Rex has photographers around the world – it’s a higher touch business: there are a lot of relationships involved. If you throw an event, there are certain photographers you’ve worked with before and you want there. – Jon Oringer
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. – Jon Oringer
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. – Jon Oringer
We realized we had high-volume marketplace as a platform. Anyone can come in and buy with a subscription. – Jon Oringer
I believe anything has to be possible. You have to be able to face any problem that comes along and unravel it into a solution. – Jon Oringer
You can’t be afraid of the problem. Don’t be afraid of failure; don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Make sure you learn from each step; iterate, and stay as efficient as possible without being paralyzed by a difficult situation. – Jon Oringer
I think, as an entrepreneur, you have to see the unlimited amount of potential but concentrate on your day and just keep building. – Jon Oringer
To make a computer do something that would take a human a long period of time was always interesting. – Jon Oringer
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. – Jon Oringer
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. – Jon Oringer
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. – Jon Oringer
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. – Jon Oringer
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. – Jon Oringer
If people want to code, and they want to be entrepreneurs, there’s opportunities for them to do that. – Jon Oringer
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. – Jon Oringer
We believe PremiumBeat will accelerate our mission to make licensable music accessible to every creator. – Jon Oringer
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. – Jon Oringer
Shutterstock has evolved from an image-based marketplace for small businesses to a much broader platform, with a large and expanding addressable market opportunity. – Jon Oringer
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. – Jon Oringer
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. – Jon Oringer
Shutterstock has the tech ethos. Rex has the relationships, packaging, and merchandising know-how. – Jon Oringer
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. – Jon Oringer
Shutterstock’s ability to cultivate a healthy and expanding marketplace for both customers and contributors remains a key competitive advantage and a crucial component of our sustained growth. – Jon Oringer
To ensure we are meeting the demands of existing customers while also attracting new users, we remain focused on building cutting-edge technology and introducing new and innovative product offerings. – Jon Oringer
I don’t own a helicopter because I want someone to bring me places quickly. I own it because it’s an incredible machine that I like to fly and learn about. I like the complexity of it. – Jon Oringer
In 2013, we opened our first international office in London and established a European hub in Berlin. – Jon Oringer
Just as we are enhancing the customer side of our marketplace, we are also looking for ways to increase our contributor expense. – Jon Oringer
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. – Jon Oringer
