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
I love meeting contributors and hearing how we inspire them to create art. I'm also proud of creating hundreds of jobs.
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.
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.
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 opened up Shutterstock to the whole world. I created a contributor community that anyone could give stock photography a shot.
I was trying to create products to complement the pop-up blocker. All these people were giving me their credit cards. I figured I could sell them something else.
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 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.
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.
There's tonnes of room for more people in the tech market, and there are lots of content gaps that have still not yet been tapped into.
On average, an e-commerce client who evolves into a premier enterprise client increases their annual spend by 10 times in that first year.
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.
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.