Sam Yagan

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”