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
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.
As I saw more and more people buying the images that were happy buyers, and people selling the images that were happy with how the market was pricing them, I started to get the sense this could be the go-to place for businesses to get the images they need.
In the early days, start-ups make the main mistake of hiring people to do the work that they could do themselves.
I figured managing people was obvious - I'd tell someone what they needed to do and they'd do what I wanted. It turns out that's not the case. It was frustrating at first.
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.
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.
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 would still rather be in Silicon Alley. I like the West Coast also, but it's sort of fragmented. You have companies in downtown San Francisco, companies in Mountain View, and people are driving between them all. It's kind of nice in New York to just jump in a cab and reach another company so easily.
It's typical for video customers to often use licensed music - whether a soundtrack, background music, or sound effects - to complement their video projects.
Just as we are enhancing the customer side of our marketplace, we are also looking for ways to increase our contributor expense.
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.
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.
In 2013, we opened our first international office in London and established a European hub in Berlin.
All businesses need images to sell their products and services.