Top 55 Jon Oringer Quotes

In 2013, we opened our first international office in London and established a European hub in Berlin.

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.

As I started college, I started to build software products that I could sell to people over the Web.

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.

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.

We sell to businesses who sell other stuff, so we’re just going to concentrate on doing that.

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.

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.

As we continue to grow, the question is, how do you keep the company as innovative as it was 15 employees ago?

I’ve never been very flashy or high-profile.

I think, as an entrepreneur, you have to see the unlimited amount of potential but concentrate on your day and just keep building.

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.

Nobody is opposed to paying taxes; governments need to coordinate, work together and simplify the law.

I opened up Shutterstock to the whole world. I created a contributor community that anyone could give stock photography a shot.

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.

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.

I’ve little in common with the scene in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. I’m a New Yorker.

I love meeting contributors and hearing how we inspire them to create art. I’m also proud of creating hundreds of jobs.

We believe PremiumBeat will accelerate our mission to make licensable music accessible to every creator.

Many entrepreneurs think that cash is the ultimate solution to all of their problems: the one thing standing between them and their dreams.

There aren’t enough people out there that are becoming experts in technology as technology moves.

All businesses need images to sell their products and services.

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.

On average, an e-commerce client who evolves into a premier enterprise client increases their annual spend by 10 times in that first year.

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.

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.

In the early days, start-ups make the main mistake of hiring people to do the work that they could do themselves.

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.

We realized we had high-volume marketplace as a platform. Anyone can come in and buy with a subscription.

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.

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.

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.

Every time someone downloads a picture, the photographers get paid about 30% of what we charge.

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.

Offset and Skillfeed are examples of products launched in 2013 that have expanded our opportunity with both large enterprises and across new content types.

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.

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.

I think that initial independence is very important; that’s what being an entrepreneur is all about.

Editorial imagery licensing includes celebrity, entertainment, sports, and news images that capture what is happening in the world around us.

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.

Just as we are enhancing the customer side of our marketplace, we are also looking for ways to increase our contributor expense.

Anyone can contribute images, and we sell them to designers and agencies all over the world.

It turned out it was really easy to create commercial stock footage.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Offset is helping to expand our relationship with large enterprises and serve a broader set of imaging.

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.

The best ways of marketing were email and banner advertising, but I needed images… and they were very expensive.

To make a computer do something that would take a human a long period of time was always interesting.

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.