Jon Oringer
Jon Oringer
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. Oringer started his career while a college student in the 1990s, when he invented "one of the Web’s first pop-up blockers." He went on to found about ten small startups that used a subscription method to sell "personal firewalls, accounting software, cookie blockers, trademark managers," and other small programs...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBusinessman
Date of Birth2 May 1974
CountryUnited States of America
Anyone can contribute images, and we sell them to designers and agencies all over the world.
I've little in common with the scene in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. I'm a New Yorker.
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.
Problems are good. Impossible problems are even better.
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.
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.
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.
Nobody is opposed to paying taxes; governments need to coordinate, work together and simplify the law.
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.
Shutterstock has the tech ethos. Rex has the relationships, packaging, and merchandising know-how.
Shutterstock has evolved from an image-based marketplace for small businesses to a much broader platform, with a large and expanding addressable market opportunity.
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.
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?