Quotes from Sam Yagan

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.

A lot of times people feel a little apprehensive about suggesting to actually meet in person. One of the reasons that can be hard is people think they have to propose something super novel.

I want to see talent and companies and money and entrepreneurs moving to Chicago.

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 have never written a line of commercial code in my life. Nor should I.

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.

What people don't realize is that Tinder built a brand on more than the experience of the swipe.

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

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.

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.

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.

We think that there really is racial bias in determining who people want to date.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

There are over a million people running around the United States that were born to parents just on Match.com alone, to say nothing of the other properties we run, so that's a million lives that our company just had a little to do with in bringing their parents together.

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.

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

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.

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.

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