Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American businessman Jon Oringer.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
Jon Oringer is an American programmer, photographer, and billionaire businessman, best known as the founder and CEO of Shutterstock, a stock media company headquartered in New York City. Oringer started his career while a college student in the 1990s, when he created "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.
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.
All businesses need images to sell their products and services.
Nobody is opposed to paying taxes; governments need to coordinate, work together and simplify the law.
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 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.
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.
Every time someone downloads a picture, the photographers get paid about 30% of what we charge.
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.
We sell to businesses who sell other stuff, so we're just going to concentrate on doing that.
Rex is 60 years old with 13 million images and 10 million in archive. It's the first time we've had a historic archive to work with, which is super interesting.
Problems are good. Impossible problems are even better.
I love meeting contributors and hearing how we inspire them to create art. I'm also proud of creating hundreds of jobs.
There aren't enough people out there that are becoming experts in technology as technology moves.
We continually hear from our engaged customer base that Shutterstock's content is a true differentiator, given not only the size of the library but also the quality and diversity of the images we offer.
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.
I've never been very flashy or high-profile.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 started Shutterstock without any outside funding; I believe in creating a lean startup. By not taking outside investors early, I was forced to use every dollar I had as efficiently as possible. And I was able to keep a large part of the company.
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.
The decisions you make affect a lot of people. You have investors, employees, and customers who all rely on you. Being a leader is a 24-hour-a-day job.
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.
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.
At around 50 employees, you get to the point where you can't see what's going on all the time. So you start to have weekly check-ins, and you have days that go by without knowing exactly what's going on.
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.
By investing in diverse asset types from SD video to HD video to 4K video, we can satisfy the video needs of a wide array of users.
I shot images of everything I could find over the course of a year. I would go all over the world and take pictures. In a day, I could easily take thousands.
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.
When I started Shutterstock, I tried to get people access to big events. It's very hard to keep up, to publish them quick, and to get the right photographers.
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.
I hear so many startups talking about how they can raise VC instead of questioning whether they need it in the first place.
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.
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.
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 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.
We realized we had high-volume marketplace as a platform. Anyone can come in and buy with a subscription.
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.
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.
The growing demand for content across our platform delivers bigger payouts to our contributor base and encourages them to upload fresh content to Shutterstock, further facilitating the network effect of our business.
Was I going to start companies outside of Shutterstock or inside? Going public kind of meant I was going to start them inside, and I kind of thought this through and decided that if I was going to do that, I was going to continue to operate Shutterstock like it was an incubator of startups.
While the scale of our library is certainly attractive to our users, equally important is the quality of the content we provide and our state-of-the-art processing operation that vets every single piece of content that's submitted to ensure only the most suitable content is included.
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.
The best ways of marketing were email and banner advertising, but I needed images... and they were very expensive.
Shutterstock has the tech ethos. Rex has the relationships, packaging, and merchandising know-how.
It turned out it was really easy to create commercial stock footage.
As I started college, I started to build software products that I could sell to people over the Web.
As we continue to grow, the question is, how do you keep the company as innovative as it was 15 employees ago?
If people want to code, and they want to be entrepreneurs, there's opportunities for them to do that.
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.
Many entrepreneurs think that cash is the ultimate solution to all of their problems: the one thing standing between them and their dreams.
Try to rally up as many people as you can with as much information as you can to try to get it to appear in front of the right people in the organization who are the decision-makers to greenlight the project.
On average, an e-commerce client who evolves into a premier enterprise client increases their annual spend by 10 times in that first year.
In the early days, start-ups make the main mistake of hiring people to do the work that they could do themselves.
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.
I've little in common with the scene in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. I'm a New Yorker.
To make a computer do something that would take a human a long period of time was always interesting.