Do you know how old Meetup is? It's another overnight success isnt it? Hmmm.... quite a few nights ;)

This morning - I woke at 500am - all excited about gamifaction and how this concept, along with my usual toolkit of cutting edge digital marketing could and will help this particular client. But then I realized something - not only had I woke up my wife by not turning down the ipad backlight (school boy error) but also that I had been doing this for around a decade. If not more...

This waking up excited by new marketing projects with new ideas for clients for 10 years.


Doing greatmarketing talks and trainings for organizations and companies for at least 7 years.

Working in marketing and events promotion before that for Spearfish for at least another 3.

And in guerrilla marketing for eco fashion label THTC before that for more years than I care to remember.

The point is that - success - doesn't seem to come over night.

So I read with interest something from Fred Wilson, who is a VC and principal of Union Square Ventures.

Who invested in Meetup. That great idea which I thought was new. As an app and all that.

But do you know how old meetup is? As Fred writes:

"Meetup is in its second decade as a company and growing rapidly. Last night Meetup booked its hundred millionth RSVP. You can see the counter at the top of this page. That is one hundred million people who used the Internet to get off the Internet and go out and meet other people and talk about things they are passionate about. Now I realize that some of these hundred million people are the same people doing this again and again. But even so, a hundred million RSVPs is a big deal for a company that has been plugging away on this mission for more than a decade.

When you are at something for a decade or more, it can become a slog. It requires tenacity and persistence to keep pushing and innovating. In the past year Meetup has started growing faster than it has in quite a while. The chart below shows that:


Scott and his team are as passionate about the Meetup mission as they were when they started the company. They have a very long timeframe in their minds and they are executing against it. And they are winning with tenacity and persistence. Which is why we backed Meetup in the first place."

I love that - an investor with a vision more than 10 years ahead of its time. Now that's what I need :)

Or is it - should I stop this path of helping companies succeed and succeed myself? For this I might well need a little "seed" capital. Pun horribly intended.