Quotes from Sam Yagan

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I hated meeting people at bars when I was single because it's all about the looks and the funny line.

It turns out that if you're a 24-year-old whose only line on their resume says CEO, you are totally unemployable.

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

Immigration is the ultimate entrepreneurship.

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.

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.

In an ideal world, we would charge people a $10,000 success fee when they get married or a $5,000 success fee if they enter into a relationship with someone. Unfortunately, that's a little bit hard to track, although someday maybe we'll get around to that.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.