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Jon Oringer [1974-0] American

Rank: 103
Businessman, CEO of Shutterstock

Jon Oringer is an American programmer, photographer, and business executive best known as the founder and CEO of Shutterstock, a stock media and editing tools provider headquartered in New York City.

Computers, Failure, Independence, Technology

Quote	Tags	Rank
To make a computer do something that would take a human a long period of time was always interesting.		101
Many entrepreneurs have shifted their focus to pursuing VC funding as a primary strategic priority instead of concentrating on generating value for their users. This is worrisome because raising capital alone is misleading as a benchmark for success.		102
You can't be afraid of the problem. Don't be afraid of failure; don't be afraid to make mistakes. Make sure you learn from each step; iterate, and stay as efficient as possible without being paralyzed by a difficult situation.	Failure	103
Each time I went to create my website, I needed imagery. It was complicated to get, the process was expensive, I had to negotiate rights. I knew there had to be a better way.		104
There is a lack of talent in technology, and we need to be encouraging kids in school to learn how to code. We need to encourage computer science as a major. We need to encourage entrepreneurism.	Technology	105
Working with limited resources is an excellent way to hone skills that will serve you well for the rest of your career. You will prioritize profitability from the start.		106
Evolution has been the key tenet of success over the past 13 years, and we have transformed from a single subscription e-commerce image business into a company with a diversified portfolio of content offerings, servicing the needs of businesses of all types and sizes globally.		107
I think that initial independence is very important; that's what being an entrepreneur is all about.	Independence	108
I think, as an entrepreneur, you have to see the unlimited amount of potential but concentrate on your day and just keep building.		109
The best ways of marketing were email and banner advertising, but I needed images... and they were very expensive.		110
I hadn't really worked in an office before Shutterstock, so I didn't have the experience of building a culture, nor did I understand how important that is for attracting and retaining the best talent.		111
The decisions you make affect a lot of people. You have investors, employees, and customers who all rely on you. Being a leader is a 24-hour-a-day job.		112
I started Shutterstock without any outside funding; I believe in creating a lean startup. By not taking outside investors early, I was forced to use every dollar I had as efficiently as possible. And I was able to keep a large part of the company.		113
I love meeting contributors and hearing how we inspire them to create art. I'm also proud of creating hundreds of jobs.		114
There's tonnes of room for more people in the tech market, and there are lots of content gaps that have still not yet been tapped into.		115
Nobody is opposed to paying taxes; governments need to coordinate, work together and simplify the law.		116
In the early days, start-ups make the main mistake of hiring people to do the work that they could do themselves.		117
In high school, I used to teach guitar and fix computers by the hour. I was looking for some way to make some cash, so I actually learned how to play guitar in order to try to teach it.	Computers	118
As I started college, I started to build software products that I could sell to people over the Web.		119
I figured managing people was obvious - I'd tell someone what they needed to do and they'd do what I wanted. It turns out that's not the case. It was frustrating at first.		120
At around 50 employees, you get to the point where you can't see what's going on all the time. So you start to have weekly check-ins, and you have days that go by without knowing exactly what's going on.		121
I've never been very flashy or high-profile.		122
I shot images of everything I could find over the course of a year. I would go all over the world and take pictures. In a day, I could easily take thousands.		123
I don't own a helicopter because I want someone to bring me places quickly. I own it because it's an incredible machine that I like to fly and learn about. I like the complexity of it.		124
I've little in common with the scene in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. I'm a New Yorker.		125
All businesses need images to sell their products and services.		126
I hear so many startups talking about how they can raise VC instead of questioning whether they need it in the first place.		201
Many entrepreneurs think that cash is the ultimate solution to all of their problems: the one thing standing between them and their dreams.		202
The problem with taking venture capital is if you take $5m from someone, it may feel great; you may feel like they're validating your business model. But they're giving $5m out to 20 different people, hoping one of them will be a hit. They don't really care if it's you.		203
Some people are serial entrepreneurs and want to just move on to the next thing. They just want to clean the slate and start from scratch. I feel that sometimes, too, and the way that we do that here is we build things inside Shutterstock: we launch new products all the time.		204
I like San Francisco, but I don't think I'd want to work in Palo Alto. It seems like a pretty rough commute. In many ways, I think New York has a lot of things the West Coast doesn't have.		205
I started Shutterstock out of my own need. I'd previously created a few software companies, and each time, I struggled to find affordable images to use on my websites.		206
Every time someone downloads a picture, the photographers get paid about 30% of what we charge.		207
I wanted a CFO with public company experience; I needed an HR department, new office space, and a board which could help me grow the business. Insight, the private equity firm I chose, helped me with all that.		208
Instagram is great for us because it's encouraging people to shoot more stuff. Some of those snappers will become professional, and they may choose to sell their photos through us.		209
I believe anything has to be possible. You have to be able to face any problem that comes along and unravel it into a solution.		210
Business is a string of seemingly impossible problems looking for solutions. Each problem you solve creates a new barrier to entry for your next competitor.		211
Problems are good. Impossible problems are even better.		212
We realized we had high-volume marketplace as a platform. Anyone can come in and buy with a subscription.		213
If people want to code, and they want to be entrepreneurs, there's opportunities for them to do that.		214
There aren't enough people out there that are becoming experts in technology as technology moves.		215
I met with several public company CEOs to learn about their experiences of going public and listened to as many earnings calls as I possibly could.		216
When I started Shutterstock, I tried to get people access to big events. It's very hard to keep up, to publish them quick, and to get the right photographers.		217
Shutterstock has the tech ethos. Rex has the relationships, packaging, and merchandising know-how.		218
Rex has photographers around the world - it's a higher touch business: there are a lot of relationships involved. If you throw an event, there are certain photographers you've worked with before and you want there.		219
Rex is 60 years old with 13 million images and 10 million in archive. It's the first time we've had a historic archive to work with, which is super interesting.		220
We sell to businesses who sell other stuff, so we're just going to concentrate on doing that.		221
Any business that is trying to sell something should be willing to spend a couple dollars for a stock photo to not have ads in it and not distract the user from using the product they're trying to sell.		222
I was trying to create products to complement the pop-up blocker. All these people were giving me their credit cards. I figured I could sell them something else.		223
It turned out it was really easy to create commercial stock footage.		224
As we continue to grow, the question is, how do you keep the company as innovative as it was 15 employees ago?		225
Was I going to start companies outside of Shutterstock or inside? Going public kind of meant I was going to start them inside, and I kind of thought this through and decided that if I was going to do that, I was going to continue to operate Shutterstock like it was an incubator of startups.		226
Try to rally up as many people as you can with as much information as you can to try to get it to appear in front of the right people in the organization who are the decision-makers to greenlight the project.		301
We have a lot of customers in Japan, but they don't quite get the local content that they always need, so we want to encourage all of our product teams to start thinking globally.		302
We continually hear from our engaged customer base that Shutterstock's content is a true differentiator, given not only the size of the library but also the quality and diversity of the images we offer.		303
To ensure we are meeting the demands of existing customers while also attracting new users, we remain focused on building cutting-edge technology and introducing new and innovative product offerings.		304
The growing demand for content across our platform delivers bigger payouts to our contributor base and encourages them to upload fresh content to Shutterstock, further facilitating the network effect of our business.		305
On average, an e-commerce client who evolves into a premier enterprise client increases their annual spend by 10 times in that first year.		306
While the scale of our library is certainly attractive to our users, equally important is the quality of the content we provide and our state-of-the-art processing operation that vets every single piece of content that's submitted to ensure only the most suitable content is included.		307
We recognized early on that media consumption was evolving and customers were looking for moving images to include as part of their advertising campaigns, website designs and corporate presentations.		308
By investing in diverse asset types from SD video to HD video to 4K video, we can satisfy the video needs of a wide array of users.		309
Shutterstock's ability to cultivate a healthy and expanding marketplace for both customers and contributors remains a key competitive advantage and a crucial component of our sustained growth.		310
Equally important to having the right content is providing the proper tools for the users so they can quickly find the images and videos they need.		311
Just as we are enhancing the customer side of our marketplace, we are also looking for ways to increase our contributor expense.		312
We significantly increased our global presence in 2014. During the year, we expanded the number of languages in which we serve customers to a total of 20.		313
We believe PremiumBeat will accelerate our mission to make licensable music accessible to every creator.		314
Editorial imagery licensing includes celebrity, entertainment, sports, and news images that capture what is happening in the world around us.		315
Shutterstock has evolved from an image-based marketplace for small businesses to a much broader platform, with a large and expanding addressable market opportunity.		316
In 2013, we opened our first international office in London and established a European hub in Berlin.		317
It's typical for video customers to often use licensed music - whether a soundtrack, background music, or sound effects - to complement their video projects.		318
I opened up Shutterstock to the whole world. I created a contributor community that anyone could give stock photography a shot.		319
I needed to make the buyer happy: I needed to provide a price point and sort of a model that was attractive to them. But I also needed to make the contributor happy.		320
Anyone can contribute images, and we sell them to designers and agencies all over the world.		321
I found it very helpful not to do the venture round. Instead, I started with very little money, a few thousand dollars, and I did every job myself. I was the first photographer. I was the first customer service rep. I was the first online marketing person.		322
We look for the scrappy entrepreneur: the kind of person who will get things done without looking to spend money right away.		323
As I saw more and more people buying the images that were happy buyers, and people selling the images that were happy with how the market was pricing them, I started to get the sense this could be the go-to place for businesses to get the images they need.		324
I would still rather be in Silicon Alley. I like the West Coast also, but it's sort of fragmented. You have companies in downtown San Francisco, companies in Mountain View, and people are driving between them all. It's kind of nice in New York to just jump in a cab and reach another company so easily.		325
The best thing is to go public only when you're absolutely sure that's the right move for the company. And in order to make sure that is the case, you need to have as much control over the company as possible, which means not giving up control early on.		326
Offset is helping to expand our relationship with large enterprises and serve a broader set of imaging.		401
Offset and Skillfeed are examples of products launched in 2013 that have expanded our opportunity with both large enterprises and across new content types.		402
At Shutterstock, we've been offering tutorials to customers and contributors on our blog for many years. Our audience already viewed us as thought leaders on the latest digital and creative skills; we felt it so natural for us to launch Skillfeed, which is an online marketplace for professional learning.		403
When a user signs up for Skillfeed, they get unlimited access to thousands of video courses and creative and technical skills, all as a part of one inexpensive monthly subscription. Instructors from around the world can apply to have their course from Skillfeed and earn money based on how much their courses are viewed.		404

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