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
We sell to businesses who sell other stuff, so we're just going to concentrate on doing that.
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.
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.
We believe PremiumBeat will accelerate our mission to make licensable music accessible to every creator.
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.
Every time someone downloads a picture, the photographers get paid about 30% of what we charge.
It's typical for video customers to often use licensed music - whether a soundtrack, background music, or sound effects - to complement their video projects.
The best ways of marketing were email and banner advertising, but I needed images... and they were very expensive.
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.
It turned out it was really easy to create commercial stock footage.
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.
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.
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.
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.