OKCupid’s Founder Ripped Into Me Before We Even Started This Interview – with Sam Yagan
…And I loved it.
I’ve heard OkCupid’s Sam Yagan can be blunt with founders. Remember how a past Mixergy interviewee told us that Sam said his site “was the ugliest web site I had ever seen”? The reason you like Mixergy is that my goal has always been to see how founders really lead, not to get some sanitized, self-helpy version of their leadership style. We got it here. As you’ll notice in my voice, it threw me off balance for a bit.
His style isn’t all harsh though. Sam told me, “I have rubbed many people the wrong way, but I think everyone knows where they stand with me, and I’m equally, passionately positive when I’m excited. When things are great I will go out of my way to help entrepreneurs. I mentor dozens of entrepreneurs. I do a lot of a investing, I sit on a lot of boards. When there is a team that I think is great there’s really no limit to the amount of support and help I will give them.”
Sam Yagan is the co- founder of OKCupid, the free online dating site that uses math to get you dates.
Andrew: I’ve told you about them forever, so you probably already know the names of my three sponsors, right? For example, if I asked you, who’s the lawyer who tech entrepreneurs trust because he understands the startup community. You probably know it’s Scott Edward Walker of Walker Corporate Law.
And if I asked you, where should you send your friends who want to build online stores, you’d probably tell me Shopify.com because Shopify stores are beautiful. They’re designed to sell, and Shopify makes sure that there won’t be any tech support for you to do, because they’re easy to set up.
Finally, if you have a friend who says, hey, I want a phone number, and then if somebody presses one, I want it to go to sales, and two, I want it to go to tech support cell phone number, and three, I want it to reach my home phone number, and all that stuff, where do you send them. Of course, you send them to grasshopper. com. Three great...
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