Match CEO Explains The Algorithms Of Love

 

It used to be there was a stigma attached to online dating, but not so much anymore. (jordansmall/Flickr) One of the biggest online dating sites, Match, turned 20 this year, and a lot has changed since it debuted in 1995. It used to be there was a stigma attached to online dating, but not so much anymore.

Sam Yagan, CEO of The Match Group, oversees online dating sites owned by parent company IAC, such as Match, Tinder and OKCupid. He says dating sites are great for helping you identify the people you would or wouldn’t be interested in, but we’re “decades away” from predicting chemistry between people.

On how numbers can help find love

“When the choice was: Do I want my love life determined by a psychologist or a mathematician, I pick mathematician every day of the week… We fundamentally believe that the way to predict compatibility is to rely on data and and to allow people to customize an algorithm that would take into account their preferences and their lifestyle to cull through the millions of profiles we had to find the people that were most compatible with them.”

“My three founders and I, all Harvard math majors, none of us have ever been on an online date, despite having started one of the most successful online dating companies. Some people come to entrepreneurship and innovation through a need that they are trying to solve for themselves. For us it was more of a need that we saw in the marketplace. We saw that there wasn’t any dating site at that time that was focused on an algorithm data-based approach. Now, that’s where the industry has moved quite a bit.”

“There are really three things that I look at. The first is of course the customer. I get to be the noisiest friend or acquaintance that anyone has because it’s my job is to ask you about your dating life all the time. 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 second is to make sure you’re always using competitive products. I think that’s something industry leaders sometimes don’t do. They sometimes assume they’re the ones setting the trends and doing the innovating, and me, I use our competitor’s product as much as we use our own. I have all of our competitors’ apps on my phone.”

“The third is just generally staying current on technology and really trying to think not just in our category, but looking at what people are doing in other categories, and thinking what are the applications of something someone’s doing in a different vertical, in a different industry to dating. Use of location-based services for example, and use of video.”

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