Jon Oringer Quotes

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

— Jon Oringer

“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.”

— Jon Oringer

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

— Jon Oringer

“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.”

— Jon Oringer

“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.”

— Jon Oringer

“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.”

— Jon Oringer

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

— Jon Oringer

“All businesses need images to sell their products and services.”

— Jon Oringer

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

— Jon Oringer

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

— Jon Oringer

“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.”

— Jon Oringer

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

— Jon Oringer

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.

— Jon Oringer

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.

— Jon Oringer

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

— Jon Oringer

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

— Jon Oringer

“If people want to code, and they want to be entrepreneurs, there's opportunities for them to do that.”

— Jon Oringer

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

— Jon Oringer

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

— Jon Oringer

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

— Jon Oringer

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

— Jon Oringer

Shutterstock has the tech ethos. Rex has the relationships, packaging, and merchandising know-how.

— Jon Oringer

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

— Jon Oringer

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

— Jon Oringer

“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.”

— Jon Oringer

“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.”

— Jon Oringer

“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.”

— Jon Oringer

“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.”

— Jon Oringer

“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.”

— Jon Oringer

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.

— Jon Oringer

“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.”

— Jon Oringer

“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.”

— Jon Oringer

“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.”

— Jon Oringer

“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.”

— Jon Oringer

“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.”

— Jon Oringer

It's typical for video customers to often use licensed music - whether a soundtrack, background music, or sound effects - to complement their video projects.

— Jon Oringer

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

— Jon Oringer

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.

— Jon Oringer

“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.”

— Jon Oringer

“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.”

— Jon Oringer

“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.”

— Jon Oringer

“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.”

— Jon Oringer

“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.”

— Jon Oringer

“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.”

— Jon Oringer

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.

— Jon Oringer

“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.”

— Jon Oringer

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.

— Jon Oringer

“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.”

— Jon Oringer

“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.”

— Jon Oringer

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.

— Jon Oringer