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
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.
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.
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.
If people want to code, and they want to be entrepreneurs, there's opportunities for them to do that.
I opened up Shutterstock to the whole world. I created a contributor community that anyone could give stock photography a shot.
On average, an e-commerce client who evolves into a premier enterprise client increases their annual spend by 10 times in that first year.
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.
In the early days, start-ups make the main mistake of hiring people to do the work that they could do themselves.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In 2013, we opened our first international office in London and established a European hub in Berlin.
Anyone can contribute images, and we sell them to designers and agencies all over the world.