Sam Yagan Quotes
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Your goal in an online dating profile and in your first message to somebody is to strike up a conversation.
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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.
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One thing that we learned that we published on our blog post is that uniformly, men lie about their height by almost exactly two inches. So if you look at a plot of census bureau data on the distribution of men's heights in the U.S. and you plot men's heights on OKCupid, it is exactly shifted two inches to the left.
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OKCupid's model is almost entirely based on advertising, which is the way most online media is monetized these days, whether it's the news or whether it's sports, and we think online dating is going to evolve in the exact same way.
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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.
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I'm an off-the-charts introvert. To me, being around groups of strangers is exhausting. I've had to sort of train myself to think about two tactics: finding common ground and invoking humor.
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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.
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My OkCupid co-founders are my best friends. We were in each other's weddings.
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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.
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Immigration is the ultimate entrepreneurship.
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I like being part of a big company's executive team. It's fun to stretch other parts of my brain, considering questions like, 'How should we think of acquisitions?' I get to be privy to things that would never come up at a small company.
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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.
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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.
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We think we have the best matching algorithm, we think we have the best members. So why wouldn't we want to just shine the light onto just how our processes work, what the real data are, and let people come to their own conclusions.
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We think that there really is racial bias in determining who people want to date.
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I want to see talent and companies and money and entrepreneurs moving to Chicago.
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It turns out that if you're a 24-year-old whose only line on their resume says CEO, you are totally unemployable.
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Obviously, there's more to aesthetic appearance than just race, but that is going to be the first thing that someone notices when they look at a picture.
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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.
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I remember sitting in on meetings where everyone in the room was twice as old as I was.
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When you're thinking about building your own online dating profile, especially on OkCupid, you should go through the same steps you're thinking about when you're going out to meet someone new. You want to put your best foot forward.
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I hated meeting people at bars when I was single because it's all about the looks and the funny line.
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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.
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Something like a quarter of the founders that have gone through Excelerate and Techstars are women. I'm incredibly proud of that.