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
Just as we are enhancing the customer side of our marketplace, we are also looking for ways to increase our contributor expense.
The best ways of marketing were email and banner advertising, but I needed images... and they were very expensive.
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.
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.
Many entrepreneurs think that cash is the ultimate solution to all of their problems: the one thing standing between them and their dreams.
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.
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.
I think that initial independence is very important; that's what being an entrepreneur is all about.
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.
I think, as an entrepreneur, you have to see the unlimited amount of potential but concentrate on your day and just keep building.
We realized we had high-volume marketplace as a platform. Anyone can come in and buy with a subscription.
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.
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.
To make a computer do something that would take a human a long period of time was always interesting.