Sam Yagan Quotes

In dating, the question is how many Tinder knockoffs are we going to have, and are any of them going to take off?

New Year's Eve to Valentine's Day is our peak season, and in many ways, Valentine's Day is our Christmas. Everybody in the world makes the same three New Year's resolutions: health, career and money, and love.

I think for marketplace businesses, and when you think about online dating, it's not a social network. It's not a place where you go to talk to people you already know; it's a place you go to interact with someone you've never met before.

I remember sitting in on meetings where everyone in the room was twice as old as I was.

I started my first company when I was in my college dorm as a senior with two of my really good friends. We started a company that became SparkNotes.com. You know CliffsNotes? SparkNotes is a modern-day version of that.

We did some research that showed that the very first word of your message that you send a girl - when we looked at men sending messages to women - the very first word can have a tremendous ... can have a very accurate prediction of whether you're going to get a reply.

I run all the brands like cousins. You want your cousins to do well, but you want to do better. All of our brands want to win, but we certainly want to fight fair and coordinate as much as we can behind the scenes. But to the consumer, we want to offer the broadest, most competitive set of products that we can.

Something like a quarter of the founders that have gone through Excelerate and Techstars are women. I'm incredibly proud of that.

The sort of the most efficient way for online dating marketplace to evolve and, in fact, any marketplace to evolve is to have one really big market where people can enter and exit as they please, where people have really advanced search, sort, and filtering technology.

I get to be the nosiest friend or acquaintance that anyone has because it's - my job is to ask you about your dating life all the time.

Your goal in an online dating profile and in your first message to somebody is to strike up a conversation.

People are already on Match and already going to Starbucks on first dates.

OkCupid has users from 18 to 80 on the site. And we get to observe all of their actions. We get to watch how they use the site, how they interact with other people.

There has to be a willingness to constantly accept critical feedback and rapidly iterate to make things better.

Immigration is the ultimate entrepreneurship.

I would say the larger the pool you have to select from, the more likely you are to find the most compatible person for you if you have the right algorithms working on your behalf.

We've learned a bunch of things; when you send a message to people, keep those messages short. Imagine walking up to a girl in a bar and going into a four-minute speech about how great you are. No one wants to hear that.

We sold OkCupid to Match in January of 2011. In September of 2012, I became CEO of all of Match, which is the operating segment of IAC that contains all of the dating properties.

One thing matters more than anything else for a dating product, and that is the quantity and quality of the people who use the product. It's really freaking hard to get critical mass.

We were intrigued by the fact that we had so much actual behavior among people on our dating site, OKCupid.

Because we're able to adjust for compatibility - and what that means is we've already normalized for how well we think each person is going to get along with the other person - the only factor left in determining response rate, really, is the aesthetic appearance of the person who sent you that message.

We can watch every time someone looks at a profile. Do they choose to send that person a message? We can look at every message that's sent, and we can determine, was that message replied to or not.

Dating is a numbers game. What we try to promise is good first dates. Once that first date happens, it's really up to you.

I think of OkCupid as an online bar; a place where singles can go, have fun with each other and in the process hopefully meet new people, some of whom might turn into a romantic relationship.

My friends and the people I know understand that I'm going to ask them what they're doing, how they're dating, who they're dating, where they're going and what they're doing. I'm constantly asking those questions and making sure I'm in touch with the customer.

When people talk about the impact of mobile dating, everyone focuses on real-time meeting - this idea that my pocket will vibrate every time a hot girl walks by. That's important. But it's not transformative.

Our entire brand is about transparency. We want that data out there because you know what? If you are only getting one in three messages replied to, you're normal. You're right there in the middle of everything with everyone else.

I don't have the looks to compete at a bar, and I'm not that funny. So the last thing I want is to be in a situation where that's what I'm competing on. I'd rather be on OkCupid or Match, where I can write a 300-word essay about myself that's really good.

My work involves online dating, but I believe almost every behavior exhibited online has an offline corollary. Really, the medium doesn't change human nature.

I hope that the movie industry will learn from the experiences of the music industry and will be much more constructive in their approach to P2P.

My OkCupid co-founders are my best friends. We were in each other's weddings.

The first time you meet someone, the conversation is sort of on life support. You're just trying to live another moment in the life of the conversation.

About 10,000 people a day go on first dates from Match ... We're trying to celebrate that, bring those success stories to the forefront and make it even easier in our product to meet up at Starbucks.

Life is just a set of experiences. As long as there are new experiences for me in a corporate job, I don't think I have to be an entrepreneur.