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
Equally important to having the right content is providing the proper tools for the users so they can quickly find the images and videos they need.
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.
Offset is helping to expand our relationship with large enterprises and serve a broader set of imaging.
Offset and Skillfeed are examples of products launched in 2013 that have expanded our opportunity with both large enterprises and across new content types.
At Shutterstock, we've been offering tutorials to customers and contributors on our blog for many years. Our audience already viewed us as thought leaders on the latest digital and creative skills; we felt it so natural for us to launch Skillfeed, which is an online marketplace for professional learning.
Any business that is trying to sell something should be willing to spend a couple dollars for a stock photo to not have ads in it and not distract the user from using the product they're trying to sell.
Anyone can contribute images, and we sell them to designers and agencies all over the world.
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.
We realized we had high-volume marketplace as a platform. Anyone can come in and buy with a subscription.
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.
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.