel, Spark Networks, East Meet East, and Dating Group spoke among others. We also had the head of Match Groups skunkworks speak. On the weekend we walked the Highline in NYC and did a whiskey tasting tour.
See invitation site here.
The second formal event took place in December 2019 in Berlin in the Spark Networks HQ board room and hosted by Jeronimo Folgueira, the outgoing CEO of Spark Networks, along with Eric Eichmann, the new CEO. An all-star group of executives from some of the top dating and matchmaking companies on the planet were present, and presented their growth ideas to the group. See photo below.
See invitation site here.
The first formal event took place in April 2019 this year in Chennai, India which is the home of Matrimony.com. The weekend prior to the event we held a WOW, World Officers Weekend, where we toured the sights and sounds and culinary delights of Chennai. Then the first IDEA SUMMIT was held in Matrimony's boardroom and hosted by Muru, the CEO of Matrimony.com.
See invitation site here.
IDEA mixers have been happening for the last 10 years but the first semi-formal event was in Malta in November 2018. The World Officers Weekend brought together a group of dating executives to learn and share and have a long weekend in Malta.
See invitation site here.
