SAM YAGAN

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

Immigration is the ultimate entrepreneurship.

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.

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.

I'm 34 years old. In most jobs, your early 30s to early 40s are your power years.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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'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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.