Sam Yagan's Quotes
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.
Sam YaganI 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.
Sam YaganMy work involves online dating, but I believe almost every behavior exhibited online has an offline corollary. Really, the medium doesn't change human nature.
Sam YaganDating is a numbers game. What we try to promise is good first dates. Once that first date happens, it's really up to you.
Sam YaganOne 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.
Sam YaganOKCupid'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.
Sam YaganI 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.
Sam YaganThe 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.
Sam YaganWhen 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.
Sam YaganYour goal in an online dating profile and in your first message to somebody is to strike up a conversation.
Sam YaganWe 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.
Sam YaganI 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.
Sam YaganMy 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.
Sam YaganWe were intrigued by the fact that we had so much actual behavior among people on our dating site, OKCupid.
Sam YaganWhen 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.
Sam YaganIn dating, the question is how many Tinder knockoffs are we going to have, and are any of them going to take off?
Sam YaganOne 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.
Sam YaganWe 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.
Sam Yagan