Jon Oringer quotes:

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.

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.

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.

All businesses need images to sell their products and services.

It's typical for video customers to often use licensed music - whether a soundtrack, background music, or sound effects - to complement their video projects.

Editorial imagery licensing includes celebrity, entertainment, sports, and news images that capture what is happening in the world around us.

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.

Offset is helping to expand our relationship with large enterprises and serve a broader set of imaging.

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.

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.

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.

I found it very helpful not to do the venture round. Instead, I started with very little money, a few thousand dollars, and I did every job myself. I was the first photographer. I was the first customer service rep. I was the first online marketing person.

We significantly increased our global presence in 2014. During the year, we expanded the number of languages in which we serve customers to a total of 20.

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.

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.

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 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.

Nobody is opposed to paying taxes; governments need to coordinate, work together and simplify the law.

Shutterstock has evolved from an image-based marketplace for small businesses to a much broader platform, with a large and expanding addressable market opportunity.

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.

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 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 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.

There is a lack of talent in technology, and we need to be encouraging kids in school to learn how to code. We need to encourage computer science as a major. We need to encourage entrepreneurism.

We believe PremiumBeat will accelerate our mission to make licensable music accessible to every creator.

The best ways of marketing were email and banner advertising, but I needed images... and they were very expensive.

As we continue to grow, the question is, how do you keep the company as innovative as it was 15 employees ago?

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.

In the early days, start-ups make the main mistake of hiring people to do the work that they could do themselves.

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.

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.

As I started college, I started to build software products that I could sell to people over the Web.

I opened up Shutterstock to the whole world. I created a contributor community that anyone could give stock photography a shot.

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.

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.

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.

We look for the scrappy entrepreneur: the kind of person who will get things done without looking to spend money right away.

Offset and Skillfeed are examples of products launched in 2013 that have expanded our opportunity with both large enterprises and across new content types.

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 believe anything has to be possible. You have to be able to face any problem that comes along and unravel it into a solution.

We realized we had high-volume marketplace as a platform. Anyone can come in and buy with a subscription.

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.

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.

I needed to make the buyer happy: I needed to provide a price point and sort of a model that was attractive to them. But I also needed to make the contributor happy.

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.

When a user signs up for Skillfeed, they get unlimited access to thousands of video courses and creative and technical skills, all as a part of one inexpensive monthly subscription. Instructors from around the world can apply to have their course from Skillfeed and earn money based on how much their courses are viewed.

Shutterstock has the tech ethos. Rex has the relationships, packaging, and merchandising know-how.

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.

I love meeting contributors and hearing how we inspire them to create art. I'm also proud of creating hundreds of jobs.

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.

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.

I've never been very flashy or high-profile.

In 2013, we opened our first international office in London and established a European hub in Berlin.

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.